Last week, I learned that, just like us, Italians call the computer tool a mouse [a client from Italy laughed when I called it a topo — too much watching Topo Gigio on The Ed Sullivan Show, I guess].  Despite this little sbaglio, I’ve been asked by San Francisco’s Business Association Italy America  to participate on an expert panel.  We’ll converse about the role of blogging in that ephemeral, morphing professional category known as marketing.  I hope I have the chance to talk about why I don’t feel compelled to write daily or even weekly.  Still, with luck and a little breeze sent by the time management gods, there will be plenty of subject matter in 2007 to dissect in this space.  That was a hint.  Arrivederci.

Lucy Bonicelli, my grandmother, used the Italian word creanza to encourage us to rise to every occasion.  Creanza [kray-AHN-za] technically means good manners, or politeness, but for Grandma Lucy, it meant a particular level of polish and graciousness.  We didn’t always succeed — goodness knows my creanza often flies out the window when I’m driving — but it was, and is, the most worthy of goals.

Yesterday, Regal Entertainment Group announced that it’s testing a new gadget for patrons that alerts ushers when another patron misbehaves.  Today, THE NEW YORK TIMES ran an article about how people are insulating their highly decorated homes from all signs of wear and tear — mainly by forcing guests to remove shoes, serving only non-dark items and even wrapping their tables tops in plastic wrap — this is not a joke — before people come over for a party.  Then these sadistic elitists watch their guests trembling. 

What is going on?  Do none of us know how to behave anymore?

Why do people go to the movies if they insist on acting like they’re in their own living rooms?  [Where a lot of their behavior would be scary anyway.]  And why are the snobs having parties in the first place?  They clearly value their possessions more than they value relationships and the comfort of guests.  Granted, I’m ultra particular about my stuff and still shudder when I hear breaking china or glass.  But I learned a long time ago to stop missing those possessions — and to stop obsessing over breakage or stains left behind after some fun.  Now when I look at an incomplete set of glassware or an old stain, I let them remind me of the good time associated with it.

There’s a flip side, too.  We are missing many opportunities to teach children how to be part of their community and how to behave at a nice party in a well-appointed home or even in a slow food restaurant.  We are so focused on not scarring children that I’m worried that we’re not teaching them how to socialize and take interest in the needs and talents of other people.  Even though I’m not just a member of the Scarred For Life Club, I am its president, I’m grateful that I learned how to appreciate things with my eyes and to walk slowly around a room at a young age.  We’re doing kids a great disservice when we demand that they remove their shoes but allow them to treat a beautiful living room as a running track.  No wonder people are showing up to work with flip-flops and have never seen a real handkerchief.  There are now training classes in etiquette at corporations — because we’re creating people who don’t even know to watch and learn from more experienced colleagues or — heaven forgive the phrase — authority figures.

Maybe this is all out of step.  When newly elected Senator Webb committed his faux pas in the White House earlier this week, no one seemed to blink except George Will.  I’m thinking the senator might be on the same power trip as the woman who would rather see her guests huddled in a corner than enjoying a red beverage while standing on her rug.  Me, well, I’m content to just watch the self-absorption parade from a distance.  I think they all need to get plastic slipcovers and a copy of Letitia Baldrige’s latest book on manners.  Or George Washington’s little book on civilized behavior.  Or some creanza.

Last weekend, I took the plunge, later than most, and booked flights to the east coast on jetBlue.  Besides having my faith restored and my hopes raised for the business of air service, the experience resonated on an entirely different level.  I began to wonder if it’s possible that a dedication to competence, performance and deference to others is returning to priority status across the land.

This is no exaggeration:  every single employee of this airline seemed to enjoy his or her position.  I could tell because they looked us in the eye.  They wanted to engage with us, not just as customers but as partners in a business transaction.  They kept their equipment clean and had no problem asking us to respect our fellow travelers by doing the same.  It was the first time in years I have traveled with an airline that paid more attention to unacceptable passenger behavior than to whether I had a tag on my suitcase.  These folks deliver to their own vision and are not afraid to take action when someone, or something, gets in their way.  They are firm but friendly, authoritative but respectful.  They know what they’re doing.

Maybe more of us now realize we can no longer take competence for granted, even when it’s cloaked in bluster.  Every time we accept condescension or paternalistic treatment or believe that nothing we can do will matter or improve a situation, we are denying the eternal importance of what happened on this continent two centuries ago.  And, we’re not paying attention to what happened just two weeks ago.  It’s a multi-partisan lesson — for those who confuse power with leadership, for those who believe that any voter between the coasts essentially has air between his ears, for those who think there is nothing special or worth defending in this nation’s doctrine.

