• Home
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Privacy Policy
  • Special Offers
Business Intelligence Info
  • Business Intelligence
    • BI News and Info
    • Big Data
    • Mobile and Cloud
    • Self-Service BI
  • CRM
    • CRM News and Info
    • InfusionSoft
    • Microsoft Dynamics CRM
    • NetSuite
    • OnContact
    • Salesforce
    • Workbooks
  • Data Mining
    • Pentaho
    • Sisense
    • Tableau
    • TIBCO Spotfire
  • Data Warehousing
    • DWH News and Info
    • IBM DB2
    • Microsoft SQL Server
    • Oracle
    • Teradata
  • Predictive Analytics
    • FICO
    • KNIME
    • Mathematica
    • Matlab
    • Minitab
    • RapidMiner
    • Revolution
    • SAP
    • SAS/SPSS
  • Humor

We’re the Adults in the Room

April 18, 2020   CRM News and Info

Much of the talk about what happens after the coronavirus pandemic involves what could be new on our horizon. New approaches to working, schooling, vaccinating — it’s a quite extensive list.

All of it has something in common: The discussion is largely about what we’ll add to our armament, our lives, to better prepare us for never having to face the strictures of coronavirus, or whatever comes next, again. In this we can see the roots of the term, “fighting the last war.”

It’s what we humans do, left to our ordinary instincts. We fight the last war in part because we do not have a very good radar system for predicting the future. That is sometimes due to the reality that most of us can’t capture and filter all of the available information to come up with nuggets that point out a future direction.

Very recently in human history, we invented computers and analytics and algorithms that help get us closer to that nirvana, but so far even they fail us if we can’t put numbers on the raw data that cranks through our analytic engines.

The Most Important Word

A case in point, one that’s relevant to CRM, is encapsulated in a Washington Post
article published over the weekend, which reported White House rejection of a bailout for the U.S. Postal Service.

The service, rarely in robust financial health, recently has been battered by a decline in the number of packages it delivers, partly caused by the coronavirus situation. The CRM angle obviously is e-commerce related. The USPS is the last-mile delivery option for many vendors sending packages to rural America.

“The Postal Service projects it will lose $ 2 billion each month through the coronavirus recession while postal workers maintain the nationwide service of delivering essential mail and parcels, such as prescriptions, food and household necessities,” reads the Post article.

It goes on to say the service will be, “illiquid,” a splendid euphemism, by Sept. 30 under the present conditions.

To be sure, there are those who say the USPS should be run more like a business, and that a private sector CEO might be able to turn things around, put the service on a modern business foundation, and thus “cure” the problem. Hogwash. That only redefines the problem to make it easier to solve.

The USPS is chartered to do the hard and often unprofitable work no one else wants to do. The hard reality is that the most important word in the USPS’ name is the last: “service.”

The postal service is defined in the Constitution. It was not invented to make a profit or to be run along modern business principles. It is a service — like K-12 education, the patent office, the court system, the highway system, and myriad other government services that are designed in one way or another to promote democracy but not specifically, if at all, to turn a profit.

Essential for Democracy

The late Scottish economist, Angus Maddison, identified four essential characteristics of a successful democratic society: property rights, scientific rationalism, capital markets, and improvements in transport and communication.

Scientific rationalism enables us to understand the world and to invent solutions to its challenges. Property rights enable inventors to secure the rights in their inventions and hard work. Capital markets make it possible to connect capital and invention efficiently, thus funding research and additional investment. Transportation and communication enable us to share inventions with the world and to make profits that can be reinvested in still more invention.

The USPS falls into the last category, along with today’s Internet. Without transportation and communication — or more precisely, with degraded transportation and communication — a democratic society runs the risk, in small but quantifiable ways, of not only hobbling business, but also fostering citizen categories of haves and have-nots, a barrier to full democracy for sure.

