Punam Mathur:
MGM's Grand Dame of Diversity
By Michel W. Potts

Punam Mathur is senior vice president of Corporate Diversity and Community Affairs for Las Vegas, Nevada's popular casino, the MGM Grand. Michel W. Potts interviewed this incredibly talented Indian American in her office about the challenges she faced in reaching up the corporate ladder, as she shares some of her insights, wisdom and words of advice.

The headquarters for MGM Grand's Corporate Diversity and Community Affairs is a starkly white, nondescript building that squats alongside other stark and equally nondescript buildings that line Industrial Road, a boulevard as bleak as it sounds though it lies within earshot of the casinos and the constant, hectic gaiety of the Las Vegas strip.
Inside the headquarters, Punam Mathur's office is spare and functional, the workplace strewn with the usual family photos and personal mementos that lend some color but still at odds with what one would think should belong to a senior vice president. But what catches the eye is the prominently displayed motto that reads: "Do not follow where the paths may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail." If anything, those words bespeak to her quiet dynamism and the inroads she has made.
Diversity has become an overused term. In some business arenas, it has become a catch word in the vocabulary of the politically correct and still means in the minds of employers that they should accord quotas or set asides for minorities. In her present position, which she accepted 11 years ago and is the only job she has ever held in the gaming industry, Mathur tosses out that preconception. "I didn't get into it because I had some passion for the industry," she tells Indian Life & Style. "I went into it because I believed in the employer who was asking me to go to work for them."
In 2000, when MGM Grand acquired the Bellagio, Gene Collins, a local African-American activist, stood up during the regulatory hearings and expressed his concerns as to whether African-American vendors would share in the success of the larger company, as they had previously enjoyed, or would they be shut out. In response, MGM Grand established a diversity committee to study the question. By the end of 2001, their solution was to re-think and re-shape their community relations division and refashion it as Corporate Diversity and Community Affairs, with Mathur at the helm. She soon discovered that "once you focus on the notion of diversity, it becomes so much bigger and so much more compelling than 'Are you doing the right thing?'"

Bull's Eye of Diversity

For guidance, Mathur took to heart what her father used to tell her and her two sisters, Saloni and Bindu, who went on to become successful in their own right: "At any given time we as humans use only nine percent of our brains."
"So he used to remind us that when you're making big decisions, make sure there are always ten other people around the table, because then you're worth a whole brain. What I didn't realize all those years ago is that that is the bull's eye of diversity in the workplace," Mathur says.
"Diversity in the workplace is not an extension of affirmative action, it's not reparations, it's not a social imperative. It's creating a culture in which 100 percent of your most important asset comes in every day ready, willing and able to make a full contribution. So we'll never have a higher obligation as leaders in our company than to create the culture in which full and peak performance is cultivated. That's diversity in the workplace for us."
Or, expressed on a more personal level, "if I invite you to my home, I create a bunch of expectations, and I then need to honor you when you get there by delivering on your expectations. That's diversity," Mathur explains. "So if you're going to ask African-Americans to come patronize your property, then what are their needs, what are their desires, their expectations, and what can we do to align."
As a result, MGM Grand has become the undisputed leader in the high-end international marketplace, catering to ethnicities from around the world. For example, "there are three or four Asian food outlets on every property," Mathur points out. "Now is that diversity or good business? I'd submit it is both. If someone travels 19 hours to come to see you, you should feed them and you should honor their palate in the process."

No Number 4 or 12

Similarly, the numbers four and 12 are unlucky in a number of Asian cultures. Consequently, in the Bellagio or in the MGM Grand itself, there are no numbers four or 12 anywhere to be found. This has come about because MGM today has a far higher percentage of Asians on its international sales team than the competition. "Is that a pigment aspiration? No," Mathur asserts. "It's because if you're going to extend the invitation, the person who's in the best and strongest position is the person who understands your customs and speaks your language."
Diversity was not a concept 30 years ago. What mattered back then was finding new markets and tapping into them. In those days it was called good business. "It's exactly the same conversation, but we call it diversity today," Mathur says.
"The difference is, it's one emerging market. It's a whole bunch simultaneously emerging. It's gays and lesbians. It's women. It's African-Americans. It's Asians. It's Hispanics. It's South Asians. It's Baby Boomers. It's Gen-Xers. It's single parents. There's such a diversity in the experience of what used to be a far more homogenous nation. So we want to be the first to market, to extend the warmest invitation, to deliver on our promise because, that in the end, meets shareholders' interests."
To hear her speak, to hear her confidence and enthusiasm, the natural response is to point to Mathur and say, "Here's a winner!" This comes easily in today's culture, where the world is arbitrarily divided into either winners or losers, the successful exalted and the losers dismissed out of hand. But here, too, Mathur belies the preconception.

