Are We at War with China?

I stumbled on this editorial in a list of news articles that came via a key word search that runs every day for me.

Now Johnstown, PA isn't exactly the hub of America, but this guy has said what I have been thinking for a while. With all of the ongoing problems with products made in China, I have to wonder if we are being probed for a new kind of warfare. Consider that Wal Mart's quest for low prices (see "The Wal Mart Effect") has moved a tremendous amount of American consumer product manufacturing offshore. You cannot go anywhere and buy nearly anything that hasn't been manufactured in China. The latest lead paint episode has effectively destroyed Mattel's Christmas -- if not because the products are going to be off the shelves, but because their reputation has been incredibly tarnished. It will take Mattel quite a while to overcome this -- and with profits for an entire year wiped off the books.

So think about that... in your wildest Tom Clancy scenario, imagine a country deciding to wage war economically. A few serious problems with products manufactured for American companies could put those companies out of business. I worry, frankly, about cell phones that explode or catch fire due to defective batteries. A few people seriously hurt or killed by cell phones could put my employer out of business. And what is true for Mattel or or Colgate or Motorola could be true for Black and Decker or Proctor and Gamble.

Then imagine a concerted effort to poison the food supply or cosmetics industry. Look at the results of the dog food scare. Imagine thousands of people becoming ill. Or something besides lead paint (which is bad enough) in toys.

Now look at Chinese investment in American companies. I read something this morning about a Chinese company wanting to buy Seagate. What if they embedded some code in a hard drive that "phoned home" with your personal data?

Yes, you could bring America to its knees with a well-orchestrated series of events that struck at the credibility of American companies and the safety (or security) of manufactured food and other products.

This is an effect of flattening the world. It is one of the most serious potential negative effects. But it could also simply be paranoia. I don't intend to sound like a xenophobe, but I'm wondering if our quest for low prices has swung the pendulum entirely too far.

Dude, You're Not Gonna Get a Dell!

file this one under, "Customer Service Matters".

So the college kid in my house decided that she wasn't going to lug the desktop PC and all of its peripherals back to Northwestern this year. The Cunningham Scholarship Fund met and determined that it was willing to pony up half the cost of a laptop, with the provisions that lost, stolen or busted laptops are not replaceable except through outlay of said college kid's own money.

We had been poking around Dell kiosks for a while. I've been a Dell guy with laptops for a while, having bought an Inspiron about 8 years ago and it is still ticking (granted, rather slowly -- but it will boot and eventually get around to launching a program). I've also been through most of the D series of Latitude laptops, with fairly decent results, considering this is my everyday computer at work for the past six or so years.

So I trust Dell and they have always exceeded expectations for me. Well, until now.

On July 24, we configured and ordered an Inspiron 1520 in "Ruby Red". The estimated shipping date was August 10 and my comment to my daughter was that it would probably be at the house before August 3rd, "because they always pad the shipping date". Um, not in this case. On August 10, the ship date was moved to August 17. No big deal. she starts school in September, so probably a good thing that we ordered when we did... guess the Fall rush on laptops is on. On August 17, the ship date moved to August 31 -- and I had to call Dell or they would cancel the order "due to FTC regulations". So I called. a very nice lady (who is likely dealing with lots of irate customers) told me almost nothing about why the order was delayed and couldn't even promise that the ship date wouldn't move again.

I started doing some research and found Dell's blog which finally owned up to the problems last Friday. I also found this link where it seems that there are a whole lot of people really cheesed off.

It seems that Dell has had a paint and supply chain problem, but was still marketing the heck out of their laptops. So not only did that cause a backlog in orders, but it also caused a build capacity problem. In addition, rumor has it that Dell's new deal with Wal Mart has likely chewed up a fair amount of build capacity. As anyone who has ever dealt with Wal Mart knows, you don't underdeliver to them if you ever want shelf space in the future. so it may well be one of those "perfect storm" moments that really tests a company -- huge demand from normal sales channels and a new goliath channel (Wal Mart), unforecasted demand, supply chain shortages, and production problems.

