PIECE FOR RW PRODUCTIONS

BSB: NEIGHBORHOOD PALS

FOR IN SYNC UNDER CONTRACT WITH GM: FOR COMEDY

OWN YOUR OWN

EDITORIAL RESPONSE

ASTHMA

THE AMERICAN CONVERSATION

OBEDIENT CHILDREN

FOR RW PRODUCTIIONS (back to top)
Taking a page from Emminem (who used the cavernous and haunting Michigan Theater parking garage for footage in his film “8 Mile”), RW Productions filmed Detroit rocker Michelle Penn’s latest music video in the historical Packard plant on Detroit’s near east side this winter.

Produced by RW’s Mark Miller, Penn’s newest song, "Maybe Now" - from a new album targeted for a late summer release - was directed by Matt Cantu of Cantu Creative. Using Two Panasonic DVX-100A mini-DV cameras, shooters Derek Robinson & Kim Simms were aided by running car lights to navigate the vacant warehouse in the late night freezing conditions.

RW utilized Zack Stock of Jackson Dawson Communications to edit the music video (on an Avid Adrenaline system), which was aired on ETV shortly after. Penn, who started in pubs and clubs all over Detroit and recorded at White Room in Detroit and the Pepper mill in Ferndale, has also performed at St. Andrews, DTE and Lilith Fair. She will be using the video to promote herself in Los Angeles, where she now resides, and to announce her latest music around the country.

BSB: Neighborhood Pals Link Modern Technology
Using An Old Fashioned Concept (back to top)

by Timothy Jeffrey
Competing regularly with the likes of Northern Telecom and Lucent Technologies, BSB in St. Clair Shores is responding to a banner year by expanding their offices and work force. To accommodate a ferociously escalating demand for their services in the specialized field of upgrading business phone systems by converging them with data networks, BSB is renovating their headquarters near Eight Mile on Harper with a special emphasis on a new high-tech demo and training room.

Throughout their 14 years one of the smaller telecommunications companies in the state - yet one of the busiest - BSB has registered a sales spike of over 50% in less than two years, setting sales records in a surge expected to reach $3.5 million by the year’s end. The Intertel product line they represent and install has, partially due to BSB’s efforts, increased more than 150% over the last three years and is now second only to Northern Telecom nationally.

The BSB expansion includes not only completely refurbished offices, but demonstrates that BSB practices what they preach. BSB is upgrading their own office phone system and lines that will enable them to handle a major increase in calls, and to efficiently access more information. “We’re computerizing our inventory, dispatch, and tracking capabilities, even to profiling job categories, to eliminate time lags and back logs,” co-owner Bill Nutting notes.

He and partner Steve Klenner still refer simplistically to their success as finding “phone solutions,” identifying themselves as advisors to clients rather than super-salesmen who dictate to the technologically challenged.

An example of such a solution: when you call to speak with someone about your payment record or an order you made, the operator reads back the information which in the past you had to wait on hold for them to find. The call created an information “screen” of your customer record for the attendant to serve you faster. Called computer telephony integration (C.T.I.), this advanced tool also provides businesses with “unified messaging” - where, for instance, faxes, voice mail and e-mail arrive at the same location.

Steve, the more retiring of the two principle partners - genial, mid-forties, and reluctantly getting used to wearing ties - explains: “When a call comes in, the system ‘sees’ a caller’s I.D., goes out and searches your data base, finding a match on the phone number as the phone rings.”

While most of us by now have had this experience without realizing it, the technology has been affordable almost exclusively in the largest corporations. In the last two years, however, mid-size companies with high volumes of in- bound and out-bound calls now benefit as well. That is where BSB likes to operate.

Sophisticated business for a couple of formerly long-haired pals attending the old East Detroit High School who originally had no particular aspirations beyond music and motorcycles. Bill’s father, who now works occasionally for BSB, ran his own phone installing firm - the former Detroit Communications Corporation - where Bill started in service for his father in 1969. Steve joined them in 1972, which obliged him to quit teaching guitar. Mainly, he admits sheepishly, he came to work with Bill because he was getting married: “I needed to get a real job.” Steve later worked up to operations manager. Bill was service manager when, 12 years later in 1984, both decided to strike out on their own with the aid of Steve’s father, Bob.

Like all young entrepreneurs with a desire and little idea of what it takes, they were determined only that along with using their mutual expertise, they would build the business by maintaining a reputation for integrity.

“We could have gotten big faster, but we took our time,” Steve readily admits. In the beginning, they handled all the sales, installation and service. They established themselves in the field from the start not only for being forthright, but for their timely service and sound technological knowledge.

In fact, even though they could have made scads of money selling long distance service along with their systems, they decided to forego the opportunity, a policy that continues in the company today.

