Tim Krohn
The Free Press
September 27, 2007 12:04 am
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A lot of books and press releases cross my desk telling how to succeed in business or be a better employee. They have catchy titles and lots of Top 10 lists.
One “10 Things for Job Success” list I saw tells employees not to pilfer office supplies such as pencils, Scotch tape and copy paper.
I couldn’t agree more. You hardly get anything when you try to resell them.
That’s why you should focus on bigger things, like the fax machine or the laptop hardly anyone uses anyway.
You can get something for those on ebay.
Which leads me to multi-tasking, something companies have been pushing on their employees for years. “Work smarter, not harder.” Which you should take to heart. If you manage your ebay account while at work, selling office equipment and supplies, you accomplish several tasks at once. Now that’s working smarter.
Most every business-success book written in the past couple decades has a chapter on “Thinking Outside the Box.”
The catch-phrase surfaced about the time Japanese business leaders began showing up at American corporate headquarters and started measuring corner offices for drapes, seriously alarming the American executives having cocktails in those corner offices.
It has become mandatory for all managers to use the term “Think Outside the Box” at least twice at every business meeting.
Manager: “OK, any concerns by anyone?”
Employee: “Could we get toilet paper in the restrooms? We haven’t had any since last quarter’s sales results came in. It seems like something the company should provide.”
Manager: “I bet Japanese companies don’t buy toilet paper for their workers. You need to Think Outside the Box people.”
I’m not sure outside-the-box thinking has helped that much. Toyota just overtook GM as the world’s No. 1 car maker and the public has less trust than ever in American corporations.
It might be time we go back to Thinking Inside the Box — returning to the business basics that worked the first couple of centuries in America.
Businesses could have a person answer the phone when a customer calls. Companies could have Americans build toys and make dog food and they could promise customers they won’t contain lead paint or rat poison. They could make quality products, provide good customer service and take a long-range view of their industry.
The newspaper business has invested a lot in Thinking Outside the Box as the number of people subscribing to papers has dropped. We’ve been making a mad dash to cut expenses, shed employees and get Internet sites up and running, although no one’s exactly sure how to make money from them. We’re putting videos on the Web sites, too, so we can be, well, almost like TV.
I hope it works. But looking at newspapers across the country, so far it looks like serious readers are finding less in their papers that makes them want to keep subscribing and the video junkies find more on TV or YouTube than on a newspaper’s site.
When companies aren’t Thinking Outside the Box or extolling the virtues of multitasking to employees, they’re talking about “going the extra mile,” “branding,” “Six Sigma Training” and, my favorite, “Whatever it Takes.”
Which, in corporate-speak means, “Whatever it takes that doesn’t cost us more money.”
About 15 years ago the company that owned our newspaper launched a “Whatever it Takes” campaign. We had lots of employee committees, brainstorming and rallies. To this day I don’t know what the goal of the campaign was — neither does anyone else who was here at the time.
There’s only one remnant of the costly, time-consuming and pointless experience: Nice glass paperweights they gave all of us that say “Whatever it Takes.”
Hey, that might be worth something on ebay.
Tim Krohn is a Free Press staff writer. He can be contacted at 344-6383 or tkrohn@mankatofreepress.com
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