I still marvel at the system that was constructed by people who were as flawed as we are today yet stepped outside of their irritations and hurts and defeats to collaborate and introduce a way of life and governance that remains intact — no matter how much we chip away at the individual responsibility and personal possibility they sought to protect.  It is an entity that glorifies the potential of the human being, that commands us to rise to be the best and do our best.  It is what inspires us to go on, again and again, when we think we cannot.  This system gives us the tools and the processes to reach consensus without sacrificing personal beliefs and values.  And I think we’re finally beginning to care about this again.

It has nothing to do with partisanship.  Anyone, inside or outside this country, friend or foe, who believes the results of the midterm elections represent an ideological shift is making a strategic error.  It could be that what happened on November 7 was the first blink of a sleepy American spirit, awakening from a hibernation brought on by the self-indulgent habits cultivated in the 1990s and the extremist factions either protecting them or fighting them — trickling down from a government that forgot its role is not to construct playpens in the Oval Office but to nurture qualified public servants capable of anticipating and thwarting threats, from corporations often dominated by elitists who surround themselves with yes-men and yes-boards.  This looks like a return to the practical, to accountability, to reason by people who are thinking again about the qualities that signify real power and true leadership.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, is a heavy piece of melodramatic fiction.  Or so I thought.  Then I was stranded two weeks ago in O’Hare Airport.  I realized about six hours into my 18-hour ordeal that one of the themes of the book —  the decline of the railroad industry — was coming to life before my very eyes.  Only this time, it was an airline.

The day was truly a lesson in management, customer relations and operating performance.  The lost opportunities as well as the outright mistakes.  So for much of my time there, I was absorbed by the circus.  Buffeted by fellow passengers and their sanity, I actually was able to relax and observe just how much the ability to think has been devalued in the airline industry, except when it comes to the elite — the executive platinum flyers.  [Once, I was a platinum flyer.  Don’t fly enough on any one airline anymore.  In fact, I was flying on the last of my points, which explains why I was at the airport so long.]  For the rest of us, if anyone took the risk of reflecting on the whole experience, it was demeaning and debasing.

• The gate agent who, once he got his hands on the microphone, would not stop talking.  Or lecturing.  Or threatening.  He was attempting to entertain but came up patronizing and controlling.
• The passenger who told me how she had approached the same gate agent and offered to give up her seat.  This was around 6 pm.  She lived near O’Hare and when she arrived and saw the scene, she figured she could just go home and give her seat to someone who had been there all day.  Well, she approached Mr Standup and offered just that — as long as they could get her a seat later that night or the next morning.  Guess what he said to her:  "you’ll have to pay the $100 change fee."  Here was someone offering to inconvenience herself to help another human being, and this guy could not find a way to make that happen.  Think of the story Mr Standup could have told from that podium:  how a fellow passenger was making it possible for someone to get home that night.  No, he couldn’t think off-script or off-computer screen unless it was to pontificate about how we were crowding his desk.  So the airline lost a goodwill building opportunity.  Not to mention a nice story that would have been told and re-told.
• At another gate, sitting next to a guy who had logged five years in the hotel business.  Here’s how I knew that.  We were all sitting there in the waiting "pen," when all of a sudden, an experienced airline employee [with his badge turned around so that you couldn’t read his name] started screaming at a distraught woman about how he was going to "call the police because you touched me."  Now, none of us had heard or seen anything until this guy started yelling.  Of course, this only got the woman more riled.  So now there was a real scene, with dozens of eyes trained on it.  My fellow traveler, the ex-hotel guy, just sighed and explained that there were a million ways the guy could have diffused the situation.  Instead, he chose a power trip and added tension to a stressful situation.
• The pilot who growled at a weary passenger that he was blocking a thruway near the men’s room.  I understand the pilot got the appropriate response.
• The equipment tango.  At one of my standby gates, the equipment for a flight to New York and the passengers had been waiting and waiting.  Then all of a sudden they had an "equipment problem."  That one caused a near riot.
• The gate changes.  This was the biggest mystery of the day.  If they’re flying less equipment in general right now, and fewer planes were landing that day because of the weather, what is so difficult about assigning a gate, putting it up on the monitors and on the agents’ screens and notifying the 800 number that many of us were using in frustration because the lines were interminable?  Or, when you must change gates, making some general announcements?  They were forcing everyone to go to the fancy new plasma screen monitors to keep updated — which would have been fine, but I guess because they’re more expensive than the old TV screens, there are not as many of them.  Which only created crowds in the middle of the concourse.  This is apparently the airline’s only intersection with today’s new technology.  If I were a large systems integrator, I would be chasing some business right now in this industry.  But first, get yourself to an airport on the day of a big storm — the research value would be immeasurable.

