The Importance of Earnest Service

I ran an errand in Grand Central Station last week and on my way in I noticed two suitcases leaning against a wall near the door to the food court. They were still there on my exit.

At first I figured a tourist must be on the curb flagging a taxi, [most New Yorkers wouldn’t dare leave suitcases unattended like that for fear of theft], but this person would have been long gone in the four or so minutes it took for me to buy bread and walk outside.

The picture above was the first one I took on my phone and as the cases were hiding behind the young woman in the shot, I took another one which clearly showed the cases and nobody near them. The camera was full so I couldn’t save that image but it was evident on my phone’s screen when I showed it to a policeman in the station’s office downstairs. By the time I emerged three police officers were standing around the cases.

Was I the only one reporting the situation? I didn’t see anyone in the police office and the young woman in the photo, like countless others on this busy midtown street, didn’t notice them.

I described the incident to a few friends. One, Martha Takayama, urged me to draft a post about it. She wrote: “It is a shocking commentary on our indifference to the realities of today’s world! What an arrogant attitude! How can we possibly, as a nation or a people, confront our social and political problems if we continue to be so turned in! Boston is still reeling and will be forever from the bombing.”

The admonition, “When you see something, say something,” seems to have been around for ages. Loudspeakers at Grand Central and in the subway chant the message for those who might forget. Don’t we hear it anymore? Why do you think the message isn’t sinking in, just one month after the Boston Marathon bombings? What might do the trick?

I bought a summer skirt from a catalog that came in my Sunday New York Times. I’d never heard of the company—Boden headquartered in the UK—I liked the look of the clothes, the prices were very reasonable and the promotion, for the paper’s readers, included free shipping, for returns too, a discount and a handbag for first time customers. I bought, I liked, the skirt was too big, and I’ve exchanged my purchase for a smaller size. So far so perfect and customer service—I had questions–was helpful and in Pennsylvania.

Recently two friends have not had as much luck and both of them, independent of each other, shared their experiences within a week.

At a fundraising auction at her son’s school, one friend won a gift certificate at a hair salon for a wash, cut and blow-dry. She said, “When I got to the salon, and even when I made an appointment, the receptionist was super suspicious. She examined the certificate carefully and announced, ‘it expired last month!’ I told her ‘I just got this,’ and pointed to the expiration date: 2014, not 2013.” My friend added: “Had a good shampoo though!” But who wants to go back to such a place?

Another friend, Joan Cear, shared her thoughts about what she calls “The Groupon phenomenon.” She explained: “Restaurants actively market a special offer – whether through a promoter such as Groupon, or Restaurant Week or to their own member club database. So many times, I have felt like an untouchable in a restaurant because I either:

“a) Have to ask to get the Restaurant Week menu or the special that the restaurant sent me in an email (it is not offered as an option by the wait staff).  Or

“b) When I hand them my coupon offering at the beginning of the meal I am treated with disdain.”

Joan’s husband, Jim, likes an iconic NYC steakhouse that became a watering hole when they lived in that part of town. “They email us these specials and then make us feel like the great unwanted when they are not included among the menu offerings – print or oral – and I have to ask for them.  It’s the same for restaurant week offerings.  And it happens this way every time – regardless of which branch we go to – so I think the wait staff is trained this way.

“If restaurants can’t instruct their staff to treat every guest graciously, the establishment has no business recruiting diners,” she said.

Joan continued, “Last weekend I had just the opposite experience in Riverhead at Bistro 72. I wanted to give the restaurant a whirl, but was afraid to spend lots of money,” on a test. She jumped at the promotion, through Travelzoo–dinner for two valued at $102 for $45.  

“I kept commending the waitress, Cindy,” said Joan who left her a 22% tip on the full price of the meal.  “It was such a refreshing experience—we ended up enjoying the meal very much and spending an additional $20–that I would go back again and again and ask to be seated in her section.”

Why, in some establishments, is there a disconnect between staff and their employers’ special promotions while others take advantage of the opportunity to transform the discount visitors into loyal customers? Do you think that business owners take advantage of the special promotions to increase traffic and actually train their employees to direct customers to pay full freight?

Peter Van de Wetering’s nursery has for 50 years been responsible for the plantings along Park Avenue in Manhattan from 54^th to 86^th Streets. Constance Rosenblum, in her New York Times article, “A Gardener’s Stage: Park Avenue,” reported that in fall workers plant 70,000 bulbs to best control the results for spring enjoyment. They don’t use the same bulbs year after year because tulips, she explained, “can be temperamental.”

