Nasty, Brutish and Short

A friend of mine threatened to murder the CEO of Ameritech today.

Of course he was only kidding (I think). He’s not psychotic (I hope). But he felt truly infuriated by the way the company was treating him and his wife. It’s a familiar story: ILEC screws up installation or repair order, causes annoying delay in service, and suggests the customer can take a flying you-know-what because, after all, “We’re the phone company.”

This attitude led to the Bells’ breakup in the first place, but it’s not unique to ILECs or even telecom companies. Indeed, the same phenomenon brought down the empires of Rome, Byzantium, England, the Nazis and the Soviets. It made Milosevic think he could cling to power after the Serbian people stopped supporting him, and it keeps Al Gore and George W. Bush from winning the trust and adoration of the American people.

If you’re human, you’re susceptible to it, too. It’s the tendency to pay more attention, day after day, to internal matters than to the outside world. Do this long enough, and you’ll isolate yourself completely. In the end, you’ll be a little Hitler, holed up in your bunker, wondering where it all went wrong.

Before you get all defensive and hurl this magazine into the trash, let me say that I could serve as the poster boy for this phenomenon. (Note to self: See psychoanalyst about emerging tendency to identify with Hitler.) On average, I spend about two-thirds of my days dealing with internal issues that are, at best, tenuously related to anything even remotely productive — and I work for a medium-sized publishing company, not an institutionalized public utility company!

So to every manager or executive who struggles to stay in touch with the customer — only to get dragged back into the mire of internal issues — I feel your pain. But sympathy doesn’t excuse inaction. As much as we might like to give up and blame “the System” for creating all these hurdles, it’s our system — ours to accept, repair, replace or abandon.

At SBC’s Ameritech subsidiary, the decision seems to be to repair the existing system — namely by hiring a new CEO (Edward Mueller), reducing middle-management positions and drafting thousands of new “non-management” network employees. Maybe this is the right answer. But one wonders if a mob of new employees will solve what seems to be an attitude problem.

As I write this, my potentially murderous friend is at home, spending his day waiting for an Ameritech technician to show up. He feels trapped. He feels cheated. He feels angry. The rage rises within him as the minutes tick away. He sits there, firing an imaginary .44 magnum at an imaginary photograph of Edward Mueller. And he makes decisions about how he’ll spend his telecommunications budget in the future.

Mr. Mueller, you get no second chances in this business. That’s the way life is: “nasty, brutish and short,” in the words of Thomas Hobbes. But you don’t have to settle for that. You can manage your company with intelligence and sensitivity. You can create a place where all employees respect and revere the customer. And then maybe life will be less nasty and brutish, and you won’t have to worry about someone like my friend going postal, and making your life a lot shorter than it needs to be.