It Finally Happened

For some years now I’ve been trying to deal with a reputation for not liking children, which I feel is completely undeserved. Part of it stems from the fact that I was single for all of those years, while the majority of my friends married, had children, and succumbed (to one extent or another) into the obsession the late George Carlin called “The Cult of the Child” – the belief that the world revolves around children in general, and their particular child most of all. I can understand why parents feel that way – and I imagine that doing so is probably an evolutionary survival trait. But like anything else, it causes problems if taken to extremes, as in the case of parents who can’t understand why the rest of us don’t enjoy listening to their child shrieking as much as they do. So, for the record, and hopefully for the last time, I have no issue whatsoever with children; I just don’t like badly behaved ones. It makes me want to slap their parents…

In the case of one young boy from New York, it would appear that law enforcement has already done some of that for me. You can pick up the story from the local CBS affiliate station if you’d like, but what they are reporting is that a woman in East Garden City, New York, has been arrested for leaving her seven-year-old son unattended at the Lego store in their local mall while she went shopping. After 90 minutes or so the child became frightened, and the store manager called security, who in turn called the police. Persons familiar with the case are quoted as saying that the mother thought there were store employees who looked after children playing in the store, despite the fact that Lego stores do not offer that service, there is no designated play area, no release forms to sign, no one to take responsibility for the children, or indeed, any reason to believe that anyone would be watching out for a child left alone…

Now, I’m fairly sure that some people reading this blog (assuming anyone reads this blog) are going to have trouble with my comparing a parent abandoning a child in order to go shopping at the mall to parents who follow their children around constantly but refuse to discipline them for any reason. After all, one of these behaviors is considered neglect, while the other is considered over-protective or obsessive, depending on your point of view. But in addition to spending decades as a childless bachelor, I’ve also spent a number of years now as a college instructor, and I am telling you that neither of these parental behaviors are doing the children any favors. Although, to be fair, anybody who has had to deal with teenagers, college students, or entry-level employees in the last decade or so could tell you the same thing…

As usual, I’m going to leave the moralizing about this topic to people who are better qualified, and just point out that both ends of the spectrum are problematic from a business standpoint. Nobody wants to deal with entitled employees who believe that they should be given lavish rewards for doing exactly what they please – because that’s what their parents always did. At the same time, no one wants to deal with parents using our place of business as a free daycare center because they can’t be bothered to take care of their own children. And since we can’t influence how people raise their children, we will have to work on this from the other end – by establishing clear and explicit performance standards, writing company policies that require accountability as well as performance, teaching business classes that encourage discipline and teamwork, and rewarding employees who live up to those standards…

And when absolutely necessary, calling the police and having the courage to risk legal action, criticism from Monday-morning quarterbacks, and reprimand from higher management ranks when we report some idiot for leaving innocent children in dangerous situations…

What Can I Say?

I’m not sure how much I can add to the stories you’ve already seen going around the Internet about the hotel in Upstate New York that is supposedly charging wedding parties a $500 fee for each negative review posted about their establishment on Yelp. If this story is true – and it has been repeated on a number of legitimate news channels, as well as being mocked on the Tonight Show (among others) and no one is suing yet – then it’s an incredibly bad move in terms of both customer service and public relations. The hotel is claiming that it was merely a joke, made in reference to a guest complaint from years ago, but anyone who has ever spent a day working in any customer contact position could have told them that you don’t even joke about such things. Especially now, when any stupid prank you make could end up being shared with literally everyone in the world who has access to a computer. But from where I’m sitting the real questions are what to do about a public relations crisis of this magnitude – and will any of it matter?