That’s why we all should care about the USPS. Its advertising tells us that it delivers more packages (6.2 billion last year) to homes than any other service — not to mention the 75.7 billion marketing mail pieces and 54.9 billion first class mail items.

Imagine 6.2 billion packages without the USPS. If higher rates applied, might some of us reconsider some of our e-commerce orders? In these times, e-commerce keeps us out of brick-and-mortar stores where virus transmission is far more likely than shopping online.

The Trump administration makes no bones about its favored solution: to raise prices on companies like Amazon, founded and led by Jeff Bezos, who coincidentally owns The Washington Post, where the article first appeared, and which has been critical of the Trump administration (along with almost every other news outlet not named after a furry creature).

“Increasing rates too much would lead private-sector competitors to develop their own cheaper methods to deliver packages,” said Lori Rectanus, director of physical infrastructure at the Government Accountability Office, according to the Post.

In fact, companies like Amazon already are delivering packages through divisions they’ve spun up for that purpose. Still, the last mile and the destinations even Amazon Prime doesn’t reach, have to be reached somehow, and that means the USPS, because that’s the service that democratizes package delivery following the Constitution and Maddison’s pronouncements.

To be sure, we have seen this kind of debate over the Postal Service before, and every time the conventional wisdom comes around to the proposition that, love it or hate it, we need the postal service to do the job that no one else wants to do or can figure out how to do profitably.

In these coronavirus-addled days, the onus for protecting the transport and communications part of Maddison’s democracy prescription falls in part to us, to CRM, because over the last couple of decades CRM has gone from an interesting curiosity to an essential part of business and the world. We’ve come of age, and I am glad we had this talk.
end enn Were the Adults in the Room

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ECT News Network.


Denis%20Pombriant Were the Adults in the Room
Denis Pombriant is a well-known CRM industry analyst, strategist, writer and speaker. His new book, You Can’t Buy Customer Loyalty, But You Can Earn It, is now available on Amazon. His 2015 book, Solve for the Customer, is also available there.
Email Denis.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

CRM Buyer

adults, room, We’re
  • Recent Posts

    • Why it’s time for fintechs and FIs to jump on the open banking bandwagon (VB Live)
    • Integrating a function with integration limits also dependent on a variable
    • GIVEN WHAT HE TOLD A MARINE…..IT WOULD NOT SURPRISE ME
    • How the pandemic is accelerating enterprise open source adoption
    • Rickey Smiley To Host 22nd Annual Super Bowl Gospel Celebration On BET
  • Categories

  • Archives

    • January 2021
    • December 2020
    • November 2020
    • October 2020
    • September 2020
    • August 2020
    • July 2020
    • June 2020
    • May 2020
    • April 2020
    • March 2020
    • February 2020
    • January 2020
    • December 2019
    • November 2019
    • October 2019
    • September 2019
    • August 2019
    • July 2019
    • June 2019
    • May 2019
    • April 2019
    • March 2019
    • February 2019
    • January 2019
    • December 2018
    • November 2018
    • October 2018
    • September 2018
    • August 2018
    • July 2018
    • June 2018
    • May 2018
    • April 2018
    • March 2018
    • February 2018
    • January 2018
    • December 2017
    • November 2017
    • October 2017
    • September 2017
    • August 2017
    • July 2017
    • June 2017
    • May 2017
    • April 2017
    • March 2017
    • February 2017
    • January 2017
    • December 2016
    • November 2016
    • October 2016
    • September 2016
    • August 2016
    • July 2016
    • June 2016
    • May 2016
    • April 2016
    • March 2016
    • February 2016
    • January 2016
    • December 2015
    • November 2015
    • October 2015
    • September 2015
    • August 2015
    • July 2015
    • June 2015
    • May 2015
    • April 2015
    • March 2015
    • February 2015
    • January 2015
    • December 2014
    • November 2014
© 2021 Business Intelligence Info
Power BI Training | G Com Solutions Limited