Talk about “breaking faith” with your Retirees!

I must say I agreed about UPS. They’re very reliable, top service, very friendly oriented and I always receive my packages as promised (and believe me I do a lot of shopping.

The criteria of today is certainly not the criteria of yesterday, as the Corporate World continues to measure the value of its company by its share price and earnings, not by the people and the organization by which it achieves those prices and earnings.

Making money from hollow chestnuts may be an extraordinary talent. But eventually, someone is apt to break open that chestnut and find nothing inside – all facade, no meat – a company rotting from the inside out.

When all that is left is the exterior indices of what was once a tower of strength, all it takes is a little force of wind to blow it away on the air currents.

The forces of nature have not yet been able to be tamed to the extent that humans can defy nature and survive, and yet companies depend upon that daily in their eternal quest for earnings. Defying nature as a private or a public policy is never what companies were intended to be about, or to pursue. Lift that works by collusion and destruction may work but harming one’s surroundings and the people who live there should not be considered admirable regardless of the high earnings available, and regardless of the payouts, or the ability to disguise it with marketing.

Such pyramid schemes are built to fail over the long run, and those who aid the process now identified as the smart managers who allow it should be condemned not praised.

That was an America that once was. Today, it’s easily to overlook all those negatives, and concentrate on the positives of now, for money now; why worry about the future?

Such wrongheaded thinking is a lesson in utility that companies once knew, but have lost both their incentive and their common sense in the ever-changing nature of the pursuit of profits. It is the business of groundhogs and ostriches that matters to short term profits, not visionary thinking or skillful management. Values have changed, and today, few companies earn it while preserving the greatness of their organizations. Anyone can sell out, why not us? might be the scale of admiration for some but doesn’t America and its people deserve more?

You are absolutely right. I worked for Starbucks for about a year and it was one of the worst jobs, simply b/c of bad management. (My store manager refused to buy needed supplies so that she could stay within budget and earn a management bonus, which she then bought a new car with.) They promote employees that are disliked and make promises they can’t keep to others. Bad morale all around!