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?

In an anonymous comment on my last post, “Service of Independence Day,” [July 1], an articulate writer noted: “As my pediatrician is fond of quoting, ‘Without failure there can be no success.’” I’ve been planning to write about failure for a while. With social network ESP at work, now’s the time.

As I approached the topic, the first thing I thought of was that we can’t have weaknesses. Note a typical job interview where the interviewer asks, “What are your weaknesses?” The applicant replies:  “I’m a workaholic; I am too organized; I love working 13 hours a day when I know I shouldn’t and I hate vacations.”

The next thing that came to mind was the culture in some workplaces where no matter what you do, never, ever admit to failure. Sell one widget in a year when projections were for 1,000 and somehow you twist your report to show that have met your goal. Politicians always meet theirs, don’t they?

I’m from the school of “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again and again and again,” and then, if it isn’t working, I realize that I’ve done everything possible and the project or relationship or concept isn’t working or didn’t work. Giving it my all allows me to sleep at night once I’m over the disappointment/devastation/dust-off period.

[One exception is failure associated with anything electronic. I don't know about you but when something goes wrong with my computer, smartphone or other device, I sound like my mother asking myself, "What did you do?" More than half the time I did nothing and it's not my malfunction.]

More about failure: I set up and staffed a client’s booth at an industry trade show. The client was a trade association and the marketing committee wanted me to entice attendees to participate in an industry-wide initiative. Trouble is the attendees were at the show to find and buy product, meet with vendors and maybe look for a job. They weren’t the slightest bit interested in any program this or any other association was peddling. I became emboldened after day one which generated little traffic and less interest so the second day, I stood out in the middle of the floor in front of the booth with a big smile and spoke with anyone who came down the aisle. Very not me, but I was desperate. The results were appalling.  

Not long after, when another trade association-client, representing a different industry, had the bright idea to do the same, without naming names, I told them of my previous experience and the reasons for failure. The marketing committee ignored me and went ahead. Fortunately, I wasn’t asked to staff this booth. In spite of my warning, the committee members who staffed the booth were shocked when they reported dismal results. [I didn't say boo.]

You hope to turn a negative into a positive and label a glitch like this under “experience.”  That’s the success part? I also learned that like some children who must test what a hot stove feels like no matter how effectively an adult warns them that touching it will hurt, some people won’t listen to and/or learn from other people’s failures. 

A friend from third grade’s father used to say, “It’s what you don’t think of that will trip you up,” which has challenged me all my life to try to think of everything possible before a project or event so that I clear all decks leaving time to address unexpected bombshells. Still, sometimes, things fail.

These days, it happens a lot. You try to invest prudently and intelligently and surprise! Someone at the company–a household name with solid credentials and reputation–has cheated, lied or exaggerated. You get burned, lose your money and are told that “Investing is high risk–just like gambling, don’t you know,” in the same patronizing tone of voice you hear when a person who has insulted you tells you that they were “just joking.”

Do you agree with the pediatrician who says that without failure, there can be no success? In a society that doesn’t acknowledge failure, has it ever played into your success?

How reliable are your first impressions? Mine can be feeble. Whether good or bad, I’ve been happily or unhappily surprised by some.

When it comes to people, lively eyes are important to me and these are evident on a first meeting. I eventually admired one young assistant whose eyes were expressionless–almost dead. My first impression of him was “blah to the extreme.” He was one of the best and fastest writers I’ve worked with and funny and bright as a bonus. [Don't worry, it's not you-we don't know each other anymore.]

On the other hand several smart, amusing people, [some I thought were friends], turned out to be crooked, untrustworthy, sleazoids. One was caught with his hands in the coffers of the agency we worked for.

In this economy, I fear that we must brace ourselves for more of the latter. 

And it’s not only people. Well known brands sell out and if you’re not paying attention, you’ll fall for a great price for what once was a reliable brand and end up with overpriced junk. Recent toaster and electric toothbrush purchases are two examples. Either a company is cashing in on its reputation, which is usually a death knell, or it’s fooling itself that licensing a lesser quality line won’t affect its higher-priced brand. While my first impression of the item on a store shelf with moderate price tag may be “Wow!” like the men in the Staples TV commercial, if my experience is poor, I scratch the brand from my “to buy” list forever.

I tried to buy some vacuum cleaner bags on line yesterday and when I got to checkout, there was a form almost as long as a mortgage application. I clicked offline and called the toll-free number. Buying on the phone cost $2 less [on an $18 item] and the customer service person was an American who repeated all the numbers and addresses flawlessly. My impression had been that it would cost less for me to do all the work myself even though I was giving this company my email address–the passport to sending me countless emails about promotions and new products evermore. Go figure.

While I think of myself as street-smart, at times cynical [though occasionally gullible and trusting], I haven’t concocted reliable antidotes to people or companies that make their livings trying to cheat me by manipulating my first impression. Do you have any remedies or foolproof detection devices that weed them out?

When I think of students cheating in school, my mind skips to the person about to take out a child’s appendix, give a cousin root canal, remove an aunt’s gallbladder or clear away a friend’s cataracts. Did these doctors, or the anesthesiologists in each case, cheat in school?

Then I think of a vendor, stock advisor, client, political representative, landlord or banker… If they cheated in school, will they think nothing of cheating me and/or will they know how to do their jobs?

In April, Primetime on ABC covered “A Cheating Crisis in America’s Schools,” which along with tests included plagiarism-made-easy through the Internet. They referred to a 2002 statistic–that 74 percent of 12 thousand high school students admitted cheating on an exam. ABC couldn’t find more recent statistics-nobody interested to gauge this situation?

A month later, a press release highlighted a University of Nebraska, Lincoln study of 100 juniors at a large Midwestern high school. According to the release, the researchers found “Most high-school students participating in a new study on academic honesty say they have cheated on tests and homework — and, in some alarming cases, say they don’t consider certain types of cheating out of line.”

While some of the techniques ABC News reported are new thanks to technology–photos of notes on cell phones, mini iPAQ computers, two-way pagers or graphing calculators–the report noted some vintage methods as well: The rubber band trick-stretch it and write answers which nobody can see once it snaps back and using a term paper from a handy fraternity or sorority file.

Reasons for cheating remain the same: Pressure to make high grades to get into colleges and grad schools or to win high paying jobs and in some cases, not wanting to appear nerdy by studying long hours-freeing up plenty of time to look cool and to play.

The students aren’t alone, according to Friday’s New York Times in “Cheat Sheet: Under Pressure, Teachers Tamper with Tests.” The pressure word, which Trip Gabriel used in his title, is the same excuse teachers use. They need to cheat to keep their jobs, in some cases, and win bonuses in others because student test scores must improve year to year.

Students and teachers have always felt pressure. In either case, it’s a person’s focus at the time, either what a student does for 12, 16 or 18+ years or what a teacher does to pay the bills. I wonder whether cheating to this extent has always been the rule and we turned a blind eye before?

How come hard work doesn’t occur to all these people?

The title of this post is obviously facetious. I see no long-term service in cheating, unless you manufacture or sell anti-acids to soothe the stomachs of those who do.

What solutions do you propose to turnaround this situation or do you see this as business-as-usual, no biggie?