There would also be the back-breaking work of deadheading thousands of spent blossoms and the unsightly look of droopy green-leaves-turned-yellow before they can be cut, not before July 4th weekend: So not Park Avenue.

In spite of the goal—perfection—and every possible step and expense taken to achieve it, there are always some rogue blooms to delight. My father and I made a game of being the first to call out a yellow one among the 30 blocks of mostly red or vice versa.

Peppermint was the color of the tulips on our city street this year and an orange and red one snuck in, making me smile. [Photo above].

“You can plan every detail but something unexpected is bound to happen,” is a version of the advice my friend Liz Mayers’ father shared and I’ve held dear. Mr. Goldberg’s admonition is as true for fields of flowers as it is for work projects and life plans. Unfortunately imperfections are not always as charming as flower surprises such as when job loss, illness or reversals of fortune derail savings plans or home ownership or terrorists ply their trade. Hedging bets is not always possible as with tulip bulbs.

There are examples of foolproof perfection. Can you name some?

Certain specialties, while critical, are fragile because they have so many naysayers. Psychology is one of them. I believe in its effectiveness so much I wish I’d studied to be a psychologist.

When a once respected PhD like Diederik Stapel, a social psychologist, fakes tests to gain fame it’s as bad for the field as the damage charlatans do for currently incurable diseases. Because naysayers think psychology [and its offshoots] is so much bunk, when a star is caught red-handed can’t you just hear the “I told you so!”

I read about Stapel in Yudhijit Bhattacharjee’s “The Mind of a Con Man,” in The New York Times Sunday Magazine. The reporter notes that such fraud is nothing new in science which I know firsthand. As a newbie PR person in a then unfamiliar field I uncovered a clinician who had invented test results that a pharmaceutical client was about to tout. I always thought that this was the exception and was disheartened to read in the Times article, “But the scientific misconduct that has come to light in recent years suggests at the very least that the number of bad actors in science isn’t as insignificant as many would like to believe.”

Stapel, a Dutchman, blamed the media, in part, for the path he chose. Bhattacharjee wrote: “In his early years of research — when he supposedly collected real experimental data — Stapel wrote papers laying out complicated and messy relationships between multiple variables. He soon realized that journal editors preferred simplicity. ‘They are actually telling you: ‘Leave out this stuff. Make it simpler,’ Stapel told me. Before long, he was striving to write elegant articles.”

This I don’t buy. Much of my business involves simplifying my clients’ sometimes complicated or technical information for industry trade and consumer audiences which, like me, thousands do daily without fakery. That’s what links, footnotes and charts are for.

Bhattacharjee continued, “What the public didn’t realize, he said, was that academic science, too, was becoming a business. ‘There are scarce resources, you need grants, you need money, there is competition,’ he said.’Normal people go to the edge to get that money. Science is of course about discovery, about digging to discover the truth. But it is also communication, persuasion, marketing. I am a salesman.”

Does every salesman lie? In addition, Stapel doesn’t think much of the public’s brains if he believes we know nothing about scarce resources, competition and budgets/funds for projects in his or any business.

The fake studies also marred the work of countless doctoral students for whom Stapel conducted studies though the universities where they and Staple were involved didn’t find the students guilty. Yet earlier in the article Bhattacharjee commented about the students, “They don’t appear to have questioned why their supervisor was running many of the experiments for them. Nor did his colleagues inquire about this unusual practice.”

Toward the end of the article Bhattacharjee wrote: “The field of psychology was indicted, too, with a finding that Stapel’s fraud went undetected for so long because of ‘a general culture of careless, selective and uncritical handling of research and data.’”

Are you especially dismayed when people in a field that’s supposed to help others do more to help themselves thereby leaving subjects at risk, giving ammunition to the “I told you so” crowd? Is the media to blame for scientists who cheat because editors look to cover simple subjects and conclusions? It’s hard to get grants and financial support for scientific research: a viable excuse for faking a study, yes or no?

One business will get a jolt as a result of the Boston Marathon bombings because it appears that backpacks won’t be allowed at future ones there or in NYC either. Not every one of the some 45,000 runners who finish the NY Marathon depends on them but enough do. Add the smaller events here and elsewhere and the numbers add up. Fanny packs are allowed and will take their place. Perhaps transparent backpacks will eventually be allowed.

The increased incidence of pickpocketing in Europe will fatten the wallets of manufacturers of money belts and other contrivances to keep tourist cash and credit cards safe. Pilfering got so bad at the Louvre that guards went on strike. Security felt that the Paris police were too easy on the children who perpetrated countless daily thefts. [Why children? They get into the museum free.] On a recent “Travel Show,” Arthur Frommer noted that Paris isn’t the only European city to report record theft and suggested his listeners take care.