One major company impressed with the two young men and their reputation came to them in the first two years with a giant contract that would have put BSB in the black and vaulted them into a central position among the hundreds of companies providing phone system installation at the time. Steve and Bill turned the deal down, however, determined not to promise to satisfy a client they were not yet equipped to handle.

But it was tempting: Since they didn’t have a track record yet, no bank would loan money to them, and “when the divestiture hit, we had a load of competition,” Steve remembers. Still, one bank finally extended them a measly $500 line of credit. “We took it,” Steve says, laughing now. “It made us real humble at the beginning. But we took it gladly.”

Because of those humble beginnings, BSB cultivated what became and is still today the spine of their growing business: “We stayed small and sold to the little guys. Hell, if we sold a $3000 system, we were ecstatic.” But as those smaller clients grew and word of mouth spread, BSB stabilized. In fact, the large corporation came back to them a couple more times before BSB ultimately agreed to install their system. They remain a satisfied customer today.

Terry Gerstner of Independent Telecommunications Consultants, who designs calling networks, has for just such reasons recommended BSB on numerous occasions throughout the years. “They’re really thorough and easy to work with and Intertel is an excellent product to use,” he says. “BSB has certainly made me look good on many occasions.”

Though experienced people are at a premium in the field, Gerstner says BSB possesses impressively competent technicians “who figure ways to solve problems easily where other companies make it inconvenient or impossible.” And equally rare, Gerstner adds: “BSB is considerate to their clients, who they’ve never abandoned. ”

Steve and Bill credit maintaining that client base and respecting their employees as their primary objective. And as those customers expand, they continue calling on BSB. “They’re very organized,” says Judy Gruner, a Vice President at the rapidly-expanding Henry Ford OptimEyes, which uses BSB exclusively. She points to BSB’s practice of documenting phone stations, to track numbers and sites in anticipation of location moves, as critical planning typical of BSB’s thorough work ethic.

For just such failures of anticipation and thoroughness, “a lot of companies are dissatisfied with their vendors,” observes BSB competitor Harold Rourke, Marketing Director of North American Communications. “You hear a lot of complaints all the time. But not about BSB; they take care of their customers. They have good response times, get the job done right and respect the customer.”

Though originally BSB’s problems were that so many competitors had folded - so credit wasn’t feasible - and options for new, high-tech products were limited, the main stumbling block was their search beyond immediate family for good people who wanted to work - but especially, who wanted to learn the new technology.

Steve says this is, perhaps inevitably, an industry-wide problem: “For years, the data guys have looked down on the telephone guys, like they were the lower end of the food chain. ‘Data is so much more important’ the thinking goes. But since the one never wanted to be in telephones and the other hasn’t always learned PC’s enough to troubleshoot or program,” companies like BSB have had their hands full bringing both up to speed.

BSB’s solution has been to stick with an extended-family emphasis as key to their business success. Besides sisters, daughters, sons, brothers, in-laws, and wives still working at the company today, BSB has recently increased their current “family” of 35 to include predominantly unrelated technical staff and professionals who Steve and Bill insist upon calling “friends” who are treated like family. The owners are actively searching for more candidates to hire in the coming months.

Even some customers feel like they’re part of the fold: “My employees are so familiar with Steve, they think he works here,” jokes Steve Wade, of Wade Trim, a consulting engineering firm that uses BSB at all their locations. “It’s too complicated anymore; you’re not just plugging a phone in. I didn’t know how to connect every part of our company and still make us look small.” Now a 4-digit number, says Wade, the administrative manager, will link to a desktop anywhere in the state or country throughout his organization.

“I appreciate hands-on guys like them,” says Wade.

In fact, Steve and Bill, who still call themselves “phone guys,” have continued, even in the current explosion of work, to research and prepare the company for the latest field †rends and technological advances. But the learning curve that ten years ago described a three year cycle of innovation before a product came to market has now contracted to anywhere from two to six months.

The new expansion will therefore include forcing Bill and Steve out of the company’s every day affairs to become full time managers.

Like Steve, Bill will have to delegate more and more of his current load as the company reconfirms its organizational functions. Most owners would call this “arriving,” not having to get dirty with grunt work anymore.

“Me?” Bill considers the prospect. Maintaining he’s still the same guy who 20 years ago might have ridden his Harley into a sunset, he states: “If I had my druthers, I’d always be up to my elbows in wire.”

Equally self-effacing about the company success being anything more than a team effort, Steve agrees that, like it or not, BSB’s success means changes. Right away, an office manager and a full-time trainer will have to be hired while Steve and Bill travel a little more, go to meetings, ...and all that grown-up stuff. “We’re perhaps too close to everyone and involved in too much here, we know that. And it’s hard when you have to make difficult business decisions,” Steve recognizes as employees continue their daily duties, working in gales of cement dust and stepping around debris. “There’s a lot of research and overseeing we have to do now.”