First of all, it seems clear that whoever is running the hotel needs help with his or her advertising and website design, and should probably consider investing in assistance from one of the small firms that consult on such matters. People are always reluctant to do this, and I’ve never been sure of why. What is wrong with seeking help from someone whose professional knowledge of a critical aspect of your business is greater than your own? In this case it does seem a bit like closing the barn after the horse has run off, but it’s still better than standing in the open doorway looking like an imbecile. At the very least, the hotel management could check over their files to see if any former guest has ever been hit with a “negative Yelp reviews” fee – or even threatened with one for real – and then provide an apology and a refund of the $500. They should probably also have some competent third party go over their website and make sure there’s nothing else on it that could set people off…

The bigger issue is that once a story like this goes viral it can be incredibly difficult to kill off. There has never been any truth to the Neiman-Marcus cookie story, for example; at the time this canard began making its way around the Internet the company didn’t even sell cookies. Yet this remains one of the more common urban legends online over a decade after Snopes.com (among others) completely debunked it. The hotel probably doesn’t have the funds to take out full-page ads in a major newspaper denying the story, and so far denials online and in social media don’t seem to be helping. Reaching out directly to every past customer they can find and apologizing to anyone they actually charged for the negative reviews might help; explaining it was a joke and promising that they would never really do any such thing might help if they didn’t actually charge anyone. But their best bet is probably a mixture of competence and time…

The other side effect of the Internet age is a very low attention span – and a very short news cycle. By this time next week some other outrageous thing will probably have happened, and everyone in cyberspace will be off mocking someone else. If the hotel takes down anything online that could be considered rude, weird, or unfriendly, refunds any charges they have to, and makes a point of taking care of all future guests – whether they gave good reviews on Yelp or not – they might be able to live through the firestorm and rebuild their brand and their client base the old-fashioned way: one relationship at a time…

Unless they really are trying to cover up for substandard service by trying to suppress any bad reviews…

Tell Me It Isn’t

In yesterday’s post I told you about the upcoming Disney movie based on the “It’s A Small World” ride; a project which has the potential to be either the best or the very worst thing ever to come out of Hollywood depending on your tolerance for cutesy and your need to keep small children entertained without resorting to cable television. As potentially horrifying as this might be, there was a note contained within the same Los Angeles Times article cited below that contains something far more disturbing, at least in its potential. The Times author notes that Six Flags Magic Mountain is going to dismantle the Colossus rollercoaster – and that this one-time monument to adrenaline is no longer in the top ten rides in any major category…

For those unfamiliar with the installation, the amusement park originally called simply “Magic Mountain” is located just north of Los Angeles along Interstate 5. It’s on the other side of Los Angeles from the various parks in Anaheim and the surrounding areas, and is thus two or three hours closer by car to a large percentage of the city’s residents. The park began with only a few rollercoasters, and relatively modest ones at that, but gradually added various other rides and attractions. When Colossus was introduced in 1978 it was the tallest and fastest wooden rollercoaster in the world, and the first to have drops of 100 feet or more. The park was purchased by Six Flags in 1979, and has since been expanded to include newer rides incorporating increasingly exotic technological elements. Meanwhile, larger and faster rides of various types have appeared in various facilities around the world…

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that Six Flags has any ethical, moral or historical responsibility to keep Colossus operating. It occupies an enormous amount of highly valuable real estate – over ten acres – and if the company can find a more productive and/or lucrative use for that space, one could argue that they have a fiduciary responsibility to the stockholders to do just that. What I find troubling about these events is the ongoing drive for faster, scarier and more extreme rides, and the corresponding increase in the number of adrenaline junkies demanding that manufacturers and park owners continue pushing the limits on ride performance. I have to ask, where does it end?

Once something becomes commonplace it loses whatever appeal it may have had by virtue of being unfamiliar, unexpected, or just extraordinary, and therefore is no longer a selling point. In management theory this phenomenon is the basis for the Resource-Based View of the firm (RBV), which states that in order to offer the company a competitive advantage a given asset must be valuable, rare, difficult to imitate, and difficult to substitute for. In the case of the rollercoaster market, once there are higher, faster and/or scarier rides than Colossus, it is no longer a draw for the park and should probably be replaced with something that does give Magic Mountain an edge over the competition. But while this makes perfect sense from a business standpoint, I can’t help worrying about the human costs involved…

Once you’ve traveled down a 100-foot drop at 62 miles per hour it’s harder to get excited by a ride traveling half that distance at two-thirds of that speed. So the competition might respond with something that drops 120 feet at 70 miles per hour, forcing Magic Mountain to create something that drops 140 feet while traveling at 75 miles per hour while upside-down – and the cycle continues until we reach the state of the art in terms of what can be built or what the riders can survive. I have no scientific evidence to suggest that this process makes the people who ride such installations edgy, impatient, or hard to keep focused, but it seems possible that the decrease in attention spans that everyone keeps bemoaning might have something to do with a culture that places ever greater importance on high levels of excitement at all times. Speaking as an educator, this worries me…

