FunnyBusiness: Everything About Business Except The Bottom Line

BlogHer

Feeling very anticipatory this morning. I'm one of the fortunate 270 who managed to register in time to get a spot at the first every BlogHer conference. While I read many of the attendees blogs, I actually know just one of the attendees, my friend Nancy White who is also leading a session: When Globalization is Good For Women.

In case you are not aware of BlogHer here is the group's mission.

"BlogHer is a network for women bloggers to draw on for exposure, education, and community. By holding a day-long conference on July 30, 2005, and establishing an online hub, BlogHer is initiating an opportunity for greater visibility, learning and success for individual women bloggers and for the community of bloggers as a whole."

As I have looked at the schedule of sessions trying to decide which ones I absolutely have to attend in person, and which ones I'll have to wait and hear on audio later on --(yes I want to attend almost every single concurrent session!) I realized that I haven't attended a professional conference in over 10 years.

Attending a conference in the mid-90s meant becoming very adept at the "payphone dash" . To excel at this sport one needed to know exactly when to leave a session so you wouldn't miss any good stuff but in time to preempt any of the other conference attendees from securing a payphone before you did.

At conferences, if you were not a payphone dash winner, you often couldn't make your call before they next session began. Sure, I had a cell phone  but the long distance and roaming charges made me think twice before using that tool to call into the office.

Checking email wasn't even on my radar. We had it but didn't have the ability to check it from a remote location. So, I would call my office, punching in an ungodly number of numbers required by MCI card and would dutifully give my office the fax number of the hotel De jour.

Then a couple of hours later, the front desk would call,and  let me know that I had a fax. Seems like they charged anywhere from 50 cents to $1.00 a page. Of course once I reviewed the pages, I had to fax back.

I haven't used a hotel fax machine in years. Now all my faxes come directly to my computer.  I won't need the conference payphones .I 'll have my Blackberry. Of course, in the event of some technical problem, I realize I don't have a phone calling card anymore -- maybe that would be a good Plan B, just in case.

The whole phone thing has been on my mind because of a message the hotel phone system left me when I arrived in my room yesterday. Evidently, I have a direct dial number that people can use to reach me here.

Being somewhat of a skeptic, I immediately checked out the phone charge policies at the hotel to see if there were surcharges on these incoming phone calls. I couldn't find them.

I did discover that any call that requires dialing a "9" will be charged 99 cents. That includes 1-800 and its various cousins. If my deductive reasoning is intact that  charge would apply to every call that I would make outside of the confines of the hotel property.

I have a conference call this morning. I'll pay the 99 cents, begrudgingly . However, I will change to my cell phone at 60 minutes --that's when they start charging 10 cents a minute. As my daughter Berit loves to say,

"Are you jokin' me?"

Which begs the question, is anyone using the hotel's phone service anymore. Evidently, not many.

The revenue that hotels derive from guest room telephones fell last year to an average of $2 a day per occupied room, compared with $4.10 in 2000, according to the Hospitality Research Group of PKF Consulting, which is based in San Francisco, reports Inside Bay Area.

My hotel does offer free high speed Internet service. I like that. I don't like paying $9.99 for the privilege of using the Internet. I  do have WiFi in my room.--- although I don't think that's part of the hotel's perks.  The WiFi is from the Westin. I'm staying at the Hilton.

Thank you Westin. I am thoroughly enjoying the freedom that your WiFi  service is providing. It's making my stay at the Hilton all that more enjoyable.

For folks who are interested in being a part of Blogher virtually, you can attend an all day global chat . For those of you who prefer to read about it, Jay Rosen at PressThink will be covering the day's activities.

Stay tuned.

At Least

Sometimes you hear a piece of advice that is so good that you feel compelled to pass it forward.

Yesterday, as I was driving to a meeting, I was listening to my favorite all women's  radio talk station. The producer had just returned to work the day before. She is suffering from a horrific loss--on July 5th her 3 1/2 month- old daughter Brady died of SIDS.

Being that it's talk radio a lot of people want to talk to her, comfort her, support her in her grief. Anyone listening to Colleen talk about her loss would find it difficult to not be moved to tears over the rawness and depth of that loss, inspired by her strength, and oddly comforted as she talked about how much she loved young Brady.

Colleen  also managed to give her listening audience a great piece of advice that all co-workers should try to remember the next time they want to comfort a co-worker who has just lost a child ,had a miscarriage or had an adoption fall through.

