Why I Blog
I will comment on the subjects I identified in my biography, as well as others. But I need to give you a little more of a sense of who I am:
I am a registered Independent, and have never registered to be in one or the other of the two major political parties. Why? I managed to live in places dominated by each of the two parties, Monroe County, New York by the Republicans, and Boston, Chicago, and New York by the Democrats. There is a depressing similarity between the two parties when they have had absolute power for a long time. Organizations with monopoly power become lazy, unresponsive, unwilling to innovate, and arrogant.
In terms of taking the road less traveled, I like causes that are far more important than they are visible. The mailing industry is a good example. If you asked 100 well-educated Americans about mail, most would say it is dead or dying, not a growing $900 billion industry. The economic impact of the mailing industry dwarfs the economic impact of the industry around Internet marketing. Alzheimer’s Disease affects far more people, but gets far less publicity, than HIV/AIDS. Politicians spend far more effort on the less important issue of health care access than on the more important issue of whether citizens are getting healthier in proportion to access and affordability. That’s why I focus on Alzheimer’s and prevention and less on the access and affordability issues, although we have improved access and affordability at Pitney Bowes.
I would be characterized as someone who, in the words of the tag line of The Sporting News, would “see a different game.” I look at situations differently from most other people around me. That’s partly why I made counterintuitive career decisions like going to a corporate legal department, taking on the HR job, or, more fundamentally, joining a company that seemed to be dependent on a dying communication medium. But, beyond that, I am often out-of-synch with conventional wisdom.
The road less traveled and “seeing a different game” applies to my day-to-day habits, as well as my longer-term career choices. I like to sleep, but I care more about going to shops and stores when they are the least crowded, so I am at the local doughnut shop at 6:00 on most mornings. When I visit customers or prospects in competitive situations, I like to go to the least glamorous locations at the least glamorous times. I can recall visiting major prospects in Minnesota in December and February. I visited a customer in Houston in July. I went to Arizona in August a couple years ago to secure a competitive bid. I also visited our employees in less glamorous locations, while others chose to visit offices in San Francisco or resort communities. When digital music media supplanted analog media, I collected vinyl record albums and 45’s from a specialty store in New York called Downstairs Records.
Consistent with taking the less traveled road and “seeing a different game,” I try to accomplish what I do as much as possible under the radar screen. I try not to be on covers of magazines or get front-page newspaper stories on issues because I believe the most successful change management requires a blend of highly-public activity and behind-the-scenes facilitation. Open meetings, “sunshine” laws, Freedom of Information Act requests, televised governmental proceedings, and beefed-up financial disclosures about elected and appointed officials all have their place in a free society. However, I think we need to figure out how to get more candor and less posturing into public debates on issues.
Also consistent with my personality, I have been a “stealth” change agent at every organization or function I have led. The only time visible change activity works is when an organization is in dire straits and everyone knows that radical change is required. When an organization appears to be successful, visible and radical change is resisted. At Pitney Bowes, I always told people we want to maintain the roof so it never leaks, rather than being heroes in repairing it as it is about to leak.
Time is an exceptionally precious asset for me, and always has been. I hate waiting in lines (or on lines). When I am waiting, I try to find a way to think about how the process could have been better, and how to avoid putting myself into a time-wasting situation in the future. I also believe in using small bits of time as effectively as I can. I am very likely to take a book with me when I am running errands or going out for a meal alone, because I know there will be a few minutes of dead time that I can fill with some reading.
I have a passion for intellectual honesty, and like to frame issues so that people have a better ability to solve them. For example, I am angry that, here in the U.S., governments at all levels are hiding the fact that they have given away billions of dollars in unfunded pension and retirement benefits to small numbers of public employees. Although the Government Accounting Standards Board has required disclosure of these obligations, governments at all levels are doing everything possible to hide what they have done. Let’s be honest, and acknowledge that public employees have bargained successfully for rich pay and benefit packages which we must honor, and let’s get on with the task of managing how we fund them, and meet the many other obligations people want governments to undertake.
In spite of my obvious passion for the mailstream and the industry I have been a part of, I will comment on a broad range of subjects, including some of those I have called out in my biography.
June 13th, 2007 at 4:30 am
Good to hear it. As a field service engineer in a rural part of England I know what it is to travel the road less travelled. I am trying to learn the bagpipes, something that I think makes me unique in this part of the world, I enjoy visiting the beach in January when I can have the place to myself and I like the idea of being known for what I am rather than who I work for.