I’m not saying there’s a direct causal relationship between these stimuli and a fall-off in attention spans, patience and good behavior among the members of the key demographic groups to whom rollercoasters are marketed. But I would very much like it if somebody could tell me there isn’t…

Don’t Even Try

Quick, think of the most preposterous choice for a new movie project that could ever come out of Hollywood or anywhere else. This may be harder than you think, considering some of the recent choices. It’s not just that we’ve had movies based on board games (Battleship) and Disneyland rides (Haunted Mansion), it’s that some of those have actually been good (Clue) or at least commercially successful (Pirates of the Caribbean I, II and III). We can assume that anything that ever made money will be remade, but that’s hardly surprising after remakes like the Total Recall remake and the upcoming remake of Top Gun, not to mention the inevitable Godzilla and Dawn of the Dead remakes. Given the appearance of the “Brony” community (look it up) I can’t even say that a rumored My Little Pony live-action blockbuster is all that amazing. But until it is given to me to see an actual press release for a Candyland live-action adventure, I have to go with the upcoming It’s a Small World movie as taking the prize…

You can check out the original story on the Los Angeles Times site if you’d like, but unless someone is pranking the Times (and us, one assumes) there is a project in development to make a live-action movie about a Disney ride in which you travel through an air-conditioned building while dolls in “traditional” costume from around the world sing an endlessly recursive tune. It isn’t clear if there’s a script yet, but a director has been hired to helm the project – it’s Jon Turteltaub, the man responsible for the National Treasure movies. How exactly you go from action/adventure movies featuring Nicholas Cage and lots of explosions to hanging a story around something Walt Disney specifically designed for little girls is not explained – and may be inexplicable – but that’s what appears to be happening…

Now, I will be the first to admit that I’ve never written or directed a successful screenplay of any kind. The people I know who have done so will tell you that it’s even harder than it looks, and the quality of the production, the acting and the story actually have nothing to do with either the critical or the commercial success of the film. Sadly, it’s not only possible for an artist to spend the best years of his or her life crafting a cinematic masterpiece only to see it ignored by the public and criticized by various hack reviewers, this happens more than it doesn’t. After a while, the urge to go directly after projects that already have a popular following – either because they are sequels to an already successful movie or because their about something else that already has fans has to become overpowering. And given that the original version of Small World in Anaheim has had roughly 290,000,000 visitors (that’s 111,000 a week for over 50 years) it seems probable that there are people who already love the concept…

If you’ve been to the movies in recent years, or watched anything reported about motion pictures, or even spent time around people who care about the state of modern cinema, you’ve probably heard the rant about how Hollywood needs to start making better movies if they want people to start going to movie theaters again. And to some extent this is absolutely true – but it is also true that the studios keep making the same repackaged crap over and over again because that is what people will pay to see. If you personally want to do something about the state of motion picture entertainment, then go see an art film, a smart biopic, a period piece or a clever original thriller, while you still can! You can always catch the Candyland movie later, if you need something to complain about…

The Ethics of Co-Signers

Let’s try this one as a hypothetical: Let’s suppose that somebody wants to borrow money from you. It’s not a large sum by your standards – losing it won’t bankrupt you – but if you just gave that amount away to anyone who asked for it you’d be broke in short order. Let’s also suppose that the person who is asking is a decent human being and you have no particular reason believe that they won’t pay you back, but they’re not currently working and won’t be for the foreseeable future. You might be reluctant to make the loan under those conditions, but let’s further suppose that the person asking for money finds a responsible third party (a parent, for example) who agrees to pay you back if the borrower can’t for some reason. Suppose you made that loan…

Now let’s suppose that a few months later your borrower dies in a tragic accident that is in no way his or her fault. What are you going to do? We will assume that you are neither heartless nor insensitive, but at the same time you can’t afford to just give money away at will – and your borrower’s parents co-signed on the loan, promising to pay you back if something like this happened. Would you go to the co-signer and ask them to honor the commitment they gave you and repay the loan? Does our answer change if the borrower’s parents are devastated by the loss? Does it change if they are approaching retirement age? How about if they have taken in the borrower’s (now orphaned) children and are working hard just to get by?