So with the ship date now said to be Friday, I'm in a position that says if I don't have a tracking number on Saturday, the college kid and I will be at the Sony store at Woodfield Saturday morning picking up a Vaio CR Series in Sangria red. I've seen several in stock at Office depot and Best Buy, so I know that Sony is not having paint problems.

I guess what bugs me is that it has taken this long for the company to even begin to admit that they have a major problem on their hands. And when people have called Dell, they have been told lies (from what has been reported). Customer service is about remembering who is the customer and what role the customer has to play. Dell has historically done fairly well at that job, but it seems that the race for the bottom of price is causing yet another good company to abandon their heritage.

I really hope we get that laptop, but if they don't ship, they will have lost another customer.

The Invisible Profession?

This isn't quite like the license plate game in the car, but the next time that you're commuting to work, take a look out the window and look for signs of the records management profession.

Records centers, records center trucks, shredding trucks, data protection facility vehicles, etc.

You might be surprised at what you see.

I was thinking about this the other morning. On my typical commute of about 45 minutes (suburb to suburb in the Chicago area), I drive past at least one marked commercial records center and usually see a variety of vehicles from names in the industry. If I drive to work a different way -- or head to the airport, I'll pass another commercial records center. If I drive downtown, I see yet another one on each of my alternate routes into the city.

Stand on a corner in a downtown area some morning. See how long it takes before you see a vehicle from a commercial records center. I go into the city about every six weeks for a haircut (probably fodder for another blog entry). I can virtually guarantee that I will see a commercial records center truck during the few minutes while I walk from the train station to where I get my haircut.

And yet, who really understands what we do? How many times have you been asked by someone to explain what you do, then asked to explain it again?

I'm looking forward to ARMA's published Competencies document later this month. I'm further hopeful that records managers will be recognized by the US government with a Standard Occupational Classification. The Competencies will better define our roles in a standard manner. The SOC will embed the roles within the standard manner in which the US Government defines jobs and enable more accuracy for salary studies and general recognition.


I'd suggest that we're really not that invisible, just not that recognized.

Extreme Makeover: Home Edition

My ten year old daughter is in love with Ty Pennington. Ty is the host of EM:HE. If you haven't seen the show, it is on ABC almost every Sunday night. The premise is that people write in suggesting that either they or a deserving family get a makeover for their home (this usually involves demolishing the existing home and building a new showcase. In most instances, the family has been through some extremely tough times and many of the stories have been known to evoke a tear from me.

Anyway, the 10 year old is in love. She desperately wants Ty to come to our house and make it over. She likes the man's work.

EM:HE is a show that I do take time out to watch with my daughter. Nobody else controls the remote when Ty is on... so we're sitting in front of the TV a while ago and my daughter expresses her sincere desire to get Ty over to our house for some demo work. I point out to her that Ty and his crew tend to show up at your house when life really has sucker punched a family. You get that shiny new room when your old house has burned down or somebody has a horrible affliction or when the breadwinner is dead. I suggested that we probably didn't want a situation at home where we needed the services of Ty and crew. She pondered that for a while and I could see the light bulb come on. I guess she had never really paid attention to the stories behind the new house. She was thinking that it was really cool to get a new house in one week -- and never really saw the backstory.

I still like the show. It is a really nice thing to see a family who is really been through a ringer get a new start. I can't begin to imagine how the staffers at ABC ever pick out the right stories. They have to have thousands of applications -- most with horrible stories to tell -- and then they have to sort out the scam artists from the people who legitimately need the help of the show. But it is truly a lottery. There must be millions of people who legitimately could benefit from a home makeover, yet only 25 families a year get featured on EM:HE. If you think about it, these families have typically won two lotteries: they've won an awful lottery of hardship or pain; then they have won a very very positive lottery by getting a new home and a new start. And Ty seems like a pretty nice guy.