To be a CSE for pitney bowes is sometimes an isolating experience. Most of the time this suits me fine but it can be lonely and, although I work for one of the World’s largest companies it can sometimes feel as though I am a one man band, albeit with quality backup.
Most of the company environment and ethos is entirely invisible to us, ask any field engineer who is at the very top of the company and most will not know. To “go public” in this fashion is a great way to break down these barriers, maybe we will even be known to those at the top as real people and not just a line on a performance chart. I shall read this blog with interest.
June 13th, 2007 at 5:08 am
Mike,
I found this new blog very interesting, specially the differnt kind of biography you wrote about yourself. I do have one question; is it possible set it up with a RSS-feed so that it sends out a message everytime you add something on the blog.
//Max
June 13th, 2007 at 8:06 am
Hello Mike:
Blogging is a good means of communication but it has its challenges as for maintaining its true function (staying on the topic). I want to send out my appreciation to the employees that work “behind-the-scenes” on this forum (Blog), for taking on this challenging role, I wish you all SUCCESS.
Mike your credentials and experience are impressive and I look forward to your topics, as I am sure will be intriguing.
Until next time, I will see you on the Blog!
~Paul Michael
GPS - Engineering
June 13th, 2007 at 2:18 pm
Mike,
I have just been reading your blog….very interesting, especially your views on The road less traveled and “seeing a different game”. Most people these days seem to be happy to get their daily fix of World News from networks such as CNN and BBC. This results in large numbers of people having the same opinion as a small number of broadcasters. I however chose to balance these corporate news reports by listening to the English news service on Short Wave radio. When i mention this to my friends they look at me as if i am mad.The stations I tune into are as varied as Voice of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Radio Cairo, All India Radio and China Radio International.During recent global events these alternative views have been invaluable in helping me get to a viewpoint which i feel is correct.
So yes….going along the road less travelled does pay dividends.
P.S. A podcast that may interest you can be found on the web site http://www.bbc.co.uk. Follow the link to Radio 4 podcast and look for the podcast In Business The Eden Project. This podcast tells the story of a very interesting leadership style.
kind regards
Jim Mitchell
June 13th, 2007 at 2:58 pm
Mr. Critelli,
Looking forward to reading your blog. I welcome your opinions from the road less traveled view. I see all too often more effort is spent on less important issues, and we will benefit from your highlighting those and the ones that need our attention.
June 13th, 2007 at 3:49 pm
I applaud our executive chairman for leading our formidable corporation into the new millennium. As an inroads intern, I haven’t had the pleasure yet of meeting the man who was in charge of Pitney Bowes through an era of corporate turbulence on a national level and a re-invention and transformation of the mailstream. Evidently, there is still much work to be done especially with the awareness of the significance of the mailstream to the general public, even if we all ready added a new word to the english language, which by the way is an awesome start. Pitney Bowes has been excellent in adapting itself to modern needs, and will continue to do so as our new executive chairman will focus on emerging opportunities such as the influencing positive postal reform and health care. I am really curious to see how our companies’ shareholder value will increase as the years go on in effect of the projects we are working on right now.
June 13th, 2007 at 5:01 pm
Mr. Critelli,
Great idea! I especially agree with your comments in regards to the state and decline of the two major political parties in the United States….I find it rather fitting that the word “Party” is such a key component of the name.
I will look foward to your frank and candid views on life around us…
Steve
June 14th, 2007 at 9:41 am
Mike,
You say you are always looking at ways to improve the efficiency of a situation, so how do you feel Pitney Bowes can fix the enormous back log problem on orders of Shape-based rating mailing equipment?
Also, how do you think Pitney Bowes should compensating the sales representatives for the cancellation of orders they are receiving because of this back log?
June 20th, 2007 at 11:09 am
Jim, thank you for your thoughtful comments on alternative sources of information. I am reminded of when I lived in New York in the 1980’s. Many people got their foreign affairs information from the New York Times, CNN, the national news media, or periodicals like Time, Newsweek, and other mass market publications.