This sort of thing happens a lot more often that you would hope; there was a story about a case just like this that appeared this past week on CNN online. It’s not exactly a case of biased reporting, but it’s clear that both the reporter and most of the people who have written in the Comments think that it is terrible of the finance companies involved to be attempting to recover their money from these excellent grandparents who are already expending their savings and giving up any real chance of retirement in order to raise their grandchildren. The fact that the loans in question were student loans, and therefore can’t be discharged in bankruptcy or otherwise legally evaded undoubtedly make this even worse, but the basic issue remains: what are the loan companies’ ethical responsibilities in this case?

It’s easy to say that the lenders should just forgive all of the debt – reduce the loan amounts to zero, take a credit on this year’s taxes, and move on. And if this was the only such case that would ever happen I’m sure that all of the companies would just write this off. Unfortunately, there are thousands of such cases every year, and if the companies forgive all of them they will go out of business, throwing all of their employees out of work and doing potentially catastrophic damage to their stockholders – none of whom have done anything wrong either, we should probably note. It might actually be heartless to collect on debts like these, but it’s hard to imagine how it would be fair to destroy one group of innocent people in order to help another group of innocent people – especially when the group that will benefit really did bring the crisis on themselves…

Which brings me to the inevitable question: does a financial institution have an ethical responsibility to forgive loans – effectively throwing away money – because either the original borrower or their co-signer have suffered a personal or family tragedy? Does our answer change if the original borrower could easily have obtained life insurance (at a reasonable price) to cover the loan – which a healthy 27-year-old probably could have – that would have prevented the whole situation? Does our responsibility to be kindly and good people override our fiduciary responsibility to our stockholders or our professional responsibility to our employees and other stakeholders? Or should we just offer our loans and financial products at fair rates with clearly-written contracts and assume that our customers are grown adults who can make their own choices and accept the consequences of their actions?

It’s worth thinking about…

Sure They Are…

This isn’t really a follow-up to yesterday’s post, or to the post on July 23, which detailed the confessions of a former Comcast representative, confirming that the company’s incentive system makes all of their retention employees fight like starving dogs to prevent anyone from disconnecting. It’s really more about a story posted on The Verge website about the sales culture at Comcast, and how this is impacting the company’s entire customer service system. But one of the issues that keeps being raised when anyone attempts to create an alternative service and fight traditional broadband providers like Comcast is that these companies are too powerful, too entrenched, too difficult to push out of any market segments they might want – too big, in fact, to fail. After reading this piece in The Verge, I’m skeptical…

You can read the original story here if you’d like; it’s an informative and well-written piece that reveals a dreary – but hardly unexpected – reality. People have been complaining for some time now that it isn’t possible to interact with anybody at Comcast without having to fend off a variety of sales offers. You would expect that kind of thing from customer service personnel, since they’re usually the ones who would sign you up for new services anyway. It’s a bad idea will billing personnel, since you’d really rather be sure that they are concentrating on getting your bill ironed out, but most people will just put up with it. After all, offering someone a new service at a discounted rate might actually be a way to resolve certain billing issues…

It’s a really bad idea to have your technical support people doing this, however. If someone has called because of a problem with their service they’re probably already in a disgruntled frame of mind, thinking dark thoughts about your company and trying to figure out if there is anyone else who can provide the same services. It’s a bad time to start trying to sell them on something else that could go wrong without warning; in fact, anything that requires additional time to complete the call and resolve the problem is a mistake under those conditions. But what is really disturbing about this story is that the company doesn’t see things that way. Apparently, they are trying to get more and more sales performance out of every employee who deals directly with the public – and firing anyone who can’t meet a sales quota…

Personally, I don’t agree with such a strategy even for sales personnel, let alone customer service people who are supposed to be helping customers and trying to make them feel better about the company. It can be argued that the sales people signed up for these jobs knowing that’s what they would be asked to do, and even that most sales professionals like things that way. People who like performance targets with bonuses for selling things really do tend to migrate into that field. Technical support personnel, on the other hand, tend to have qualifications in electronics and/or computer programming, and did not spend the time and effort to obtain those chops in order to become salespeople. If you insist on working them this way a lot of them are going to quit right along with billing and customer service personnel who don’t enjoy this role – and the technicians aren’t nearly as easy to replace…

