Bizcuits | Fake it until you make it

Leanda Lee

“Walk through the corridors as if you own the place. No-one will stop you”, was some very early and surprising advice I received in how to succeed. That first lesson was offered to get me down hospital corridors outside visiting hours – it worked, but it had taken gumption. The message was have some bravado, look like you plausibly know what you are doing, and rarely will you be questioned. When in doubt, don’t look like you might be.

To that point in my education, confidence had always been linked to competence: knowledge and knowhow, skills and talent were all necessary preconditions to a professional persona. It was not de rigueur to pretend to be someone you were not. Only real experts were called experts, scholars were aged, and professors and consultants lauded not because they looked the part and were only one step ahead of the next informed person, but because they knew all that there was to know in their field.

Yet, there is also value given to form and status over function: some cultures and echelons of society do this and accept it more readily than others. Unknown unknowns are made up for with intellectual humility. Unknown knowns are obscured by arrogance of the inexpert, and with work and effort become knowns in the hands of the expert.  The true professional knows which is which.

Admittedly sweeping generalisations (because they are useful), men seem to be better than women at novice posturing, and MBA graduate-cum-management consultant wannabes are particularly adept at the BS factor. Then there are fly-in ‘scholars’ and commentators to Macau often reported in the media and at conferences who conveniently dismiss the nuanced Macau context to deliver advice on what Macau should do to succeed: note the broken-record and hackneyed superiority of the Las Vegas Model; mass market family-friendly forms of diversification; and, over ten years in the making, MICE to the rescue. 

The Pareto principle (the 80/20 Rule) of putting effort into the 20% of activity that brings 80% of the benefit seems to have been put on its head over and over again in these recommendations. If hardcore gaming in the VIP segment is where the profitable turnover is generated for the majority of the stakeholders (government coffers, junket operators and casino operators), a natural consequence is that less investment will be enthusiastically ploughed into do-good whimsy.

There is a potential count-down to make a return on today’s concessions (note MGM’s mere two-year window of opportunity to recover investment on MGM Cotai). No wonder we have continued to see a less than enthusiastic non-gaming investment – albeit manipulated somewhat by government prompting – where there are no guarantees into the future. Across the concessions, eagerness to invest in non-gaming elements appears correlated with the perceived risk related to concession “renewal” – a kind of insurance.

Macau is one of those uncertain contexts, confounding even those experts who are used to recognising gaps in their knowledge. What is rarely clear is whether the so-called ‘expert’ is expert enough to acknowledge gaps in their knowledge, or whether theirs is simply bravado.

Commentary on how the various elements of Macau’s gaming environment come together is speculation at best. Research, breadth and strength of connections, proactively testing theories through seeking new data and information all go to determine the quality of the thinking and suitability of the recommendations and explanations offered.

Some analysts fake it until they make it with publishable sound-bites of plausible or prevailing views: Beware the comfortable pronouncements that have you nodding agreement. Other analysts go against the tide, repeatedly experiencing the self-doubts of the Impostor Syndrome and constantly striving to know and understand both the knowns and the unknowns that are Macau.  Therein lies the most likely explanations.