Several years ago, Dr. Pepper ran an advertising campaign called "I would do anything for love."
While the soft drink company has since launched other campaigns, it seems that some people in the company evidently are emotionally attached to the message. Last Thursday it was announced that Dr. Pepper had bid and won an unusual eBay auction --to become a bridesmaid in 23- year-old's Kelly Gray's 2009 wedding.
After the bidding closed, the New York Times ran a story about Ms. Gray -- however, at that time the NYT did not have all the details.
The winner, whom Ms. Lala would not identify, must also pose for
pictures and the wedding video and join in “any other wedding
activities.” The bridesmaid will wear an apple red dress and shoes of
Ms. Gray’s choice. The dress is likely to be A-line and floor length,
Ms. Gray said.
She might be renting a tux, however, as she is
willing to have a bridesman. The winner can eat from the
still-to-be-chosen buffet, but must pay all travel expenses.
Several hours later, the good folks at Good Morning America revealed who the final bidder was --Dr. Pepper. So while The New York Times didn't have access to the winner, the folks at GMA had enough time to tape over a 2:30 minute story on Kelly, Dr. Pepper and Dr. Pepper's plans for Kelly's wedding.
My question is, if Dr. Pepper just read about Kelly Gray a day or so before the auction was scheduled to end, was that really enough time to pull the entire program together? Dr.Pepper bid $5,700 and then on national tv upped the bid to $10,000 with the stipulation that they get to pick the bridesmaid--they're hinting it will be a celebrity.
There is just something about this story that doesn't feel completely spontaneous. Read why I am a skeptic about this little lovefest at BlogHer.
The other day I was having dinner with a first year lawyer. He works in a very large law firm and when he was hired he was given a handsome salary. He says, the salary is just fine --and he doesn't feel like working the extra hours required to qualify for the annual bonus.
For this Gen Yer, he's earning enough money thank you very much. He wants a life. For the generation that coined the expression Generation Gap...we baby boomers are now finding ourselves on the other end of the gap line.
Talk to boomers who are charged with managing GenYers and you will see a roll of the eyes, a shake of the head and a general response that they are not an easy bunch to manage.
During the past week both U.S. News and World Report and Gawker have had on-going discusssions on the topic. Actually, a blogger at U.S. News ( of the baby boom ilk) did a post on 10 things managers should do to engage GenYers.
The folks at the always snarky Gawker took umbrage with the list and offered their own. For a detailed reading on the lists, check out the complete post on BlogHer.
While both lists may make you chuckle,and some may make you want to bop someone in the head, I strongly encourage people to read the comment section on both posts. That is where the real information is. Yes, there are some comments that are totally juvenile, but if you stick with them, you will get insights in to the mindset of the GenYer.
In what once was a very stable career, newspaper editors and page layout designers are finding that their careers may be going the way of computer programmers and inbound customer service reps.
According to BusinessWeek,The Orange County Register is conducting a one month trial to see if an Indian company Mindworks Global Media can handle a portion of its editing and page layouts. John Fabris is a deputy Editor at the Orange County Register
"This is a small-scale test, which will not touch our local reporting or
decision-making. Our own editors will oversee this work," Fabris said in an
e-mail to The Associated Press. "In a time of rapid change at newspapers, we are
exploring many ways to work efficiently while maintaining quality and improving
local coverage."
The company declined to release the financial terms of the deal.
Orange County Register Communications has struggled in recent months with
circulation declines. The Register recently dropped from the third-largest
newspaper in California to the fifth-largest, behind the Los Angeles Times, San
Francisco Chronicle, San Diego Union-Tribune and Sacramento Bee.
The company has been through three rounds of layoffs in the past year, most
recently in April when up to 90 employees lost their jobs. Employees were also
offered a voluntary severance program in 2006.
The news of the outsourcing experiment comes one day after The New York Times reported that 2008 looks like it will be the worst year ever of Newspaper Advertising Revenues.
My cousin Larry is spittin' mad. Carnival Cruise Lines may think he's mad about a charge of $4.89 for a bottle of water that Larry maintains he did not drink. Carnival Cruise Lines would be very wrong. Larry could care less about $4.89.
What Larry was originally mad about..what Carnival Cruise Lines still doesn't get after numerous letters and phone calls... is that Carnival Cruise chose not to believe him. But that anger is chicken feed compared to the feelings he now has for the cruise lines after their amateur and insulting customer service.
Some background. While many of us live in a world of nuanced truths...in a world where it depends what the meaning of "is" is, where telling convenient half -truths roll off the tongue without a blink or second thought, where there is no shame in getting caught in a fib of sorts, my cousin Larry is not part of that world.
He is a man of his word. If tells someone he did not drink, take as a souvenir, give to a thirsty passenger or in any way use that bottle of water, you can believe him. He did not do it.
And, when you are someone like Larry who giving his word has a textured and deep meaning, challenging it is an insult of the highest order.
So goes the story of Centor vs. Carnival Cruise Lines.