Here's the advice. Do talk to the co-worker who is in grief. It helps. However, and this is a big however, avoid starting any sentence that begins AT LEAST...as in at least you are young , at least you can get pregnant again.

There are no AT LEASTS in this kind of pain.

Are we there yet?

Scoot over to The Economist and take a few minutes to read "The Conundrum of the Glass Ceiling". It is a thoughtful, provocative ,and depressing article.

Some of its nuggets:

The glass-ceiling phenomenon is proving peculiarly persistent. The top of the corporate ladder remains stubbornly male, and the few women who reach it are paid significantly less than the men that they join there.

Booz Allen Hamilton, a consulting firm that monitors departing chief executives in America, found that 0.7% of them were women in 1998, and 0.7% of them were women in 2004. In between, the figure fluctuated. But the firm says that one thing is clear: the number is "very low and not getting higher".

Research by Catalyst, an American organisation that aims to expand "opportunities for women and business", found a strong correlation between the number of women in top executive positions and financial performance among Fortune 500 companies between 1996 and 2000.

While some apologists like to insinuate that women are not making it in Corporate America  because they follow the "mommy track" and want more work-life balance-- it's an argument that just doesn't work.

Just look at graduate schools: Women account for 50% of the students in Medical and Law Schools (both demanding careers, n'est pas?)Compare that to MBA programs  where women account for about 30% of enrollment. At its upcoming October conference the PIHRA ( Professionals in Human Resources Association) will be hosting a session entitled "Changing the Face of U.S. Corporations: Getting Women to "Opt-in" and Never "Opt-out"

In its preview of the session, the write up says,

In a recent study, the Forté Foundation, a consortium of leading corporations, top business schools and nonprofits, dedicated to combating the decline of women MBAs, found that women perceive business careers to be expensive, inflexible and philosophically unrewarding. As a result, fewer women are choosing careers in business and more women are leaving the workplace prematurely.   

Women  have been trying to opt-in. They've been trying for 20 years. Women are not stupid and the facts say, that corporate America is not really interested in women leaders.  Think it's just a bunch of feminist ranting?

Well, how can anyone explain these findings of a survey by the Graduate Management Admissions Council as reported in The Wall Street Journal's College Journal:

The survey found the starting salary for male M.B.A. graduates averaged $72,331, about 10% more than the $65,659 for women. Bonuses and other compensation amounted to $17,558 on average for men and $14,200 for women. Not surprisingly, then, only 16% of the women were extremely satisfied with how the M.B.A. increased their earning power, compared with 22% of the men.

Of all the analysis of WHY women can't break through, my favorite in The Economist article comes from the French:

Ms Maier's Gallic analysis of the issue is that French men spend more time at work than women, which “can be explained by their insatiable predatory instincts as well as by their casual approach to banal household chores.” This leaves women with so much to do at home that they are more than twice as likely as men to work part-time, “which makes it all the more impossible to break the glass ceiling.”

To quote Linda Ellerbee, "And so it goes."

Color Me Black

Here's a game to play the next time you're sitting in a coffee shop waiting for your coffee date. Count how many people are wearing at least one piece of black clothing in a 10 minute period compared to those who don't.

In New York you can revise this  game to see how fast it takes you to get to 100 people.  It will be a very short game.

However, in Minneapolis I was really surprised at the results. Only two people who walked into the coffee shop during the 6 minutes I played were not wearing black. That would be the guy in the cream colored pants and cream plaid jacket and the woman wearing the denim short and jacket ensemble.

Everyone else male, female and ,including myself --in my black linen flax shirt-- were dressed in black.

This is au contraire to what the  experts at professional crafters.com said we'd be wearing. The predictions:

Fashion Colors

"Turquoise. One of the must-have colors for spring 2005.

Turquoise/aqua blues, vibrant green, pinks, yellows with a hint of green, red-orange, dark blue, khaki, cantaloupe/coral, lavender, and slate gray."

In the six minutes I played, I saw black pants, black shirts, skirts, purses, shoes, sandals,workout shorts, workout tops, and black boots.

The lady with the black boots definitely got my attention-- it was 90 degrees and she came in sporting black boots, a coral knit sweater, long black shirt and shell. She carried a white purse. She must work in an office building that keeps it very cold. Or she's very odd.

At 6 minutes into the game when my coffee date was about 12 minutes late, I decided to check my voice-mail --she had left a message on Sunday saying she'd have to reschedule. Game over. The black won as usual.

