Monthly Archives: March 2009

Airline Adds Insult to Injury

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It seems as though we’re being bombarded by media stories that make you want to scream: “What were they thinking?” It doesn’t matter if they’re talking about politics, sports, business, entertainment, or any other aspect of daily news. Some of these stories are simply hard to believe.

We’re going to share a few of those with you from time to time if for no other reason than to provide you with a coping mechanism, let you know that others share your bewilderment and frustration, and maybe even point out a lesson or two which we may learn from the poor decisions of others. This is our second installment. If you come across a situation which fits into this category, don’t hesitate to share it with us.

Airline Adds Insult to Injury

The Associated Press reported United Airlines is dropping a customer call center that took flight complaints. Customers are now required to send a letter or e-mail instead.

The nation’s third-largest airline told employees it would stop publishing its customer relations phone number immediately, which will be turned off altogether at the end of April.

United claims it is able to respond better to customers who write, since they often include more detail, making it possible to provide a more specific response. Heaven forbid the customer service representative might be required to ask a question!

I’m confident all the other airlines will each sit down immediately and write a thank-you note to United for creating such a wonderful policy. It obviously makes all other airlines look much more intelligent, concerned and customer-friendly.

As far as United … what were they thinking?

About Harry K. Jones

Harry K. Jones is a motivational speaker and consultant for AchieveMax®, Inc., a company of professional speakers who provide custom-designed seminars, keynote presentations, and consulting services. Harry's top requested topics include change management, customer service, creativity, employee retention, goal setting, leadership, stress management, teamwork, and time management. For more information on Harry's presentations, please call 800-886-2629 or fill out our contact form.

How Quickly We Forget

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This is our second installment of our focus on change. We’re going to continue to review the many past changes we’ve experienced, identify current changes we may be dealing with at the moment, and contemplate upcoming modifications and how they might affect you, your family and organization.

Today, let’s take a look at some of the things that we once enjoyed and took for granted … never even contemplating the possibility that these things would become things of our past so quickly.

Want to put a smile on your face? Visualize for a moment how difficult it would be to try to explain each of the following to a member of today’s generation who has no clue as to what you’re talking about.

  • Free air at gas stations
  • Gas attendants
  • S&H greenstamps
  • Electric typewriters (Try to fill out a form on your computer.)
  • Stores closed on Sundays
  • Rotary phones
  • Vent windows in your car
  • Full-size spare tire in your trunk
  • 45 and 33 rpm vinyl records
  • 8-track tapes
  • Home delivery (milk – bread – laundry). Remember when every neighborhood had a milkman?

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in 1950, more than half of the milk sold was delivered to the home in glass quart bottles; by 1963, it was about a third and by 2001, it represented only 0.4%. The milkman also carried juice drinks, cottage cheese, and a variety of other dairy products. Sit down for this one. The majority of homes had a small insulated metal milk box on their porch. No lock. We actually left money in this box for the milkman and, after removing the money, he placed our order in this box, which protected the products from animals and the weather. Can you picture this happening today?

Watch this page for an on-going list and feel free to share your own predictions as well.

About Harry K. Jones

Harry K. Jones is a motivational speaker and consultant for AchieveMax®, Inc., a company of professional speakers who provide custom-designed seminars, keynote presentations, and consulting services. Harry's top requested topics include change management, customer service, creativity, employee retention, goal setting, leadership, stress management, teamwork, and time management. For more information on Harry's presentations, please call 800-886-2629 or fill out our contact form.

Robot + Boomers = New-Found Family

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Remember, as a child, watching futuristic cartoons where every family had a robot zipping around the house acting as a maid, butler and/or baby sitter? Well, apparently the future is NOW and the robots have arrived … just in time for the baby boomers to witness those fantasies become reality.

Over the next 30 years, close to 78 million baby boomers will be retiring, and this will obviously severely stress caregivers, the medical system, and many community services. Our new family friend, uBOT-5 as the robot is called, will now allow elders to live much more independently.