After being on the cruise for several days, Larry and his wife checked their account on the TV in their cabin. That's when they spotted the $4.89 charge for a bottle of water on May 3rd. Larry's wife went to the purser's office ( good strategy, Joanie is very diplomatic, Larry, not so much) where the first problem occurred. Instead of saying, "we're sorry for the mistake,as in "the customer is always right," the woman in the office said, "we'll investigate it."
So tell me, how does one investigate whether or not a bottle of water is missing? Maybe the bottle was missing. Maybe the people who clean the room got thirsty and had a drink. Maybe it rolled under a table. There are endless scenarios for what happened to that bottleof water. Maybe someone wrote down the wrong cabin number when they were doing the paperwork. All sorts of explanations are plausible. What absolutely is not plausible is that my cousin Larry's lips came anywhere near that bottle of water.
While still on the cruise, Larry and Joanie got a note saying that the investigation was complete and ,oh by the way, the $4.89 charge was sticking. Larry's wife returned to the purser's office. She told them that they had one choice and she had two: She could reduce the overall gratuity for the trip or after they returned home, she would dispute the charges with American Express. She explained the cruise line had one choice. Remove the charge. It was up to them. They removed the charge.
End of story? Not quite.
Larry was not done. If this had been about the $4.89 bottle of water the story may have been over. But this was not about chump change. Carnival Cruise Lines insulted my cousin.
So after he returned home, he jotted off a letter to manager of Guest Relations at Carnival Cruise Lines, a Ms. Bertha Espinoza. Here is an excerpt from that correspondence.
This incident has spoiled what was, at least for my wife, an
extremely pleasant cruise. That Carnival
would see fit to impugn our integrity for $4.89 is beyond the pale. I have owned a public relations agency since
1972, and I have never run across anything as petty and demeaning as this
incident.
We took this cruise specifically because our son and
daughter-in-law had sailed on the Miracle before, and were extremely
satisfied. They too were appalled by
this incident.
It would seem that Carnival should hold customer relations
seminars for its pursers. For our part,
we will think long and hard before we take another Carnival cruise.
Here are some key words that Carnival Cruise lines didn't quite pick up on, " impugn our integrity." This was not a guy upset about $4.89. In fact he left the steward an extra tip because the steward tried several times to rectify the problem.
This was a guy upset because his honesty was called into question. Surely, folks at Carnival Cruises have taken training on the motivators for complaints. Surely, they know what to say to people who feel their integrity has been impugned?
Maybe not.
Larry, waited for a response. This was no longer about the water, this was about the cruise lines understanding that they had insulted a guest and they needed to apologize. A simple apology would have been a lovely gesture.
When no response was forthcoming, Larry called customer service. They tracked down his letter and said,
" It had been received on May 19, and answered by a "letter writer" on May 30, and was scheduled to be mailed June 9."
Larry gets the letter on June 13. It's signed by a Jeff Mintzer, Special Advisor, Office of the president. Larry decides to call Mr. Mintzer to find out why he wrote a letter on May 30 that wasn't mailed until June 9.
Larry calls the number on the letter. From Larry's email to me
I call 1-800-929-6400, and ask for Mr. Mintzer.
A young lady named Sandra said, "Mr. Mintzer's a letter writer; he
doesn't take phone calls."
"Does that make a lot of sense to you?"
"We all have specific jobs."
In the letter, Carnival Cruise Lines offered this solution: on their next cruise, Larry should call them ahead of time and they'll have a special bon voyage gift for them. Are you jokin' me?
More importantly, Carnival Cruise Lines, are you jokin' yourself?
That is not a real apology and you know it. It's like printing up a million coupons and counting on only 1000 people to redeem them. What this meaningless and insulting gesture says is, you don't have time to be bothered with guests like my cousin. It isn't worth the time or energy. The insincerity is appalling.
Here's the thing: the reason that Carnival Cruise Lines couldn't understand why Larry cared about his reputation is quite simple: they don't seem to care about theirs.
My son Noah was born 24 years ago on a Monday afternoon. Noah and I stayed in the hospital until Thursday. During my free time in the hospital I finished ( on a yellow legal pad) a presentation for a financial institution. I was under deadline. On Friday the nanny stopped by and for two hours I attended a meeting on the presentation I had completed during my hospital stay.
I did not take a traditional maternity leave. I didn't feel I needed it. I kept thinking of all those grandmothers who gave birth and went back to work in the fields. My attitude was "if they can do it, I can do it."
I owned an agency and in order for every one else to get paid, I felt an obligation to continue working. But that was my choice and I have always known that that is not the choice most people would want to make.
While I did not take a real maternity leave, I did change my work hours and I was always back home by 3:45 in the afternoon. And until Noah's dad came home for dinner I don't think I stopped holding Noah for one minute. Having my afternoons with Noah was a huge gift. It was my maternity leave --it lasted over two years until my nanny had a heart attack and Noah went to daycare.
When my daughter was born, there were more people in the office to do the work and I actually took two full weeks off without doing any work. But Berit was an easy easy baby. She ate and slept and so after two weeks Berit and I returned to the office. That's where she stayed until she was six months old when she went to the day care center in my office building.