Airline limits on luggage have impacted that industry and orthopedic surgeon and audiologist waiting rooms flourish from the fashion for platform heels and ear pods on portable music devices.

Have you scrambled for matches to light candles on your dinner table or to add calming fragrance to the atmosphere? So few restaurants use matches to promote their businesses.

Finger nails are out for Android and iPhone users who expect to type on screens. Look around: There are fewer claws than in the past.The technique for those who use voice-to-text systems harkens back to the dark ages when executives had secretaries and typing pools. They chatted into Dictaphones with letter or memo copy and secretaries typed what they heard. As in days of yore, you can also ask your phone to add a comma and a period. There was no wink symbol then.

New Yorkers are split about what to expect from the 10,000 cycles in the bicycle share program again about to launch: Increased lines in ERs perhaps? I’d written about the initiative last summer in “Service of Exercise” when we first expected it and haven’t changed my mind: Thumbs down and I’d like to be wrong.

I saw an able-bodied 50-something man walking briskly across Third Avenue at 43^rd Street last week. Suddenly he fell flat on his back. He hadn’t seen a deep hole surrounding a manhole cover and lost his balance and his footing. We’re putting thousands of bicycles on these unsound streets?

New York drivers are unforgiving and rushed. If you’re crossing where they want to go—what’s a green light?–there’s a 70-30 chance they’ll stop. Maybe the unintended consequence the Mayor anticipates is a more cordial driving attitude. That would be nice.

Do you have examples of good and bad unintended consequences or some that are yet to be determined?

I’ve been watching an increasingly wonderful selection of  BBC period dramas and comedies on PBS, some repeats of 20th century programs such as “All Creatures Great and Small” and others that are new–”Call the Midwife” [below, right] for example. Whether it’s the 85 year old pig farmer in an episode of the former or, in the latter, some of the patients in a depiction of London’s East End in the 1950s, I have a terrible if not impossible time understanding them. [In no way does this fact diminish my enjoyment of the programs.]

I always thought that I should be good at deciphering what people speaking English with various accents had to say as I grew up with my father’s French one. Not so. Similarly, someone from across the pond might need to strain to catch the meaning of quickly articulated Brooklyn or southern American accents.

I’ll be curious whether we’ll pick up some of the language from these imported shows. I recently discovered British comedy “The Cafe,” also on PBS, where characters repeatedly say “laters,” instead of “see you later.”

I read with interest Sue Shellenbarger’s Wall Street Journal article “Is This How You Really Talk?” which while about voice, not accent, nevertheless covers what comes out of a mouth. I’ve previously written extensively about those that irritate me in “Service of Voice,” focusing most on the little girl high pitch some mature women hold on to–in hopes of appearing young perhaps? Shellenbarger, who calls it “the immature voice,” notes, “The problem often starts in puberty and is usually treatable in voice therapy.” Who knew? I always thought it was treatable by not speaking like that anymore.

Wrote Shellenbarger, “A strong, smooth voice can enhance your chances of rising to CEO. And a nasal whine, a raspy tone or strident volume can drive colleagues to distraction. ‘People may be tempted to say, ‘Would you shut up?’ But they dance around the issue because they don’t want to hurt somebody’s feelings,’ says Phyllis Hartman, an Ingomar, Pa., human-resources consultant.”

The reporter continued, “The sound of a speaker’s voice matters twice as much as the content of the message, according to a study last year of 120 executives’ speeches by Quantified Impressions, an Austin, Texas, communications analytics company.”

Who needs studies to prove this? Even fiction supports the study. The nasal New York accent of Fran Drescher [right] as Fran Fine in “The Nanny” [1993-1999], the TV program she created, compared to her boss’s English one, was the most obvious element of the comedy. While Miss Fine was depicted as smarter than the Mr. Sheffield character, he was the billionaire, she the servant.

Shellenbarger writes that people with distractingly irritating voices are unaware. I wonder if all their parents were deaf? My father, no speech therapist, rid me of a violent case of the “um’s” by pointing out each time I said it until I caught it myself.

One fun way to help children hear how they speak and learn to achieve a radio quality voice is through Radio Camp, at UnionDocsCenter for Documentary Art in Brooklyn. Staffed by Sally Herships and Ann Heppermann, the website promises: “At Radio Camp kids take the mic to document the people, places and things around them, all while exploring the key ingredients of great storytelling.” Herships is an award winning journalist who has produced or reported for BBC World Service, NPR, WNYC, The New York Times and Studio 360. Heppermann has reported and produced shows from This American Life, Radiolab and Marketplace to Studio360.

