Missing George

“There's no present. There's only the immediate future and the recent past.” George Carlin

George Carlin died this week and I’m really going to miss him. Maybe because he was of my generation, I remember him as The Hippy Dippy Weather Man on The Johnny Carson Show circa 1966: “Weather forecast for tonight: dark. Continued dark overnight, with widely scattered light by morning.” Here’s a link http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=HMd5qaRlJ20&

Maybe because he was so irreverent: “I'm completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death”.

But mostly, I think, because he made me laugh: “I'm not concerned about all hell breaking loose, but that a PART of hell will break loose... it'll be much harder to detect.”

Whether it was defining “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” or professing he prayed to Joe Pesci because "he's a good actor", and "looks like a guy who can get things done!" Carlin was always enough left of left field that I was continuously entertained by him. Yeah, he’d become edgier and much more cynical in recent years but hell, he was 70, he’d earned the right.

The thing that probably most defined George Carlin was his ability to call Bullshit, whether it was religion, government, sex, gender, race, even himself: “Not only do I not know what's going on, I wouldn't know what to do about it if I did.”

Which brings me, finally, to my point. Too many bad decisions are made in the business world because not enough people are willing to call Bullshit. We see examples of it all the time where edicts, policies, rules, and mandates are taken foreward where you go “HUH?” followed by “Who was in THAT meeting?”. Well, there were a lot of people in that meeting who either didn’t have the clout, the voice or the gumption to beat down a dumb decision.

Here are some recent examples from Business 2.0 magazine:

Northwest Airlines issuing a “101 Ways to Save Money” guide to laid-off workers that includes tips on dumpster diving.

Spirit Airlines “Hunt for Hoffa” promotion where customers are encouraged to dig for Jimmy Hoffa (actually that’s pretty funny).

Fiji Water runs magazine ads for its bottled water with the headline "The Label Says Fiji Because It's Not Bottled in Cleveland." Cleveland officials retaliate by running tests revealing that Fiji bottled water contains 6.3 micrograms of arsenic per liter, while the city's tap water has none.

Radio Shack fires 400 staffers via e-mail. Affected employees receive a message that reads, "The work force reduction notification is currently in progress. Unfortunately your position is one that has been eliminated."

Disney rejects the request of grieving British parents to put an image of Winnie the Pooh on their child's gravestone.


Carlin always said “It's the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately.”

More businesses need a comedian in some of their executive decision process. Others, like the companies above, need less of them I think.

I love spam

“There are people I know who won't hurt me. I call them corpses.” Randy K. Milholland

No, not that kind of Spam (more on that at the end)

I just received an email telling me I was the Grand Prize Winner and had won a new “Peugoet” car. Now, two things: first its spelled P-E-U-G-E-O-T and second even if it was true I would suppose 2nd prize would be two cars. Frankly, Peugeots have all the bad French qualities (small, slow, noisy and smoky) without any of their redeeming qualities (i.e., they don’t come with a lady from Bois de Boulogne Park carrying a case of Bordeaux).

Spam is today what snake oil salesmen were in 1800’s, part fact, part fiction, part entertainment, part annoyance, and totally for the naïve.

I feel bad for the naïve. Often times they are more desperate than dumb, more out of step than out of mind. And some of these offers just seem SO…DAMNED…GOOD. You want to believe. I want to believe. We all want to believe. But alas, the old adage “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is” usually wins out.

So, once you get over your outrage and annoyance of spam you can see it for what it is….pure entertainment. I mean, come on, you absolutely have to find great entertainment in the offers: ED remedies, free computers, discount drugs, discount girls, the list is endless. My absolute favorite is the letter asking you to act as a financial conduit for their foreign company. That for simply funneling these foreign funds into the U.S. for them you’ll receive a large sum of money. And all you have to do is email them your bank account information. Now really, what could be more harmless than that?

One of the biggest problems of spam, of course, is the occasional legitimate email of some importance that gets trapped in the myriad filters used to combat these pests. Deals get lost, opportunities get missed and relationships get postponed, much like lost mail but at cyber speed.

If you rely on email – as we all do – for your business communications you must fight the battle when a client or prospect doesn’t respond to an email as to whether they’re purposely not responding, have poor communication protocol or never received the message. If your email signature is getting trapped in a spam filter then sending more emails won’t solve the problem.

So, pick up the phone. If they’re purposely ignoring your email they’ll ignore your call THEN you’ll have something to fret about.

By the way, click here for the famous Monty Python skit about Spam. http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=anwy2MPT5RE

Service vs. Product

“At my lemonade stand I used to give the first glass away free and charge five dollars for the second glass. The refill contained the antidote.” Emo Phillips

My wife and I got into an interesting discussion this evening. The theme, Service vs. Product, came about because of the restaurant where we had dinner. This restaurant is her absolute favorite. Me, on the other hand, could never go there again and be very happy. So, naturally we go there a lot. And by a lot I mean on average twice a week.

Here’s the debate point. The food is quite good. Good standard fare, good specials that change monthly, interesting special events. What’s not to like? Well for me it’s this; the prices are premium and the service is spotty. The wait staff can be mediocre and they tend to be inflexible. There’s also this, after 5 years and thousands of dollars spent the owner still acts as if he’s never seen me before. Now, I’m truly not vain enough to expect a “Well, hello Mr. Strouse, I have your favorite table waiting” every time I walk in but a simple “Hi, it’s good to see you again” would be really nice.

In contrast there’s a restaurant I go to maybe a half dozen times a year. Yet when I walk in whichever of the two owners who happen to be working will see me act as if I’m the proverbial long, lost cousin. Now, they don’t know my name from Adam, but they at least recognize me.

So, what’s more important, Product or Service?

The answer is of course both. If you have both great product and great service you’ve unlocked the keys to the kingdom, and doing everything to provide this should be your obsession every waking minute.

But, if you can’t yet pull off having a great product, you’d damn sure better have great service. Because if having both is nirvana then having neither makes you a Detroit car company, a major airline carrier, a cable company, or the NBA.

Here’s my question. If you’ve achieved the hard part of creating a great product why oh why, outside of stupidity or greed, wouldn’t you surround it with good service?