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have developed a robotic assistant that fits right into the family while performing a number of very critical tasks, such as:

  • dialing 911 in case of emergencies
  • reminding clients to take their medication
  • helping with grocery shopping
  • allowing a client to talk to loved ones and health care providers
  • allowing concerned family members to access the robot from any Internet connection to visit their elderly parents
  • allowing family members to navigate the robot around the home in search of Mom and Dad in the event they may not have heard the phone ring or may be in need of assistance
  • allowing the family doctor to perform virtual house calls direct from his/her office or hospital

The design of this particular robot was actually inspired by the human anatomy:

  • An array of sensors acts as the robots eyes and ears, allowing it to recognize human activities, such as walking or sitting.
  • It can also recognize an abnormal visual event, such as a fall, and notify a remote medical caregiver.
  • Through an interface, the remote service provider may ask the client to speak, smile or raise both arms, movements that the robot can demonstrate. If the person is unresponsive, the robot can call 911, alert family and apply a digital stethoscope to a patient, conveying information to an emergency medical technician who is en route.
  • The system also tracks what isn’t human. If a delivery person leaves a package in a hallway, the sensor array is trained to notice when a path is blocked, and the robot can move the obstruction out of the way.
  • It can also raise its outstretched arms, carry a load of about 2.2 pounds and has the potential to perform household tasks that require a fair amount of dexterity, including cleaning and grocery shopping.
  • The uBot-5’s arm motors are similar to the muscles and joints in our own arms, and it can push itself up to a vertical position if it falls over.
  • It has a “spinal cord” and the equivalent of an inner ear to keep it balanced on its Segway-like wheels.

This type of robot isn’t exactly a new concept but, for the first time, they are both safe enough and now inexpensive enough to add tremendous value in the everyday home environment.

Creating this single masterpiece in a lab setting would cost about $65,000. However, manufacturers claim they can mass-produce these mechanisms for a couple of thousand dollars. That may still sound expensive to some until you realize the fact that a part-time, human in-home caregiver can cost more than $1,500 PER WEEK. Two weeks of that kind of care would buy you your own personal uBOT-5!

That’s certainly a fair price to allow Grandma to take the robot’s hand, lead it out into the garden and have a virtual visit with a grandchild who is living on the opposite coast. Our new found companion can now eliminate the isolation which can easily lead to depression in the elderly.

About Harry K. Jones

Harry K. Jones is a motivational speaker and consultant for AchieveMax®, Inc., a company of professional speakers who provide custom-designed seminars, keynote presentations, and consulting services. Harry's top requested topics include change management, customer service, creativity, employee retention, goal setting, leadership, stress management, teamwork, and time management. For more information on Harry's presentations, please call 800-886-2629 or fill out our contact form.

Today’s Invisible Leadership Challenge

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In today’s whirlwind business environment, we have far too many things to focus on … current national debt, mortgage crisis, healthcare crisis, jobs, food prices, oil prices, education, immigration, the environment, and social security to name a few. The media, in a variety of formats, hammers us on these issues almost hourly.

While these issues are indeed obvious and critical, there is still another growing challenge which is just as significant, if not more so, to our business environment. However, it is seldom recognized, discussed or dealt with. It’s almost as though many organizations are ignoring its existence altogether.

Consider the following facts:

  • There are more than 78.2 million boomers in the U.S.!
  • Fortune Magazine reminds us that every seven seconds, someone turns 60. That equates to 12,343 baby boomers turning 60 years old or older every day!
  • The boomers are retiring in record numbers from the American workplace.
  • Today, the average retirement age of a worker is between 61 and 62, compared to 65 just a few years ago.
  • Forty percent of the workforce will be retiring soon, leaving not a hole in leadership but a crater!

U.S. businesses face a shortage of millions of workers in the next 10 years. The Boston College Center on Aging and Work conducted a major survey of organizations across industries and discovered that only 33% of employers said that their business had analyzed workplace demographics and made projections about the retirement rates of their workers.

Over the next decade we’re going to be slapped in the face with some cruel realities. Let’s ponder a few of those realities:

  • Retiring baby boomers are going to be difficult to replace as researchers have found that the loyalty, reliability and strong work ethic will disappear altogether as this generation retires.
  • There will be a tremendous loss of labor, experience and expertise that will be difficult to offset, given the relatively small pool of new workers and the competition for new talent likely to result from so many companies facing the same problem.
  • Weigh the amount of knowledge and experience our current baby boomers have accumulated over the years in the areas of our products, services, processes, tools, culture, history, customers, vendors, competition, and industry.
  • Experts say that management and leadership skills would be the asset in shortest supply in most organizations.