The question is will black ever lose? Every year fashion pundits name a color that is this season's new black. This year is no different.

"In the fall 2005 collections, shades of brown are hot. "Brown truly is the season's new black," says Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute, a company that analyzes and predicts color trends. "Deep teal blue is running a close second," she says"

A friend who used to work in a department store shoe department talked about a sales meeting where the district manager was introducing the season's new shoes.Pointing to a red pump she said, " Tell customers that this season red is the newest neutral."

My friend was skeptical. Red is obviously not neutral. Yet, as a customer gingerly picked up the pump my friend chirped, " Red is this season's newest neutral."  The woman eager to believe, thanked her and bought the pump.

You can color me blue, red, purple or brown but I'll continue to put my money on the blacks.

Teaching an Old Dog

Just how much money does a motion -activated paper towel dispenser promise to save a company? Is it worth it in  the lost time that people spend trying to figure out how to use the equipment?

For the past three days I was attending a conference where the bathrooms had two motion -activated paper towel dispensers. One worked by waving, the other would sometimes dispense, and sometimes not.

Like Pavlov's dog, I couldn't stop myself. I had to figure out why some waves resulted in the reward of a paper towel and other times I could wave as if the queen were passing by and I couldn't get it to do a thing.

Would it dispense the paper if I waved faster or slower?  Starting from the right side and going left, or starting the wave from the left and going right? Did I need to get closer or farther away from the paper dispenser?

It was so random. Try as I would I couldn't find a pattern to get the machine to respond to me.

On the third day, after many failed attempts to get the second dispenser to dispense, I mentioned to my friend Royce that I thought the uncooperative paper towel dispenser wasn't working. As the teacher she once was, Royce said ," hold your thumb in front of the sensor."

"That's it, no waving, just thumb-it?"

I gave it the old thumbs up and the paper dispensed. I waited until the red light on the motion sensor faded, gave it another thumbs up and again, like magic, the paper appeared on cue. No waving slowly , no frantic waving, no motion at all.

Did I mention today's post was going to be a public service announcement? In fact I think the motion -activated paper towel association of America should send me a bouquet of flowers.

We are solving a major sales barrier here.The paper dispenser companies have been off message.   Their machines shouldn't be described as motion- activated but Thumbs Up activated. 

Oh, and while I'm dispensing free advice, how about a picture or a  word description of what kind of motion the motion activated equipment requires? Obviously there are different moves that work with various types of equipment, but I've never seen a user's guide for these bathroom accoutrements.

We need a user's guide.

Personally, I prefer the thumb to the wave. It's a simple, easy and power move.It's so much more civilized than waving at an inanimate object to get it to do what I want it to do. And, while I didn't try using any other digits to get the machine to work,I imagine that people who want to send the motion-activated paper towel machine a political message could do that as well. So many possibilities. It makes you want to wash your hands.

Test your bias

It's Friday and a good day to spend some time reflecting. In case you're wondering if your cultural values play a role in your decision making,  you can participate in an online research study called Project Implicit which is a collaboration between Harvard, University of Virginia and University of Washington.

If you go to the demonstration site you can take a quick test to see what your biases are for a variety of issues ranging from "weight, sexuality, gender and even presidents."

It is well known that people don't always 'speak their minds', and it is suspected that people don't always 'know their minds'. Understanding such divergences is important to scientific psychology.

This web site presents a method that demonstrates the conscious-unconscious divergences much more convincingly than has been possible with previous methods. This new method is called the Implicit Association Test, or IAT for short.

On the demonstratation site I wanted to see if how I tested on Gender-Career issues.

My results definitely show I don't always know my own mind.

"Your data suggest a moderate association of Male with Career and Female with Family compared to Female with Career and Male with Family"

The test takes about 10 minutes or so. An interesting exercise for any team. Have fun. Stay cool.

Tattoo Lady: Is A No-Tattoo Dress Code Policy Out Of Step With The Times?

The topic on the Kevyn Burger radio program was," Do employers have the right to prohibit tattoos?"

If a study published in 2000 by the Minnesota Medicine Association is correct, that no-tattoo policy could soon affect nearly 50% of younger workers . According to the report,

   

"In 1990, a reported 3% of the U.S. population had tattoos.18 In our study, a surprising 35% of patients in the 16–35 age group had at least one tattoo, as did 19% of hospital staff in that same age group. In the 36–50 age group, 28% of patients and 11% of staff had tattoos. Our results indicate that in these younger age groups, tattooing is more prevalent than previously thought."

