Forget the Volcano. Forget the Pirate Ship. Forget the Roller Coaster through Manhattan. Forget Celine Dion. Forget Cirque Du Soleil. If you are looking for profits in Vegas, think Gary Loveman, CEO of Harrah's.

Ok, so he's an unlikely Wall Street crowd pleaser. Until recently, he occupied a small office at the Harvard Business School and taught case studies for a living. But now he is being featured in Fortune Magazine as the new king of gaming. And in the new cover story for 1to1 Magazine, I called Harrah's one of the "low-key powerhouses" that now offer us "a glimpse of where business is headed."

At this point, Harrah's (with $4.3 billion in annual sales) is second only to Caesars (with annual revenue of $4.45 billion), yet it generates six times Caesars' $46 million in profit.

In an article last year in Harvard Business Review, Loveman stated that the company has strengthened customer loyalty and profitability in two key ways: "First, we use database marketing and decision science-based analytical tools to widen the gap between us and casino operators who base their customer incentives more on intuition than evidence. Second, we deliver the great service that consumers demand. In short, we've come out on top in the casino wars by mining our customer data deeply, running market experiments and using the results to develop and implement finely tuned marketing and services strategies that keep our customers coming back."