From New Delhi to Vancouver

Though she was born in New Delhi, and the oldest sister at the time, Mathur at the age of five was brought to Western Canada by her father Kishan, a chemical engineer who had been given a two-year contract by the University of British Columbia in Vancouver to write a book.
"What they failed to factor in was my father's procrastination gene," Mathur laughs. The book, in fact, took seven years to write. By then, a third daughter had arrived, and the family, having put down roots in Vancouver, ended up staying.
Then suddenly, in 1978, her father died at the age of 49, leaving behind a 40-year-old mother with three girls, aged 17, 13 and eight, to support. Though pressured by relatives to return to India, "she summoned the courage to do what she believed was the best thing for the family, and that was to stay," Mathur recalls.
A year later, Mathur enrolled in the University of British Columbia at Vancouver, eager to study special education. It was a five-year program but, to accelerate her studies, Mathur cut a deal with the head of the department to earn her degree in three-and-a-half years. But when it came time for her to take her finals, the head of the department reneged on their agreement, she says.
"I thought, I'm going to teach them a lesson, and the lesson I taught them was that I didn't show up for finals," Mathur recounts. "It's the kind of ridiculously foolish, impetuous thing that you would do at 21. What I say publicly since then is that I've never looked back to see if they are on their knees begging forgiveness."
Meanwhile, during summer breaks, she got jobs through the parks and recreation centers working with visually-impaired and terminally-ill children.

Inspiration from Children

"My strong avocation my whole life has been children," she explains. "We all have things that inspire passion, and the largest inspiration for me is children. I find them incredibly hopeful, endlessly hopeful, and I think they are as pristine and as perfect as we ever can be as people. So I think there are extraordinary lessons to be learned from children."
After finally receiving her degree in 1981, Mathur felt the crushing weight of being the oldest and most likely to succeed. She had no real direction in life, she admits, "and the hardest thing about direction is the anxiety suffered by those you love. I didn't want to subject the people who loved me so much to the anxiety of not seeing me being confident in my path."
A guidance counselor suggested "exploring my next chapter somewhere away from where they could witness it, so that I could have the freedom of exploring and making mistakes without them having to suffer the pain of watching me," Mathur says. "What I heard him say was, Why don't you run away, and I thought, I can do that!"
In retrospect, she admits that "I was clearly a person who had a surfboard of aspiration, but what I didn't know was which set of waves to ride. I needed to put it somewhere where there were lots of waves, because somewhere it would carry me."

Move to Nevada

Nevada, from what she read, had lots of opportunity. But when she moved there, things did not turn out as well as she had expected. In her first two years, "I was very broke and very miserable, and I was very uncertain as to what I was supposed to be doing here," Mathur recalls.
"So you put on your pretty face on the phone and then you struggle like crazy. For those two years, I delivered the daily paper. I mowed lawns. I did anything that I needed to do to be able to keep cheap pasta in my tummy. I now forever know about myself that for five dollars a week I can eat."
Eventually, she found a job in the travel industry, but decided it was not the profession for her. When she offered her resignation, however, her employers instead offered her the position of national director of group operations. "I had no idea what it meant, but it sounded like fun," Mathur says.
During the next year-and-a-half on that job, she and an officemate, who supervised the company's computers, often talked about operating their own business. "He with his knowledge in computers and me with my almost-degree in Special Ed decided we were eminently qualified to be entrepreneurs. In retrospect, it just baffles me," she laughs.
Their company contracted blocks of discounted rooms with local hotels and offered toll-free numbers to travel agents with Vegas-bound clients who, with a single call, could book a hotel room, book a car rental, show tickets, and tours. It was a one-stop operation, and within six months' time, Mathur and her partner had a $1 million business. Four years later, the company had grown to 20 employees,
"but at some point, I wasn't needed in the business, because it was running well. But my passion, my avocation, was not tour and travel, it was children. The employees said, Why don't you give back?"
Taking up their advice, Mathur threw herself into local community work and soon found herself sitting on 16 different committees and boards of directors. "It was crazy how quickly it all happened, but the net result was that I totally lost focus on the business," she confides. "I mean, I took my eyes so completely off the ball that, as it started to fall, I had no awareness that it was even falling. By the time I noticed, it was about to crash."