“We’re so busy being busy,” Steve remarks.

“Our unique challenge is to resist the temptation to be everything to everybody.”

In fact, one of the reasons for the build-out was that “we want to have comfortable training and demonstration rooms and to raise the level of our expertise.” More than ever before, phone/data systems require regular training and even some hand-holding: “It used to be: what lines; which were restricted; what colors; how many? And you were all done,” Steve remembers. “It’s so much more involved now. We have to ask things like: ‘What kind of network do you have? Do you want it to ring here two times or two times at your secretary’s desk and then go to voice mail...?’”

And the field is narrowing: though the average telephone communications company carries around 10 employees, a lot of “garage operations” out there may be folding their tents. More and more competitors are going to get eliminated as the field becomes more data-driven. Though they had comprised the bulk of the competition in the past and may still undercut some prices today, without research facilities or resources, Bill and Steve agree, a lot of them will disappear. Instead, “From the start,” Steve said, “we have been applications-driven. We design data to work for the customer, not the other way around.”

And BSB is making new friends where they once couldn’t find one: banks are calling, wanting to lend money to the two “phone guys” now that, all things remaining constant, they don’t really need it. “We finance everything ourselves,” Steve explained. “Don’t get me wrong, we don’t live any better than our employees - as a matter of fact, we don’t make as much as some of them. We just hate owing money, and we’re dumping ours back in for now.”

Still one would expect all that success has to tempt even laid-back guys a little.

But it’s not likely. Even the name they chose and have kept suggests a preferred low profile: “BSB” stands for “Bill, Steve and Bob.”

The owners have done their research and are convinced of the Intertel product’s superiority.

“Now we’re finally seeing real life applications in the melding of the two technologies,” Bill enthuses. “Used to be voice mail was very expensive and hard to sell. We only sold a couple a years. Now, we never put in a system without it.” Like the techies they have always been and identified with, both men become animated about the explosively creative telecommunication environments. If they wish anything for their employees and the future of BSB, it would be that their staff and clients alike remain as fascinated as their bosses.

“We don’t treat anyone better because they’re family or differently because they’re not,” Steve maintains. “We want everyone here to know how important they are to us, and we genuinely want them to think of BSB as family.” And just as with family, when things get busy or tough, the two owners - having seen it all before - always enjoy talking through a difficulty, however technical or personal.

With clients, BSB’s proactive sales approach means educating them first. The company always advises potential clients, for instance, against installing the phone/data advances BSB offers on their antiquated platforms, which will mean more money later. Since 1987, all phones have had modems and BSB’s objective in selling to a client is whether BSB will be able to remotely program and troubleshoot someone’s system. If they cannot, their first suggestion is a change in the customer’s entire system to accommodate it. In the long run, Bill says, the change which allows a customer to add other options as technology changes as they would not be able to accomplish otherwise, will save the candidate company untold thousands in patchwork fixes, makeovers and business lost to down-time. “We can get there and fix a problem for them at the speed of light,” Bill explains, “or at 30 miles an hour in a truck.”


FOR IN SYNC UNDER CONTRACT WITH GM:
FOR COMEDY TAKE ON AN INDIVIDUAL’S RETIREMENT FROM GM: (back to top)
The Ten Top Reasons the “Own Your Own” Safety Program Constitutes Significant Benefits and a Corporate First:

  • First time a Big Three safety maintenance program doesn’t require dufus husbands to embarrass themselves trying to work dandy high tech key fobs.
  • Finally, judging from the example of the company’s sudden generosity in providing safety programs freely and out of the blue, wearing a red suit with fur and shiny boots to work while “bearing your gifts” may no longer mean disciplinary leave.
  • First chance to discuss preventive safety without having to warn male employees about Madonna.
  • No longer overhear line workers refer to “auto air bags” and suspect they mean executives like you.
  • Be the first at your level to have hatched an idea without resorting to the Sunday New York Times, a toilet and the Rouge River system.
  • First company kind enough to provide extensive employee safety initiatives while working them to death.
  • Approved by Pinkerton and GM Security; disapproved by G. Gordon Liddy, O.J. Simpson and Three-Finger Harry Hangstrom.
  • Re-ignite employee enthusiasm in the product. (But while you’re at it: what the hell does “Alero” mean, anyway?)
  • Letters from employee families thanking you for precautionary steps that discontinue culinary-challenged dads’ “fiery hot greasy burger night.”
  • Two words: GM means “Genial Mentors,” not “Gerbal Maters.”


OWN YOUR OWN (back to top)
The OWN YOUR OWN safety programs are essential in the “Plan To Win” re-development of the GM culture, which must discipline and condition itself for a new business era. We think the reasons for using our safety program are clear. The Healthy Company will ultimately get in shape by:
ASSESSING ITS CONDITION:

Everybody within GM knows that deep and critical changes are necessary. But most think these means they are dispensable. They need to be included somehow, and to assure themselves their company honestly cares about their future. They need to see actions, not have to parrot mottos and high oratory.

