Screwing Stakeholders

When it comes to stakeholders, a company’s relationships can be either overt or covert. The Associated Press, for example, reported this on 20 June:

Tidewater Inc., the world's largest operator of vessels serving the offshore oil and gas industry, may move its corporate headquarters to Houston, company president Dean Taylor said Wednesday.

“We have a lot of sympathy for the city, but our shareholders don't pay us to have sympathy,” he said. “They pay us to have results for them. We ultimately need to do what's for them.”

This sterling example made the Houston Chronicle the following day via its “Around the Region” section…just a three-‘graph article that caught my attention because Taylor, who’s not only CEO but Chairman of the Board, seemed to go out of his way to tell the members of its long-time New Orleans home to drop dead. The Times-Picayune has been all over this story; Tidewater has been mending its Louisiana fences ever since.

On the covert side, Chronicle columnist Loren Steffy reported yesterday that Sprint Nextel is cutting off customers – canceling their service – if they use the company’s customer service help line too frequently. You ought to read Steffy’s column because he’s a far better journalist than I am and reports the story better. But one telling point is worth repeating here:

…The bigger problem is the message Sprint is sending to all customers — and to all customer service employees. As it moves down this slippery slope, Sprint could, for example, decide to drop customers who spend too many minutes roaming on plans where roaming charges are included in the price.

Tidewater’s done it publicly; Sprint Nextel hasn’t really spread the word about its peculiar anti-customer policy around – unless you’re one of the “riffraff” who got a service termination letter.

These love-me-or-leave-me approaches keep pointing out that we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us if we want to turn corporations into models of positive stakeholder interaction. The Stakeholder Rule© is still at the whim of CEOs and Chairmen of the Board everywhere.

The President of the New York Central Railroad, William H. Vanderbilt, was perfectly happy to say, “The public be damned.” That was 1888. He got away with it. Today, we don’t have to be so acquiescent...let’s fight back for our relationships.

“Stakeholder Rule” © Richard Laurence Baron. All rights reserved.

Weightlifter Bob

We spent the weekend visiting with Bob and Edith Fusillo in Atlanta. He is the “Weightlifter Bob” of song and story. We spent much of the time sitting on their back porch, talking and eating and drinking…a real getaway.

If you haven’t been following this particular story line, Weightlifter Bob will travel to Kazincbarcika, Hungary in August for the IWF-World Masters Weightlifting Championship:

At 80 years old, I’m reportedly the oldest super-heavy weightlifter in the world. I didn’t start lifting until I was 67. Since then I’ve won dozens and dozens of medals in competitions all over the US. In 1999, five years after taking up the sport, I won a gold medal in the World Masters Championships competition, in Glasgow.

Now I’ve qualified for the World Championships to be held in August, 2007. Few 80-year-olds compete. It’s traditionally dominated by Russians, Hungarians, Cubans and Chinese, but I think I can bring back both a gold medal and a new world record. I already hold three Pan-American records and five American records. To win a Worlds at 80 would be a major thrill.

Read the entire “Weightlifter Bob” story here – it’s a blog we keep up to pass the word about Bob and Kazincbarcika – this oddly named city of 32,000 in the far northeast of Hungary. Barbara and I had a terrific visit with them…always do.

Bob’s wearing a special T-shirt, obtained since the last time we went to Atlanta. Missed out on Nempnett Thrubwell? The entire silly story is here. (Edith is the one not wearing the T-shirt.) Thanks so much to both of them for a wonderful time.

Pumpkin Centrism

“Baptist Pumpkin Center” is today’s subject. I’m not the only person to notice the sign on I-12, the one that Barbara and I pass once or twice a year going around the New Orleans area, on our way to and from Atlanta. Thousands of drivers see it coming and going and it’s too much fun to pass up. Bill Rempel posted about it briefly here.

That would be Exit 35 on this short “intrastate” Interstate. It really does mark Pumpkin Road on the west side of Hammond (or Ponchatoula, depending on your point of view. Whatever.) It’s likely there are Baptists on Pumpkin here – although you’re more likely to find a bunch of them on Pecan here; Immanuel Baptist Church is on Pecan Street in Hammond.

Friends, I think today’s text is about opportunity. The Exit 35 sign is pretty specific: this here’s a Baptist Pumpkin Center. Not your Methodist or even your high-church Episcopalian Pumpkin Center. Certainly not your namby-pamby, ecumenical “Christian” Pumpkin Center. Down here north of New Orleans, there’s room in folks’ hearts for just one center of squash fruit, or Cucurbita Cucurbitaceae as pumpkinados persist in saying, and that’s the Baptist Pumpkin Center.

(Sigh. A pumpkinado is a person who’s a squash enthusiast – a fan – but that’s for another post.)

Other religions could have the own pumpkin centers. I’m surprised that the Catholic Church hasn’t already established its own pumpkin centers on a worldwide basis. There’d be a good deal more ceremony attached to these. Perhaps Brandeis University has established its own pumpkin center, a Jewish pumpkin center; or, since there’s already been a considerable effort to plant trees in Israel, a global effort to establish pumpkin centers in the Holy Land will soon appear in synagogue religious schools throughout the US. Then the issue of whether the patches would be Orthodox or Reform pumpkin centers would rear its unattractive head…pumpkins are kosher for Passover as far as I know.

Muslim pumpkin centers might suffer from the same kind of doctrinal split: Sunni or Shia? Buddhists might welcome the peaceful nature of their own pumpkin patches, wherein the Eight-fold Way could be contemplated.

I do not advocate proselytizing insofar as pumpkins are concerned – no. A person’s pumpkin preference ought to be his or her own, I say. So really, Pumpkin Centers could be like those all-faith chapels one sees in airports (praying that you aren’t trapped on a delayed flight can address any form of deity…and pumpkin).

It’s possible to blame this all on Charlie Brown and Linus’s search for the Great Pumpkin. But I’m thinking that “Pumpkin Centrism” is older than that, rooted deeply in America’s spiritual reawakening in the early 19th Century. And the Baptist Pumpkin Center in Louisiana is one of the last visible remnants of this nationwide urge toward gourdish worship practices.

Well, I thought this would be a good day to bring it all to your attention – and my thanks to “Lyria” (T A Noonan) for the photo. May the Great Pumpkin watch over you and keep you, no matter in what Center you worship.