You Just Don't Hear This Everyday
Here at the Futility Hotline, we love to call out those who are not acting in the best interests of people, in spite of the fact that all of our bitching accompishes absolutely nothing. We've gone after corporate executives, government, media, world figures, and the people in your neighborhood.

Well, this time, we need to applaud someone who is trying to make a difference. Someone who is using the position he holds not for his personal gain or vanity but as a way to make things better. That person in Bill Ford, Jr., CEO of Ford Motor Company.

The Ford Motor Company's latest profit after a period of trouble was something for them to celebrate. Many got bonuses. Rightfully so in reward for a good job done. However, Bill Ford decided to take his bonus of 1.5 million in stock options and distribute it to the Ford employees to use for their children's college tuition. For a high ranking corporate exec to do this is, to me, unbelievable. But Bill Ford has never been a typical corporate executive. And when a CEO treats his employees like this, the employees will respond very well in the form of their own job performance because they now have proof that the company really does care about them.

Cheers to Bill Ford for hopefully showing corporate executives that it is possible to also have a heart in today's business climate.
- posted by Jon @ 9:35 PM

 
Crumbling Under The Weight of Our Own Capitalism?
One of the newest, and most alarming, buzzwords I’ve been hearing in corporate life is “off-shoring,” as in the export of jobs. You may have heard a number of stories in the news lately of many corporations whose base customers are in this locale sending their jobs to countries in the other hemisphere. One of the more popular positions is that of telephone customer service personnel. It is very likely that you may have recently called some form of help line through a local or toll free number and been connected with a customer service person located halfway around the world.

Why all this “off shoring?” Simple-to save money. Wages in places such as India are much less than having to pay someone in the United States. It’s the first rule of capitalism: maximize profits, which in this case is done by decreasing expenditures. (Personal aside-I actually thought the first rule of capitalism was to create competition, causing all of the players to constantly improve themselves and their products. I better go check my economics textbooks.) At face value, there’s nothing wrong with that. Everybody wants to try to save as much money as they can.

However, when you see the big picture, you have to wonder who this is really benefiting. In the current climate, the US economy is supposedly starting to improve, most obviously shown by the recent gradual rise of the Dow Jones. And yet, paradoxically, the employment growth rate in this country still seems to be slow.

So, faced with these pieces of data, am I drawing too simplistic of a conclusion that this rush to maximize “offshoring” might have something to do with this? Could it be that while the wage savings brought about by this latest corporate fad pad the balances of corporate ledgers, the dearth of domestic opportunities caused by this job export creates the atmosphere for slow employment growth?

Of course, the short term outlook practiced by the beancounters shows that this reduction in expenditures allows company profits to grow, thereby increasing stock prices (theoretically making stockholders richer should you be fortunate enough to have the funds to afford such shares) and providing more money to raise the wages of those currently employed by the company (well, at least those making enough money to be considered for such a bonus). But in the long term outlook, a view generally frowned upon by business school graduates, you have to wonder one thing.

If nobody domestically has a job in order to make a decent living, who’s going to buy the company’s products?

- posted by Jon @ 4:16 PM

 
Public Service Announcement
This is for those of you that still have Christmas decorations up. You're all lazy SOBs. Take them down. Now. It's really not clever to say you're "early for next year."
- posted by Jon @ 8:46 AM

 
The Subject Line (or How A Corporate Procedure Became Part of Everyday Culture)
Hello?

Anyone?

Bueller?

I think the engine has permanently stalled. I'll try to add some gas here on behalf of my fellow bloggers and consider the subject. Line, that is.

One of the more useful/annoying bits of e-mail communication has got to be the subject line. Its roots are from the days when memos were circulated at work on paper. Each memo had to have some sort of one line summary about just what it is you were about to read, just in case the author did a piss poor job of conveying the point in the body of the memo. So when memos became electronic, the subject line had to come with it. Now, with this summary, you can prioritize which "important e-mail" you wanted to read, assuming that you didn't make that choice based on the author of the e-mail.

Problem is, the corporate beasts that created e-mail didn't forsee its impact on everyday life and the post office. Really, who could have? So now, informal letters from person to person are stuck with this subject line curse. How often have you sat there for hours to come up with a subject line for an e-mail? Do you really need to come up with a subject for an e-mail to your kid brother that calls him "boogerhead?" All you want to do is spontaneously fire off a message to your friend, but now you have to come up with one line to prepare that person for what is to come. So you end up with some lame subject line like "Hey." Real catchy.

In many cases, you come up with a subject line and realize that anything you write in the e-mail is now seriously redundant. Let's say you want to ask someone to lunch. So of course you put in a subject line of "Lunch?" or "Let's do lunch!" Well, now what do you do for an encore? You've already put your intentions in the subject line. Why should you add the e-mail?

This leads to another problem. How much do you put into the subject line? After all, you've gone through the trouble of writing the e-mail. You want to make sure they read it. So you start trying to make the subject as vague as possible to make them open the message. Something like "Lun..." Could be a request for lunch, but maybe it's about the lunar lander.

Maybe you can be really clever and make the subject the fragment of the first sentence. Something like "Hey! I was thinking that we could...." Now they have to open the e-mail to see how it ends. Because maybe it will end with "...go out for lunch." But then again, maybe it could end with "...have wild, passionate sex in the restroom of the restaurant that we're going to have lunch at." You just don't know until you open it.

Speaking of which, I must now check my own e-mail. I'm very intrigued by the one with the subject of "Enlarge your penis in 30 seconds." It's likely not a request for lunch.
- posted by Jon @ 10:15 AM