By Robert D. Campbell
Fri, May 16 2008 There comes that moment in everyone's life when a correction must be made. "All right," you say, "what to do?" A time-out is often invoked by a parent to an unruly child; by a teacher to an unruly child; by a barista to a ... Wait just a minute! What's a barista? I'm glad you asked. A barista is the name commonly used within Starbucks to designate that person who prepares your latte et al, places the frothy-headed beverage on the counter and says, "$2.50, please." (Funny, I never heard that term at our local Dunkin' Donuts.) On Tuesday, Feb. 26, a bit of history was made from 5:30 to 9 p.m. Employees at all of Starbucks' 11,000, give or take, outlets endured a training session on making and serving coffee. Howard Schultz, the founder of the company, had become extremely concerned about the company's loss of revenue and market. He felt the company had strayed from its roots and thought it was time for a "time-out" to get back to basics by making good coffee better. Does this strike you as a little strange? Can you imagine, six years ago the high mucky-mucks of Enron taking time out to stress basic training, in effect, making "better coffee"? Lay, Skilling et al were too busy raping and pillaging the economy as well as their own employees. Enron didn't want to stop what they were doing; their company vision was blurred by reasons of excess. Perhaps (forget perhaps) we should all get back to basics and learn not only to smell the coffee but to make better coffee. A little training couldn't hurt and could materially make all the management's dreams come true, instead of nightmares. David Pauly, a Bloomberg columnist, has a unique view of today's mortgage mess: "This present market is in disarray because lenders forgot how to make the coffee. Giving mortgages to people with little or no credit (even nothing down) violated the basics of business and led to the subprime mortgage disaster that helped drag the economy to its low state." In essence, bankers need to stop and figure out how to make their coffee more agreeable to buyers. Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize-winning economist, just recently gave his estimate of the cost of the Iraq war to a Joint Economic Committee headed by Sen. Chuck Schumer. Stiglitz believes the "overall costs of the war will reach $3 trillion." He went further, mentioning "Social Security, for a fraction of the cost, could have been put on a sound footing for the next half century or more." While Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al were brewing a witch's cauldron, they should have been brewing coffee. Now, after five years of war, we are into a vicious spiral of inflation and possibly recession. We are settling for mediocrity, but as the leading democratic nation in the world, we shouldn't be settling for anything less than perfection, be it government or a better cup of coffee. Robert D. Campbell, an essayist who lives in Newburyport, believes that a sense of humor is essential. ><p>
—
Copyright © 1999-2008 cnhi, inc.