In New York, there were dozens of English-language newspapers targeted at overseas ethnic communities, like the Irish Echo, which gave me a far better sense of what was going on with the Northern Ireland conflict than anything I could have read in a publication focused on a U.S. audience. I also found that many unlikely places had better information about fast-breaking events than our government did. In the early 1980’s, the Holy Name Catholic Church on Washington Boulevard in Stamford, on the way to the Pitney Bowes headquarters, with a predominantly Polish church-going population, had daily reports on the activities of Solidarity long before it made the national news in America. An Irish bar on East 86th Street around the corner from where we lived had reports on the Bobby Sands hunger strike weeks before it made the national media in the U.S.
I also found that New York was a great place to have in-depth conversations with taxi drivers who reflected whatever was the refugee hotspot at the time, like India, Haiti, Pakistan, or Afghanistan. I remember one day having a long conversation in a taxi with a driver who had been a judge in Afghanistan, but had fled because of the war against the Russians. I also remember getting a much more granular understanding of the multiple ethnics in Iran when shopping for rugs in a New York showroom.
Today, one of my two sons is a tournament chess player, and the people competing at his level are mostly foreign-born players, with a majority still coming from Russia and the countries of the former Soviet Union. The day-to-day conversations I have with them when I take him to tournaments are highly informative, and, not surprisingly, many of them are politically knowledgeable. The greatest player of this generation, Garry Kasparov, whom I have not met, is an Armenian who has been very vocal in the media about his opposition to the policies of the Russian government.
Keep up your broader reach to understand the world as it exists, not as it is filtered by often myopic American reporters and editors.
JD, thank you for your e-mail. Getting the public to understand a concept like “mailstream” takes a while, because it challenges the way people customarily think about the communications medium we understand very well. People have certain stereotypes about “mail” that are just dead wrong. They think of it as letters and postcards only when, in fact, so much more goes through the mailstream, including packages, prescription drugs, DVDs, digital photo albums, credit and debit cards, magazines, newsletters, and kits. They think of it as the U.S. Postal Service only, when, in fact, we include FedEx, UPS, DHL, daily messenger services, mailroom management services, and any other provider of delivery solutions. They think of it as a service for senders only, and only after the sender prepares a mailpiece; we think of an end-to-end process that includes recipients. They think of it as a paper-based communications process only; we think of it as including hybrids of physical and electronic communications.
Aaron, I understand your frustration on backlog relative to the shape-based rating systems in response to the May 14 postal rate change. I would make the following comments:
• It’s very difficult to produce sufficient units without good forecasts, and without having sufficient lead times in advance of a deadline. In this case, we had the double whammy of forecasts that were lower than what we eventually needed and orders that came in too close to the deadline. We are working down the backlog and should have it corrected shortly.
• This transitional rate increase raises a much broader issue. Government regulations and process changes require some understanding of how private sector companies need to function to make money. What happened here was a delay in finalizing the new rates, coupled with an unrealistically short deadline for complying with a complex set of changes. When governments make rules of any kind, they need to understand that private sector companies need predictability, common-sense approaches to the substantive rules, and sufficient lead times to adjust. The U.S. Postal Service has generally been very good in this regard, and we expect that the Postal Regulatory Commission will be as well. This was just an unfortunate combination of events in a transition process that should not be repeated.
• On the other hand, in Europe and in other non-U.S. markets, the unpredictability on the timing and form of substantive rule change has been a real problem. The EU directive on opening postal markets has been delayed in its effective date repeatedly, with the latest effective date likely being the beginning of 2011. Many countries have adopted a “hurry up and wait” approach to new rules and ways of doing business.
• Relative to your comment about sales commissions, our general philosophy at PB has been that our commission and incentive rates are based on the principal that we should align sales representative pay with the achievement of our goals. In other words, we pay representatives only when we get paid. To have a system that rewards sales efforts when the Company is not similarly rewarded means that the underlying commission and incentive rates would be lowered to reflect the risk of situations in which the Company is not getting revenue to pay the sales representative.
Max, yes, we will be setting up an RSS feed to send out a message each time we add something to the blog.
Jeff, I appreciate your thoughtful comments about being a customer service engineer in a rural area. Your experience is very typical of service technicians for any service-intensive product sold into rural areas. Some companies, including ours, actually restrict sales of some complex products in rural areas simply because we cannot get a critical mass of customers to support a dedicated service technician. Others, including us in some geographies, use third-party multi-product distributors located in the rural area. They can support a technician only because he or she can service a wide range of products from multiple vendors. Make no mistake about it: it’s difficult to solve the problem, and nobody I know has found a magic bullet solution.