This was my first, and I hope last, experience of the kind.  Despite all my travel over the years, I felt like one of the Clampetts arriving in Beverly Hills, filled with wonder at everything I beheld.  Or Dante descending into the Inferno, circle by circle.  Since then, friends and colleagues have shared some tips for how to maneuver through this kind of a situation.  One of them:  if you choose to gamble with the standby game, do so only if you’ve paid a lot for your ticket and/or you’re an elite flyer.  Otherwise, just get yourself confirmed on a flight the next day and get the heck out of Dodge.  The airline will string you along just to make sure they pack the plane.  In contradiction to the teachings of the late Professor Theodore Levitt, it’s not about helping you get to your destination, it’s about putting a derriere in every seat.

I believe the true test of a company’s performance is not when the going is good but when the system is under duress from unforeseen circumstances.  As one traveler said that day, the whole experience just showed him that the system is a house of cards.  Or as another one asserted, "it’s easier to get out of Beirut."  If the airline is trying to streamline operations and improve employee relations to put forth true ambassadors, the only evidence I see is the article in THE NEW YORK TIMES from July 23.  The competent, patient, respectful employees were few and far between that day.  It was the passengers [except for the line jumpers, of course] who made it bearable.  And the slapstick surrounding equipment and scheduling was unfathomable.  Good businesses keep enough slack in their systems to accommodate more demand.  Then they charge for it.  And they don’t reward you with free gifts — like air travel — if they’re going to punish you for using for them.  And I felt punished, even though I had earned every point I used back when I was flying this airline on a biweekly basis.

Yesterday, also in THE NEW YORK TIMES, Joe Sharkey explained what’s really going on this summer in the airports.  He invites travelers to share their stories with him this week.  This should be fun.  And illuminating, if the powers-that-be choose to read the papers.  Of course, they could just pick up a copy of Atlas Shrugged to read on their beach vacations.  If they can get there.

There was a report today in the SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS that Hewlett-Packard’s CIO is leading a change in the telecommuting practices of the IT team.  Telecommuting is coming to an end, for the most part.  IT people are going to start having to show up at an HP office for most of the work week.  CIO Randall Mott indicated that this will help less experienced staff learn to work more effectively.

One staff person was quoted as saying the only reason she worked for HP was because she could telecommute.  [She wouldn’t identify herself.  Well, at least that was smart.]  The article also reported what is most likely a suburban corporate legend:  one guy phoned into a meeting while riding on his tractor.  [Well, I hope it’s a legend.]  From what I understand, these folks are not freelancers or in-between-job contractors — they are employees with standard work weeks and compensation packages.  The whole enchilada.

Beyond the fact that HP’s shift in practice should help some employees remember what a job is, it should enable staff, the company and shareholders to profit from a bunch of benefits:  teamwork, exposure to the company persona, the ability for employees to influence and strengthen corporate values, higher productivity, office high jinks.  And maybe we’ll have a test case for how telecommuting should be done in 2006.  We may have come full circle given the speed and reach of  technology.  It’s worthwhile to verify that this speed and reach are not just funding someone’s swanky shower curtain at the expense of a full-time salary and ultimately, shareholder value.

Yet HP’s shift on telecommuting may turn out to be a gigantic lesson in something even bigger:  assimilation.  Great companies, like great countries, produce and perform measurably, clear about the ingredients essential to their raison d’etre, pouring them into the Kool-Aid.  In HP’s case, maybe it’s bringing people back into shared office space to re-learn The HP Way, collaborate and even duke it out.  After all, the company is coming out of a period in which many agree it lost that way.  For another organization, it might be something different.  Essentially, great companies decide which factors foster appropriate assimilation around a common set of goals and practices.  They make assimilation enticing, giving employees reasons for deciding to come to work that reach beyond "me" while still satisfying "my" ambitions and desires. 

When I studied in Italy, the professors taught us local customs, dress standards and the importance of at least trying to speak Italian.  Most of us jumped in, but some students never bought it.  They agreed to study for a year in a foreign country and then did everything they could to turn it into what they wanted it to be, never thinking about what they could contribute, only what they could take.  They were just missing the point.