Do you have tips on how to understand regional English accents? Do you believe that people who screech, whisper, whine, turn statements into questions, speak in a monotone, incessantly repeat “like,” um” and “you know” or boom/lecture are unaware?

In some fields, such as human resources, “New research calls into question other beliefs,” wrote Steve Lohr in “Big Data, Trying to Build Better Workers,” in The New York Times.

This research, called workforce science according to Lohr, “is what happens when Big Data meets H.R”

Lohr continued, “Employers often avoid hiring candidates with a history of job-hopping or those who have been unemployed for a while. The past is prologue, companies assume. There’s one problem, though: the data show that it isn’t so. An applicant’s work history is not a good predictor of future results.”

The next bit is scary: “Today, every e-mail, instant message, phone call, line of written code and mouse-click leaves a digital signal. These patterns can now be inexpensively collected and mined for insights into how people work and communicate, potentially opening doors to more efficiency and innovation within companies.” Rather than basing conclusions on hundreds as before, research can involve hundreds of thousands of employees.

Tim Geisert, the chief marketing officer of Kenexa, a recruiting, hiring and training company that IBM recently acquired, reported that “the most important characteristic for sales success is a kind of emotional courage, a persistence to keep going even after initially being told no.” This compares to the trait of outgoing personality that most people used to rely on.

I question the novelty of this “finding.” Persistence is the key to success in almost every specialty and task. Who needs a survey?

Every year, according to Lohr, “Kenexa surveys and assesses 40 million job applicants, workers and managers.” IBM bought Kenexa for $1.3 billion, he wrote, because of its data and strong qualified staff.

There are other companies in the Big Data business such as Google. This company no longer equates high SAT scores and college GPAs as it once did to determine a candidate’s success as a Google employee. Studies of its workers showed that “the most innovative are those who have a strong sense of mission about their work and who also feel that they have much personal autonomy.”

In yesterday’s Sunday Business section in The New York Times Matt Richtel wrote about the same subject in “I Was Discovered by an Algorithm.” He quoted Sean Gourley, co-founder and chief technology officer of a Big Data company, Quid: “When you remove humans from complex decision-making, you can optimize the hell out of the algorithm, but at what cost?”

Richtel also writes about Vivienne Ming, the chief scientist at another such company, Gild. “Dr. Ming doesn’t suggest eliminating human judgment, but she does think that the computer should lead the way, acting as an automated vacuum and filter for talent.”

Do you see any place for instinct in big business hiring anymore or will gut-made decisions only be the realm of small businesses that don’t have access to or budgets for workforce science? Will it be easier or harder for people to get a job? How do you feel about having employees’ every action captured and analyzed?

Some companies market themselves or their products joyfully and well. I love it when they do. Two of the three I selected are no spring chickens in our flash-in-the-pan world of trends: The grocery chain was founded in 1958 and the energy bar was introduced in 1991. I don’t know how long the vintner has been in business.

I wouldn’t trade them for the world

Trader Joe’s, headquartered in Monrovia, Ca. publishes a newsletter, “Trader Joe’s Fearless Flyer.” The copy is succinct and clear–perfect pockets of information for customers waiting in the checkout queue to digest.

The lines in the East 14th Street Manhattan store can be daunting, though they move fast. You have just enough time to be tempted to try Mini Organic Peanut Butter Sandwich Crackers, Channa Masala, Apocryphyl [sic] Pita or Dixie Peach Juice–the headlines of some of the well-written news briefs in the newsletter I picked up.

I didn’t want to lose my spot–though a few of the tempting items were at hand on shelves I passed on my journey to checkout–and I plan to search out some of the other taste sensations on my next trip, especially the juice. The newsletter describes it as a blend of peach puree and apple, white grape, pear and pineapple concentrates. Trader Joe’s has carried the drink for seven years–now I know.

The company suggests you use the newsletter, printed on recycled paper with soy-based inks, as paper airplanes, wrapping paper or packing material. So wonderfully California.

Bar none

My friend Jim Roper treated me to three Clif Bars. He was taken by the packaging of these energy bars, pointing out the story on one of the wrappers that described the founder’s father’s influence on the product starting with its name. His dad’s name is Clifford. Gary Erickson, the founder and owner, reminisces on one label about his dad, his childhood companion and hero during hikes in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

Gary also explains on this and on other bars that sport the hallmark packaging why he made the 240 calorie, lightweight “nutrition for sustained energy.” A main reason was taste as he found most other energy bars reminiscent of sawdust or chalk. I agree with my friend Jim and with Gary–the Black Cherry Almond and Blueberry Crisp bars I’ve tasted were scrumptious.

