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June 12, 2009

Snapshots from San Francisco

I’ve been in San Francisco all week, attending the Women Business Enterprise conference. Lots of things have happened to stimulate my thinking:

The sea lions at Pier 39 near Fisherman’s Wharf. The sea lions began treating the area as their winter home about 20 years ago—seemed they liked the herring and the sightseeing—and now they have a special area reserved for them, where they can lounge on wooden floats, take naps and have loud arguments about who’s in charge. Eighty percent of the visiting sea lions are males, and they spend a good deal of their time trying to establish dominance over one another, mostly by bellowing. (No comment.)

A cab driver’s solution. On my way to the conference, I hailed a cab, and the driver asked me which conference I was attending at the Moscone Center. When I told him a “women business conference,” he shared his theory on successful male/female relationships. “The key is to respect each other,” he said. “Men and women are different, and they have to respect each other’s differences. Same thing goes for countries. If you respect each other, you get along.” Thanks for the tip, I told him, and tipped him.

Could somebody listen? At dinner with one of my favorite Millennials, he talked about his frustration with the corporation that employs him. “We keep doing things the same way, and it’s not working. I have ideas on how to improve some processes, but it’s hard to find someone in authority who will listen to me.” Hmmm.

A bowl of cereal, please. The speaker at the conference lunch was Chip Bell, a customer service expert. He told the story of visiting his favorite breakfast place, famous for frying everything in butter, a few days after his doctor had told him he had to lower his cholesterol. He asked the waitress, “Got any cereal?” No, was her response. “How about oatmeal?” Nope. Now intrigued, he decided to probe further. “Am I the first person who ever requested these foods?” he asked. Her reply was that she got these requests all the time. “And what do you do with the information?” he asked her. “Nothing,” she answered. “It’s not my job to make suggestions. Besides, the manager probably wouldn’t listen, anyway.” Double hmmm.

Just say no to Facebook. Last night I had dinner with the Millennial again (trendy restaurant: Nopa) and the topic of social media came up. He doesn’t have a Facebook page because the ROI makes no sense to him: Maintaining it would take too much time, and all he would gain is contact with people he doesn’t really care about. I wanted to know more. Did he participate in a Facebook-type network at work? Yawn. “How about LinkedIn?” I asked him. That was a different story, said the Millennial, who is on Linkedin “for professional reasons.” Twitter? Nah. Anything else? Yes, he’s a devotee of Yelp, the web site where people review restaurants, stores and other establishments. “Yelp reviewers say the pork chop is incredible,” he said, and they were right.

Posted by Alison Davis at June 12, 2009 09:15 AM