CSotD: Monday Short Takes
Skip to comments
In one of the four or five political cartoons today that is not about how much more room there is in a wheel well than in a regular airline seat, Jack Ohman wraps up the saga of Cliven Bundy.
Let us never speak of this again.
Please listen carefully, as our annoyance options have changed
Tina's Groove on the topic of "Who's brilliant idea was this?"
None of this sort of thing ever comes from the front line troops. The question is, how does anyone ever gain enough power to impose it without, apparently, ever having worked with the public? Because, for all the benefits of "building your brand" and "promoting your product" and "selling the sizzle," there is a drawback in "pissing off the customers" that needs to be factored in somewhere.
And yet it never is.
Because, as today's Non Sequitur notes, nobody at the top of the pyramid really wants any feedback from those who are actually affected by their decisions.
A number of years ago — the number doesn't matter — I discovered that a major county fair would give us booth space in the Education Building at a ridiculously low price, and I mean like $200 or something. So I proposed to my boss that we set up our trade show booth to promote our educational programs to parents and teachers and grandparents, and he agreed it would be a good idea.
And, of course, we'd have free copies of the paper, with flyers tucked in offering an inexpensive introductory subscription.
Then the marketing director caught wind of it and decided we should give away balloons.
Which meant, first of all, that we were now talking about getting balloons printed, renting helium tanks, buying string and then throwing away all the little plastic choking hazards she bought to plug the balloons in lieu of tying them, so that we could give the damn balloons to small children.
Y'know: Children the right age for balloons but too young to benefit from our educational program.
It also meant that, instead of having me and one other person staff the booth, we also needed two more people in the back of the booth blowing up and tying off the damn balloons, which, by a simple arithmetical process, we can readily see doubles the number of (on-the-clock) volunteers required throughout the entire week of the fair.
So you'll note that the original $200 project cost has gone up somewhat.
But wait, because there's more: It also means that, instead of engaging interested fairgoers in a discussion of the wonderful ways we could help teachers and the expert curricula we offered them for free, we, instead, spent that week handing out one balloon after another to people who didn't care in the least what we had other than free balloons.
But wait, because remember that we were also offering free newspapers.
Only now, instead of "offering" them, we were pushing them on people by having someone standing in the aisle outside the booth shoving them at people while delivering a little speechette she had written, which I have since scrubbed from my brain but which more or less resembled Tina's scripted telephone greeting above.
In all fairness, she did volunteer for two four-hour shifts, which meant that, during that week, there were actually eight full hours during which anybody rambled through that stupid speech while shoving papers at people so they could toss them in the trash barrel at the other end of the building.
Which brand of management insight is a perfect segue to our …
Juxtaposition of the Day
Now, here's your perfectly predictable moment of zen:
Comments 1
Comments are closed.