There must be a formalized system in place to capture that which we are about to lose. This loss will be like a slow water leak, barely discernible at first, but over time it can do major damage.

Organizations that do not plan to deal with this emerging skills and experience gap may very well find themselves suddenly facing the most critical dilemma they have ever had to deal with. Manpower warns that this loss of experienced workers could be crippling for many companies.

This critical issue is being treated like a bad weather report—we hear the news that the storm is coming, but we ignore the warnings until it is too late.

Does your organization have a formal strategy for identifying the potential leadership and skills gap and developing talent to fill that gap before your workers retire?

Ask yourselves these questions:

  1. How many senior leaders or senior technological staff will be retiring over the next 10 years?
  2. What is the impact to the organization when (not if) you lose the knowledge of those individuals?
  3. What strategy do you have in place to ensure seasoned, experienced leaders and technical staff are in the pipeline?
  4. What actions are you taking to retain knowledge in the organization?
  5. Have you considered allowing your experienced boomers to formally mentor or coach those who will soon be replacing them in the areas of your products, services, processes, tools, culture, history, customers, vendors, competition, and industry? This transfer of information and experience is invaluable.

Organizational busyness can distract us to the point that, by the time we look up, it will be too late to recover from the consequences we’re facing.

About Harry K. Jones

Harry K. Jones is a motivational speaker and consultant for AchieveMax®, Inc., a company of professional speakers who provide custom-designed seminars, keynote presentations, and consulting services. Harry's top requested topics include change management, customer service, creativity, employee retention, goal setting, leadership, stress management, teamwork, and time management. For more information on Harry's presentations, please call 800-886-2629 or fill out our contact form.

Introduction of Another New Feature

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It seems as though we’re being bombarded by media stories that make you want to scream: “What were they thinking?” It doesn’t matter if they’re talking about politics, sports, business, entertainment, or any other aspect of daily news. Some of these stories are simply hard to believe.

We’re going to share a few of those with you from time to time if for no other reason than to provide you with a coping mechanism, let you know that others share your bewilderment and frustration, and maybe even point out a lesson or two which we may learn from the poor decisions of others.

Let’s start with a recent headline from the political world which really shouldn’t have surprised us.

Talk about irony. I saw a cartoon in the newspaper yesterday that really proves the old adage of “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Picture this. A mailman, heavy bag slung over his shoulder, is on a sidewalk approaching a house after passing through an open gate into the yard. There is a sign in the yard which reads “BEWARE OF DOGS.” On his face is a look of sheer terror. The reason is quite obvious. Directly in front of him stand four very large, obviously vicious dogs baring their sharp fangs, poised to attack.

The artist has labeled each of the dogs … EMail, Texting, Twitter, and Recession. We suddenly understand why the postman must beware of each. These four dogs obviously threaten his existence.

Now, the irony.

In today’s paper, I read that the post office will once again raise the price of a first-class stamp! The price will increase to 44 cents on May 11.

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) suffered a net loss of $2.8 billion last year.

The bulk of its processing and sorting operations is performed at some 400 large, special-purpose mail processing plants … separate and distinct from its network of local, retail post offices.

It also operates 58 airport mail centers, 220,000 motor vehicles and 37,000 facilities.

Volume is expected to plunge by some 12 billion pieces during the coming year.

So, with all of these responsibilities, a tremendous projected loss in volume, and growing competition from electronic communications such as E-mail, Twitter and Texting, the USPS is facing what may well be the greatest challenge it ever had to deal with.

When you consider that fewer and fewer people are buying stamps because of the constant increase in prices and the many emerging options which cost nothing, I can’t help but wonder who made the decision that a good strategy to address these challenges would be to once again raise prices!

What were they thinking?

The Postmaster General receives a salary of $263,575. Add his many other sources of compensation for this job, and he receives a total of $857,459 annually. Was he the one who made this decision, or did he simply approve someone else’s recommendation?

I know hearing about another price increase makes me want to run right out and buy even more over-priced stamps.

What were they thinking?

About Harry K. Jones

Harry K. Jones is a motivational speaker and consultant for AchieveMax®, Inc., a company of professional speakers who provide custom-designed seminars, keynote presentations, and consulting services. Harry's top requested topics include change management, customer service, creativity, employee retention, goal setting, leadership, stress management, teamwork, and time management. For more information on Harry's presentations, please call 800-886-2629 or fill out our contact form.