Is it time for companies to re-evaluate their own biases against tattoos and body piercings? The web site, the Modified Mind lists companies and their policies on tattoos and body piercings. The policies were surprising.

While the California based grocery chain Albertson's forbids facial piercings or tattoos,the more staid Bank of America is " Open to all mods that aren't extreme. "Extreme" is based on branch manager's preference, no official corporate policy."

Wal-Mart says no to tattoos but IBM is more lenient saying,"In all office environments: Employees are entitled to have piercings as long as it does not interfere with normal working day, or cause a safety concern. With regard to tattoos, if there is a risk that they could cause offense to anyone, they should be covered up."

Which brings me to Maureen. Currently working in a bead store, Maureen waited on me today as I was selecting beads to repair a watch band. Maureen has "facial ink."  Under each eye she has a series of dots that go the entire side of her face.

As Maureen was adding up the cost of the beads I asked her about her tattoos. In particular, I wanted to know if the dots had a specific meaning,

"It means something to me. It's very personal," she said, adding,"you have to be committed to have ink on your face."

I then asked Maureen if this was a trend. Are we going to start seeing a lot of women wearing dots on their face? How are they going to cover those up for work?

Maureen doesn't  think it's a trend saying  the only people she knows with ink on their face are tattoo artists and performance artists.

Still,Maureen is not the first young woman I've seen with a tattooed face. The most remarkable was a young woman  standing in line ahead of us on the day my daughter went to get her driver's permit.Like Maureen, this young woman had dots--actually they looked more like small n-dashes --on her face. Unlike Maureen, this woman had created an entire facial design. It  looked like the outline of a permanent Mardi Gras mask that not only outlined her eyes but her nose and mouth.

At the time I wondered where she worked and who would hire her. Two months later I got my answer. My daughter Berit saw her working at the University of Minnesota Book Store.

So far, the courts have sided with companies who restrict tattoos and body piercing,saying as long as they are not discriminating based on race, sex, age or sexual preference, the company has the right to create policies on "dress code."

The question is how realistic are these dress codes? If tattooing has reached critical mass than shouldn't companies relook at these policies?

If someone would have told me that IBM has one of the more liberal tattoo policies, I would have laughed in their face. Perhaps other companies should follow IBM's lead.

 

Update: Checked the Modified Mind Website on 8/11/07 and tWal-Mart has modified its policy.

"Tattoos and facial piercings allowed for night stockers only. Large or offensive tattoos must be covered.
The Canadian branches have no standing on body piercings/tattoos."

Image Credit: Smoking Gun web site: Amanda Rudder

NOTE: Maureen is a real person with real ink on her face. She preferred we didn't use her real name.

Tags: Business, tattoos, jobs, work, employment

False Positive

Three times I have tried to send an email to an editor about a pending story. Three times my email service say her company "bounced" my email for spam.

I'm getting cranky. I read my email and try to figure out what possible words I could have in the message that a newspaper would filter.

I can't figure out. Evidently I'm not alone. At least not in England where a survey taken this year says 40% of British workers say they have missed a deadline because of a false positive email.

"The spam hysteria of the last few years has created the impression that blocking unwanted e-mail is the primary concern for businesses, with the result that some service providers and companies appear to have lost sight of their users' real needs," said Nigel Brooke, a vice president with the European office of Mirapoint, in a statement.

"Filtering unwanted messages ultimately serves no purpose if it undermines the effectiveness of the overall message network's responsiveness," he added.

A conference spokesperson said that although false positives may be impossible to eliminate entirely, the result -- missed deadlines -- can be avoided by using such standard e-mail security and anti-spam tools as "white lists" and giving users easy and timely access to spam quarantine folders." 

According to the survey over 60% of participants said their real email was filtered out at least on a monthly basis. 25% said it happens on a weekly basis.

A quick search on Google didn't give me the ten tips to avoid  having a newspaper editor bounce my email.

Could it be the urgent notation I put in the email?

Could the second bounce have occurred because I mentioned the first email was bounced as spam?

Or, is my ISP currently being blacklisted because a real spammer is in my neighborhood?

I will call and give her a heads up about the email. Hopefully, her voicemail box isn't full.

Blogging meets product placement

People will often ask me, how do you make money blogging?

My sad answer has been,

" I don't."

I quickly add that I'm trying to figure that out. It seems that there are some bloggers who have already done that. I'll take a pass.