Tastefully dressed

What glee when you sip something quite remarkable that comes in a stunning package and costs under $5.00–try $3.99 [in NYC]. Grifone Primitovo is a Zinfandel from Mancuria in Italy that I found in Trader Joe’s wine store. The vintner designed the label to look like something from Hermes, proving that something doesn’t have to be costly to look expensive [my fashion mantra since childhood]. Trader Joe’s recommends you “enjoy it now”–a polite way to suggest you shouldn’t treat it as it looks—don’t put it away for 10+ years.

Does it take time for a company to understand and promote itself at perfect pitch or do many “get” their personalities from the start, helping insure long-term success? What other brands or organizations do a fun or flawless job marketing their products?

The topic of Rick Wolff‘s radio program “The Sports Edge,” on WFAN–it focuses on children’s sports–continued to be coaches who bully, in the aftermath of the Rutgers basketball scandal. During yesterday’s show he said he’s heard of countless examples of bullying in other school and college sports programs and asked listeners to share examples.

One of the callers was a wrestling coach who admitted to losing it after he observed one of his best athletes giving up at a major tournament after the first round of three. He said he dressed down the student the next day, screaming, yelling, using the f-bomb, underscoring what a disappointment the kid was to himself and if this wasn’t bad enough, he did it in front of the team.

He said that he immediately met with the student’s parents to apologize to them and the young man and then he met with each of the families of the other team members and did the same thing.

Meanwhile, last week, Rupert Murdoch refused to apologize for the New York Post‘s decision to run images of two men who were not the Boston Marathon bombers. “On Media” Politico.com columnist Dylan Byers reported that the Murdoch-owned paper was the only major print publication to use the photos.

Murdoch said that as soon as the FBI changed course–it was they who had distributed the photos but it wasn’t clear that the bureau meant the media to receive them–the paper removed the photos. As Byers noted, Murdoch obviously couldn’t delete them from the already-distributed printed copies.

In a statement, wrote Byers, the paper’s editor-in-chief, Col Allan, wrote that the two men weren’t identified as suspects. The headline associated with the image: “Bag Men: Feds Seek These Two Pictured at the Boston Marathon.” The bag reference was to the bags they carried.

So what about the reputations of the young men implicated by the headline that flirted with accusation? Are they collateral damage in the quest to be first with the news so it’s OK?

I’m sure that a smart lawyer could figure out a slippery way for Murdoch or Allan to sound as though they were sorry should their coverage have given the “Bag Men” or their families a start. Maybe one of them, like the coach, will meet with the young men.

Are public figures so afraid of being sued that they won’t apologize? Or is it a macho thing? Does this attitude then filter down to the rest of us so that often vendors respond “no problem” instead of “I’m sorry” when you ask them to right a mistake? Or have some successful people forgotten that they can and do make errors and that the thing to do is to apologize?

A society that on the one hand reflects straight-laced puritan roots regarding marriage and at the same time barely shrugs at the likes of a hedge funder’s shenanigans—I’m thinking of Steve Cohen–baffles. Cohen agreed to pay a multi-million dollar fine for insider trading while at the same time refusing to admit guilt, an approach that the Security and Exchange Commission approved. Did someone knock out this watchdog? Does the public play possum again?

Good for federal Judge Victor Marrero who, as Kaja Whitehouse wrote in The New York Post, “balked at the agreement between the Securities and Exchange Commission and Cohen’s SAC Capital that allows the firm to pay a $602 million fine without admitting or denying guilt.” Meanwhile, Mr. Cohen has recently bought $215 million worth of goodies: a Picasso painting and East Hampton ocean-front home. Any ideas of what investors without the inside scoop bought—maybe a sandwich at Subway?

Of a different nature, a major publisher paid half a $million for what The New York Post reported as the memoir of a “drug-addicted beauty writer.” In addition, the author told reporters “she’d rather ‘smoke angel dust with her friends’ than hold down a full-time job.” The Post continues, “Aside from four abortions, she recalls getting ‘choked out by a Park Avenue millionaire kid in a pine grove by the reservoir at 4 a.m.’ and ‘sex in vacant lots in Bushwick with white rappers.’” Who can believe what someone consistently under the influence remembers about her 29 years and frankly, who cares? The publisher thinks many will. I hope they don’t.

Here’s a society strung out on the politically correct with dollops of conservative values that concurrently lies motionless when someone picks their pockets and regulators wink. In this environment a publisher thinks people are hungry for the sad story of a lost soul with less than three decades and little perspective to write a worthy memoir. Sure it’s democracy at its best but can you explain such extremes and contradictions?