The Importance of Earnest Service

In his column, The Ethicist, Randy Cohen wrote recently in The New York Times, “Your wife should err on the side of caution and not take anything of value from a supplier.” The woman supervised travel for a company and she’d won the grand raffle prize of two roundtrip tickets to Japan at an event sponsored by several airlines. There were some 1,000 guests.

In my first job out of college I worked at Dun & Bradstreet writing credit reports. We were told that if a company we visited manufactured matchbooks not to take a single match, even to light a cigarette. That has been my guideline ever since.

Yet I think that Cohen is being harsh in this instance. He softens at the end of the column, noting to the husband who sent in the query, “At the least, she must disclose her winnings to her supervisors and get their green light before she packs her bags.” I’m comfortable with that.

Some in the media won’t let a PR person buy them so much as a cup of coffee. Others gather enough loot over years to fill a strip mall. Reporters and editors don’t have a lot of time to schmooze over lunch these days, nevertheless, just as business is done by some on a golf course, I can’t imagine how, for the price of a lunch or a coffee, anyone would sell their soul and run photos of horrible looking, poorly made or faulty goods in a new product column or run positive coverage of a lackluster ad campaign or sleazy business.

What about a book or movie reviewer who is sent/given a galley or invited to preview the flick? I don’t recall reading in their reviews that they didn’t pay for the book or seat at the theatre and it doesn’t bother me. What about a beauty editor sent samples that aren’t samples but entire bottles and jars? No problem in my mind. Making up samples would cost a fortune and wouldn’t provide the same experience. Packaging–how the beauty product looks and how the dispenser works–is part of the evaluation.

Full disclosure: I send promo codes to reviewers who ask for them so they can try a client’s smartphone application and have given hundreds of yards of fabric and countless rolls of wallpaper and dinnerware and flooring to be used for newspaper or magazine new product pages or to decorate a home that a magazine photographs.

Obviously, if a company pays any of the reviewers for their assessments, they must disclose this relevant piece of information, whether they write for a blog, web site, an online or print newspaper or magazine. Special sections or advertorials are paid for by the participants and are clearly identified by publishers, usually at the top of the page.

Because attitude and service are more than half of the experience, I think that a restaurant, hotel or travel reviewer should be anonymous and pay for all his/her expenses, no exceptions. 

What about stock brokers? Should they tell you that they’ve been told to push an investment by the boss?

Where do you stand on full disclosure? Do you care?

When a small business owner hears that a bigger business has made an obviously bad decision, it doesn’t feel good, but it helps put things in perspective when aggravating little glitches occur.

Big business or little, quarterbacking after the fact is the easiest thing to do - like in the BP oil leak fiasco - even so it does seem inconceivable that a company, as huge, as experienced and as reputable as BP, had no viable contingency plan to address potential disaster in something as fraught with risk as deep sea oil drilling, yet still went ahead and drilled.

But then who am I to talk? I lost a bundle when I didn’t sell my AIG stock when rumors spread about its possible insolvency. A respected advisor told me, “It has a tremendous franchise, and is too big and diverse to fail.” So this small business owner made a big mistake, but only her family suffered-nobody else’s.

The only good that is likely to come out of these bad mistakes is that they should serve to remind us to be on our guard. Let’s face it things do go wrong!

Not all business decisions are as bad as BPs [or mine about AIG], but some show incredible short sightedness and are so obviously unnecessary. Some board members met after work at a hotel bar in midtown Manhattan a few months ago. The quiet space is on the second floor of a place that’s far from a household name either for New Yorkers or most tourists. It offers no skyline view and there’s nothing spectacular about it other than it is comfortable, centrally located and mostly empty. The cash register must have rung happily that night between drink and snack orders for 20. We were told when we made a reservation for a second gathering that it would cost us $500 on top of the price of what we ordered. This is NYC, folks, with zillions of bars that welcome our business. Our reaction: “Fahgedaboudit” as native New Yorkers would say.

And who, at a company with a stellar reputation like Johnson & Johnson, would approve substandard manufacturing practices for infant and children’s meds leading to a recall and Federal investigation? The plant is in the US, in case you aren’t following the story.

My last example relates to museum security. Perhaps you saw the piece in The Wall Street Journal by Ulrich Boser, “This is No Thomas Crown Affair.” The inspiration was the recent robbery of five paintings at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris. Boser wrote, “The museum had been about as secure as a woodshed. The alarm system had been malfunctioning for almost two months, and replacement parts had not yet arrived,” and he noted “…many museums have not done enough to protect their collections, and art crime has become one of the world’s largest criminal enterprises.”

It’s a shame that some people feel that what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine, but we know that they do, so if you are in the museum business, one of your responsibilities is to protect the art as a bank protects the safety deposit boxes and cash in house and adults protect the children in their care. So who made the decision to buy another artifact or picture when the budget should have gone to keep all the works out of the hands of thieves?

What are some blatantly bad business decisions that you’ve noticed or read about and what is your reaction?