According to the Boston.com (requires registration to read the entire article), the online version of the Boston Globe, bloggers are now making money - pathetic as it is - by mentioning companies in their blogs. It's the blogging equivalent to product placements in movies and TV. .

"Jeff Cutler has never purchased anything from Dot Flowers, but you might think otherwise, reading the Hingham resident's blog.  "No more driving to the corner to buy flowers and hand-deliver them," he wrote on his Web page. ''Nope. Now I go online to places like Dot Flowers.com and 1-800-Flowers. I like Dot a little better just because of the personal touch."

Dot Flowers' ad agency paid Cutler $5 this spring to promote the florist and put a link to its website on his blog, or online journal, short for web log. Cutler, who does not disclose the payment on his blog, is one of more than 2,000 bloggers whom marketer USWeb enlisted to hawk products and services. That helped the nascent florist double its sales in the first three months and shoot up near the top of Google's search list, according to USWeb."

Will I ever take $5 to mention Dot Flowers? Absolutely not. Do I have a price? Not in this blog.

Here's a peek into my Gemini life. In my business, I consult with companies on marketing communication issues. I encourage my clients to blog.I have not suggested that they pay bloggers to hock their products and services.

If and that's a big IF, I were to ever advise a client to seek out bloggers as shills, I would recommend that the bloggers disclose their arrangement.

I love advertising when I know its advertising. Blending those lines just doesn't sit right with me.

Call me old-fashioned, I just don't think I can do it. FunnyBusiness is a journalistic endeavor. When I'm writing FunnyBusiness, I adhere to the ethics I value as a journalist. That includes that very clear wall between advertising and journalism. I will never write about a product or service in this blog for money.

Yes, advertisers and sponsors are welcome. In fact, I'd love to have many advertisers, as long as the people who read this blog understand that the advertisers are advertisers.

Do I think its wrong for bloggers to get paid to promote products? Not at all. Blogging is not always journalism. In fact, that's one of the things mainstream journalists complain about. If it looks like journalism, reads like journalism, is it journalism?

Obviously not. Maybe those of us who consider ourselveshournalists should have some kind of icon on our blogs that lets readers know we are not going to be promoting products for a fee or in exchange for free tickets to concerts and theaters.

I would prefer if people disclosed that they are getting paid to mention a product or service. But that's my values. It's because I look at blogging as an outlet for journalism. Not everyone does.

Most bloggers not have the voice of their former news director John Greene echoing in their ears. The occasion was the morning talk show. I was the substitute "hostess". The guest was a starlet promoting some movie. Prior to going on air, John said to me,"she can't mention the name of the movie, that would be promotions and this is a news program."

It's been a long time since that stupefied starlet looked at me in complete bewilderment, when I told her we wouldn't be mentioning the movie title because my news director wouldn't allow it. At the time I thought John was being unreasonable.

I owe John an apology. You weren't being unreasonable at all. You knew by crossing that line we'd slide down a slippery slope that would be impossible to climb up.

Unfortunately, there are very few people still standing on John's side of the line.

I wish there were more John Greene's in this world.

How much do you charge?

When it was all said and done yesterday, my high score in loop was 2300 points. At one point in the evening,perhaps around 11:30 p.m. my daughter Berit yelled down the hall and said, " go to sleep already."

It was during one of my "breaks" yesterday from loop---that would be when I was actually doing my work---that I overheard a one-sided conversation Berit was having on her cell phone."

"Well, I babysit for one family with three children and they pay $10 an hour and then I just babysat for a family with twin babies who paid $6.50."

After she hung up, I asked her what fee her new "client" settled on. "We didn't," said Berit, "She said I'm sure we can figure out something in that range."

"You really did a great job handling that question," I said. "It's one that stumps many consultants."

"I hate the money question, " said Berit.

Don't we all. But what I really liked about her approach is that she threw out an acceptable range and opened it up to negotiation.

Prior to 2001, I was fairly confident and firm about my fees. 9/11 changed all that. In fact, during lunch yesterday with an OD consultant, we talked about how our work came to a virtual standstill. As my lunch partner said, "not just for a short time...like two years. It's just now coming back," she said.

In those post 9/11 days I put in a stint at a children's toy store. I earned $7.50 an hour.I loved that paycheck ( at the time it was about the only one I was getting).

So the next time someone asks me what I charge, I'll  tell them ,"my range is $7.50 to $200."