Failed Business Successfully

As part of their business strategy, Mathur and her partner "had put way too many eggs in a couple of advertising baskets," where one ad in one publication was worth 65 percent of the revenue, she explains. "I thought I had an iron-clad contract that wasn't so iron-clad and it got yanked out from under me. In the end, we failed that business more successfully than anyone had failed a business before."
Mathur closed down the business, liquidated everything, and paid off her employees before paying off her corporate debts. "I felt very proud of how well I failed. But it allowed me at that point to hold my head up and to not feel shame, not feel humiliation and not feel embarrassed, which are debilitating things if you give into them," she says.
But she also learned a greater lesson. "I realized at that point that if I were going to flee again in the face of that failure, that would be the second time in my life at the age of 26 that I would be contemplating fleeing, and I didn't want to become practiced or good at that. It actually caused me to understand what my relationship with failure was going to be.
"If you're trying to do things that no one's done before, and if you're attempting to get on the skinny branches and you're being bold, one of the inevitable by-products is that you will fail, because you can't be risk taking and not fail. Failure should fairly frequently describe the outcome of your actions, but you should never allow it to describe who you are. The things I did failed, but it doesn't mean I'm a failure. I can be incredibly successful, because I learned rich lessons from the failure. I've developed character and wisdom and insight through failure. It contributes to success."

Marketing Job

Once again without a job, Mathur learned in 1990 that the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce was looking for a director of marketing. Though she had never taken a marketing class, she nevertheless applied for the position. Out of 85 applicants, she was the one hired.
"The six people on that selection committee were also on all the boards I sat on, and on all of them, whenever there was a marketing chore, I was given the job. I had also developed media contacts. So I had a core set of skills that I had refined as a volunteer that were apparently sufficient to compel a committee of six to pick me out of 85 very talented people."
Once hired, Mathur quickly moved up the ranks to the position of vice-president. Then, in 1995, the chamber of commerce felt it was time to reorganize its government affairs, since it was perceived as being composed of old, rich, white Republicans. Being a woman of color and a registered Democrat to boot, Mathur was made senior vice-president, "and I became everything that was the antithesis of the perception."
The new government affairs office "was a volunteer organization with this great visionary bold group of leaders who were making all the policy decisions, and I was just implementing their decisions," Mathur says. "But because you're in the fish bowl doing the work, you receive a ridiculous amount of credit for the extraordinary direction of other people. It was a big net gain for me. I was just the peon, but the peon got all the credit."

Re-evaluated Goals

In 1996, at the age of 36, Mathur took stock of her life and re-evaluated the goals she had set for herself. "The one non-negotiable for me was parenting, because what it always came back to, for me, was this abiding passion I have for children," she emphasizes.
"I realized that professionally I could take some pride in some of the accomplishments I had made at 36, but if the next day were to be my last day, the real sadness I would have felt would have been about not doing anything about becoming a parent."
To accomplish that goal, she realized she had to quit her job with the chamber of commerce, because by then it had become "a way of life," Mathur recalls. "It was all consuming."
When the word got out that she was leaving the chamber of commerce, Mathur got a phone call from Elaine Wynn, the wife of Bellagio casino owner Steve Wynn, who offered her a position as director of government affairs and community relations. But during the interview, Mathur made it clear that her main interest was to become a mom. In Elaine Wynn's eyes, that made Mathur all the more desirable. "So with that kind of permission, to have your priorities granted by an employer, it didn't matter if they sold carpets, linoleum tiles, or been in the gaming business, I would have worked for them," Mathur says.
True to her word, Mathur began adopting special needs children eight years ago. Within 48 hours of receiving her eligibility, she adopted nine-year-old Richard and the next day adopted two-and-a-half week old Joseph, both of whom had been born to drug addicted mothers. Eighteen months later, she adopted her daughter Tai.
When MGM took over the Bellagio, "I didn't know that I should have been worried. I didn't know that when you get acquired you should be insecure. No one told me to jump ship," Mathur says.
The incoming chairman, Terry Lanni, reviewed her position for three months, and in the end decided to keep her on because of her reputation. "If you know where you stand and people level with you, there's no higher form of respect they can show you," Mathur adds.
"I've been grateful for having opportunities presented. So if you keep your knees bent and hug every opportunity that's presented, that sort of opportunity begets opportunity."

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