So if this story is correct, Comcast is driving away not only their most technologically oriented customers (e.g. the ones most likely to pay for expensive new services) but also their best technical, billing and customer service personnel, all while blithely assuming that they are too big to fail and some little upstart like Google Fiber can’t possibly be a threat. I could suggest that they might want to ask some of the former Google competitors, most of whom are now long out of business, how that’s working out for them, but it seems as though no one at Comcast is listening, any more than Frontier Communications is…

Too big to fail, eh? Sure they are…

You Should Get Out More

One of the common errors I keep ranting about is companies – and particularly senior management teams of companies – who have no idea who their customers, employees, suppliers or other stakeholders actually are. This is what gets you silly statements about employees wanting the “prestige” of a promotion that offers more work and longer hours for effectively less money (exempt jobs that pay less than hourly jobs when you include overtime), and tone-deaf comments about people who should just buy what you’re offering and quit asking for what they want. Most recently, it would appear, it has resulted in the CEO of Frontier Communications stating that her customers in Portland are too dumb to understand why they don’t need a broadband speed 80 to 160 times faster than anything they have now…

I don’t know if you’ve been following the development of Google Fiber, but you can read more about it here if you want to. In many parts of the country, including Central Michigan, the prevailing Internet speeds can run as low as 1bps or lower, and even advanced systems rarely exceed 30 mbps. With a limited number of companies competing in each market there isn’t usually any need to upgrade either the systems or the service provided; after all, if your competition is offering a top speed of 10mbps and you can offer 12, you’re 20% faster. There are satellite-based systems that can do better, but most of them are relatively expensive, and you are still limited in where you can get them…

Google is building its own fiber-optic delivery systems and offering to provide speeds in excess of 1,000 mbps in an increasing number of medium-sized cities around the US, which does sound like it would be an advantage over a system operating at 1% or less of that speed. Moreover, Frontier Communications currently has a monopoly on broadband service in Portland, and has therefore never had to worry about the competition in terms of download speed or anything else. But as much as it sounds like Frontier is trying to confuse the issue while running scared, they do have a point: Currently, there is no service or system in general use that requires a speed of 1,000 mbps. In fact, there’s some question as to whether anyone has hardware that could make use of such access even if it existed. And it is also true that Frontier is offering basic service at less than half of what Google Fiber will cost. Unfortunately, both of those contentions are rather missing the point…

First of all, consider that anyone whose broadband use is limited to small and occasional downloads isn’t going to care about a higher access speed in the first place, and they’re certainly not going to go to the trouble of changing providers. But the key demographic for Google Fiber is people who do make use of larger downloads or streaming audio/visual services, and not only do they want the fastest access speeds possible, but they’re not going to take kindly to being told that they are too stupid or too technologically inept to understand how fast Internet connections work. In fact, a lot of power users will probably change providers just because they’re been insulted in such a tone-deaf fashion – but that isn’t even the worst of it…

While it might be true that no one could possibly make full use of a 1,000 mbps Internet connection as of today, I won’t take any bets about that being true for long – especially if such download speeds become widely available. Somebody will find something to do with them, and technology-oriented users are likely to want that capability even before they find out what such new services can do. If technology has taught us anything in the last three decades, it’s that the curve is rising faster than we can keep up with it, and the technology that seemed like science fiction only a few years ago will be available in every big-box retailer by Black Friday if not before…

All of these things would be obvious to anyone who was paying attention to the customer demographics involved, the development of the Technology sector over the past few years, the rise of services like Dish Network, Netflix and Hulu, the appearance of the “Cord-Cutter” movement, or the increasing use of home WIFI systems. In fact, all of this should be obvious to anyone who is actually in touch with the world around them, and not just sitting in their Executive Suite and listening to an echo chamber of yes-people telling them what they wanted to hear. If that is the case, I can only suggest that Ms. Wilderotter of Frontier Communications needs to get out more…