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

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

“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

Jonathan

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!

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?