By the way, it also highlights the challenge of the national postal services delivering on a universal service obligation with as broad a product line in rural areas as they have in more densely-populated areas. Governments around the world subsidize the universal service obligation to prevent rural areas from feeling and being isolated. However, what governments need to do is to take advantage of newer technologies and more flexible service models. Even in rural areas, self-service kiosks can be placed in the local general store, just as automated teller machines are today. Rural areas also have Internet access, which could be used more effectively. We have been a strong advocate for more flexible approaches to the delivery of government services to rural areas, and are beginning to get some responsiveness from postal authorities.
Unfortunately, politicians tend to make laws defining government service obligations with a high and dysfunctional degree of inflexibility. When I was in Germany on June 6, I learned from a representative of the German postal regulator that the federal government has mandated that a “postal outlet” containing a full range of postal services, even those used very infrequently, must be in every community with more than 2,000 people, and that a street mail collection box must be within 1000 meters of every German citizen. Why the German citizen in a rural area cannot simply put his or her outgoing mail in the mailbox to be collected by the letter carrier is beyond me. Politicians should stop micromanaging what they want regulated, and should articulate broad principles and goals, which can then be implemented flexibly and intelligently by regulators with more expertise.
You are vital to the success and the brand of Pitney Bowes, and in the area you serve, you are the face of the Company to many people. Keep the faith!
June 25th, 2007 at 5:41 pm
Will you be providing an RSS feed for your blog so that I can include itin my RSS News reader?
July 2nd, 2007 at 1:24 pm
Welcome to the bloggin community. An intriguing question - wheere and how will social networking and the mail industry overlap?
Jonathan
July 6th, 2007 at 9:13 am
Jonathan, regarding your question about the overlap of social networking and the mail industry:
“Social networking” is a term with many potential meanings. Let me know if I have misunderstood you as I respond.
Certainly, as individuals reveal more about themselves on websites like youtube.com, facebook.com and myspace.com, as well as other sites in which they are engaged in a public conversation with others, they provide insights that marketers of all kinds, including direct mailers, could not get any other way. So, at a minimum, social networking provides the raw material from which data can be extracted that allows more targeted mailstream marketing.
We also see more interplay between the mailstream and digital communications, in which the mailstream leads the way. People learn through the mail about a social networking web site that enables interaction desired by others. People also start conversations on a social networking site, and may resume them in some other form that includes a communication through the mailstream.
I also see the mailstream as a delivery medium, as well as a communication medium. The digitally-rendered movie that appears on a social networking site, along with the comments that give it greater popularity eventually lead to a transaction in which the tangible item like a DVD gets sent through the mailstream to someone.
I am not sure that, at this stage, we fully understand all of the implications of the mailstream relative to social networking.
What do you think the relationship is, or should be?
- Mike
July 11th, 2007 at 3:58 pm
Mike, I retired from Pitney Bowes in 1999 after 32 years of service , I to traveled the road less traveled as I was a resident csr in rural Alabama.. I am really glad that you now have a blog and I Will continue to follow it. Mike thanks for running our Company the way it should be run.
July 19th, 2007 at 10:41 am
How I add this article to Digg?
December 28th, 2007 at 12:21 am
Dear Mike,
I understand that you might share an interest in the work of C.S. Lewis and others who have addressed crucial theological issues and their relevance to the modern world.
If so, I would be delighted to learn more.
Thank you for your assistance.
Best regards,
David
David J. Theroux
Founder and President
C. S. Lewis Society of California
100 Swan Way
Oakland, CA 94621
(510) 635-6892 Phone
(510) 568-6040 Fax
dtheroux@lewissociety.org
http://www.lewissociety.org
January 19th, 2008 at 10:03 pm
Mr. Critelli:
I have recently discovered your blog and must admit that I am glued to it. I worked for PB for 2 1/2 yrs and really miss the atmosphere and the service I provided my customers. I am now in school working on my BA in Criminal Justice and often use PB as examples for what a great company can offer it’s employees as well as the enormous growth PB has shown over the past nearly 100 years.
I was always grateful for the opportunity I had to work for this great company and now through your blog, I can continue to keep up with the Mail Stream.:) Good luck in all your endeavors and may you continue to see your wisdom prosper. God bless.
~Bridget Quimby
January 23rd, 2008 at 10:26 pm
Bridget,
Thank you for your kind comment.
- Mike