As the owner of a business, I had the freedom to have the maternity leave I wanted to have. Most women and experts agree moms need those first few months to bond with their baby and physically recover from childbirth. Most women can't arbitrarily say - I'm leaving work 2 hours earlier than I used to be with my baby ( without suffering a pay cut) I could. I could always cut into my work day to be with my children.
The gloomy economy is causing businesses to rethink maternity leaves. It is a troubling trend. It's a trend I wrote about at BlogHer.
Ask anyone who owns their own business and they will tell you all the things they miss about working for a major corporation: regular paychecks, discounted health care, paid vacations, and all those other perks that come with being part of a Fortune 500 organization.
However, even with the regular paycheck and health care benefits, most business owners will say that it would be hard to work for a major corporation again because they'd miss their freedom.
That's why I was so shocked to learn that Best Buy has implemented a program that Timothy Ferris, author of the Four Hour Work Week calls" the most radical workplace experiment the Fortune 500 have ever seen."
It's called the ROWE Concept: Results Only Work Environment. Businessweek featured the concept in 2006 with a piece called Smashing The Clock
One afternoon last year, Chap Achen, who oversees online orders at Best Buy Co. (BBY
), shut down his computer, stood up from his desk, and announced that
he was leaving for the day. It was around 2 p.m., and most of Achen's
staff were slumped over their keyboards, deep in a post-lunch, LCD-lit
trance. "See you tomorrow," said Achen. "I'm going to a matinee."
Under normal
circumstances, an early-afternoon departure would have been totally
un-Achen. After all, this was a 37-year-old corporate comer whose wife
laughs in his face when he utters the words "work-life balance." But at
Best Buy's Minneapolis headquarters, similar incidents of strangeness
were breaking out all over the ultramodern campus. In employee
relations, Steve Hance had suddenly started going hunting on workdays,
a Remington 12-gauge in one hand, a Verizon LG (VZ
) in the other. In the retail training department, e-learning
specialist Mark Wells was spending his days bombing around the country
following rocker Dave Matthews. Single mother Kelly McDevitt, an online
promotions manager, started leaving at 2:30 p.m. to pick up her
11-year-old son Calvin from school. Scott Jauman, a Six Sigma black
belt, began spending a third of his time at his Northwoods cabin.
At most companies, going AWOL during daylight hours would be grounds
for a pink slip. Not at Best Buy. The nation's leading electronics
retailer has embarked on a radical--if risky--experiment to transform a
culture once known for killer hours and herd-riding bosses. The
endeavor, called ROWE, for "results-only work environment," seeks to
demolish decades-old business dogma that equates physical presence with
productivity. The goal at Best Buy is to judge performance on output
instead of hours.
Read more about this experiment and how its increased productivity at Best Buy by nearly 40% and reduced turnover by 90% in some divisions at my blog post on BlogHer.
You can also check out the blog of Work Suck's authors Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson as they talk to the many skeptics who say it can't be done in my office.
When my son was five years old, we checked into a Best Western in South Dakota. He went into the room with his dad . A few minutes later, I walked in to see Noah hanging up the phone. He turned to me and said, " Mom, take a note: We're never staying in a Best Western again. They don't have room service."
I thought of Noah last night when I discovered that The Ayers Hotel doesn't have room service. It's been awhile since I've stayed at a hotel without even a limited menu. I do like room service.
If I weren't so tired last night, the fact that the hotel didn't offer room service would not have been a big deal. I would have just driven to a restaurant.
But I was tired. Really tired.
I had had four hours of sleep the night before, a plane trip cross country, and spent over 90 minutes driving up and down the 405. The last thing I wanted to do is get back in the car to get food. So I didn't. Sleep won out over hunger.
When I realized that dinner would be out of the question, I thought I would just get a snack in the vending machines. No vending machines either. What's with that? Note to hotel: If you aren't going to offer room service, why not have a vending machine?
My room does have a microwave, so why not have a supply of frozen dinners like Lean Cuisines on hand for guests who do not have the time or inclination to get back in their cars and find a restaurant
If you were to read a review of this hotel on Yahoo! you would have all the confidence in the world that this is a great place to stay. And, it does have some nice features. The bed is very comfy. It has lots of outlets. I like me a hotel with lots of outlets. It offers a free breakfast. That's always a nice touch and given that I am particularly hungry, that's a very appreciated touch. I will probably be the first person down there.
It's very green. When I checked in, I was given instructions on what to do with my room key after I got into my room. There is a room key holder on the wall and you have to keep the room key in there at all times or else none of the electrical equipment-- including the air conditioner and lights will work
I can support that system, I support not changing the sheets and reusing the towels -- it does take away some of the fun of staying in a hotel but I do try to do my small part to conserve.
However, I am less enthusiastic about the requirement that you can't keep the temperature lower than 70 degrees. I am a woman who keeps my house at 64 in the winter in Minnesota. I like it cold. I would even go so far as to say I need it cold.
An inside temp of 70 degrees just isn't comfortable. Several times last night I woke up wishing upon wishing that I could turn that thermostat down to 66. Having a cold room is a very important feature for me.
I hope this 70 degree thing in hotels is not a trend.
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