Pinkerton and GM Security Chiefs have given the program contents their blessings.

DEMONSTRATING SOUND INTENTIONS TO RESURRECT THE YOUTHFUL, LEAN BODY:

You are spending money on your workers of your own volition, with no immediate, foreseeable benefit accruing to you.

Such a comprehensive and affordable program is inevitable; but if you follow someone else’s initiative on this (inside or outside of GM), you will only again appear to your workers to be insincerely imitating another more progressive organization, and they will show the same contempt for your offering here with which they imagine you regard them.

EXERCISING:
You personally have the capability to make this happen before the concept is bogged down in the typical corporate environment of indecision and power games. You have a natural pipeline for promoting and communicating the importance through CSG’s.

This bolsters relations with the UAW and encourages them to cut costs by co-sponsoring.

MAINTAINING CONSCIENTIOUS ATTENTION TO DETAIL:
You will be sending an admirable, personalized message about family values, the essential call for security and safety, and your commitment to an integrated, contented and productive workforce in the new world of auto making.

PUTTING THE MOUTH IN SYNC WITH THE BODY:
Initiating such a program therefore demonstrates for your employees that you care about them and their families, as indeed they feel you should.
After the last decade of layoffs, they are naturally shaken and feel “unsafe” in their positions. This spells absenteeism; unhealthy workers; dangerous work conditions. Your initiating this program is a clear signal that genuine cooperation, and a sound philosophical direction has been set out.

INGESTING A NEW DIET:
It will arrive as an unprompted selfless gesture out of genuine regard. No more empty mottos or symbolic gestures typical of other companies.
The best reason of all: it’s the right thing to do. And it means the beginning of a disciplined habit of corporate communication and personal regard up and down the ladder sorely lacking in most companies.

Straight talk... (back to top)

GM’s image has long been one of a company at war with itself. That only seldom does company information or programs immediately benefit more than twenty percent of the company population suggests a distrusting culture throughout, whether or not the characterization is fair or accurate.

The company must return to being the integrated and interdependent sales/promotional organization it once was, so GM must first recognize its deeply felt and willingly demonstrated obligation to anyone who has sacrificed something to be a part of its success.

“Own Your Own” programs represent good will, sound corporate citizenship and especially, a first time opportunity to do something right, for the right purpose, at no risk, and with an undeniable benefit. “Own Your Own” finally characterizes General Motors as people working together who recognize everyone’s humanity and who, more importantly, are less concerned with quarterly profits than with the long term condition of the corporate “house” and the health of its “inhabitants.” If GM means to announce a “Plan To Win” as a hallmark change in direction, this program must stand as proof of a new millennium for the world’s greatest manufacturer.

Because this current period in the American marketplace is marred by distrust and fear, GM must inevitably align itself with families. The disarray of these families, the degradation of a drug-riddled culture, and the loss of community are pandemic. And we are most afraid of our own children and co-workers, who constitute a huge percentage of crime in the country. The obvious need your workers have - that all humans have - is to be included. We are not safe. We feel alone. We have met the enemy and he is us...

Strange behavior from the most wealthy and educated people in the history of nations. Despite everything spent on drug, alcohol and mental rehabilitation; family and personal therapy; neighborhood watch programs; educational alternatives; alarm systems; gun control; high-tech security forces and all the rest, we continue to be most insecure in the two places we spend nearly 95% of our time: at work and at home.

And we reinforce the bad behavior that causes our trepidation: though we apportion $3,500 to $6,500 yearly to educate and maintain and protect each student in our schools, for instance, we also offer that same child - should he or she throw a brick through a window - ten to twenty times as much ($93,000 a year in the case of one juvenile facility in Saginaw), and way beyond a Cranbrook or Universtity of Michigan educational stipend, if they are remanded to corrections. Among the many perks beyond tutoring, family reunification, counseling, activities, trips, and cultural education that await each child is a two or four year fully-paid college education upon fulfilling rehabilitation requirements! We are saying that if you confirm our prejudices about your worthlessness, we will reward you.

And we have many times acted similarly with our cohorts.

Now, that changes. The nondescript fear and undermining resistance and apathy which grip our workers every bit as much as it causes our children’s’ current malaise, derives from estrangement. The solution is only, can only ever be, trust. And the first step toward engaging that trust is by offering help to one another.

Though we obviously must stop writing scholarships for criminal behavior, we must also stop courting misery in the workplace by ignoring our partners in any mutually profitable enterprise. We can do that by recognizing the common human need to feel safe among our peers and loved ones.

We therefore provide people with accessible, critical and customized personal information on how to preserve their well-being, and by extension, their peace of mind, and to ultimately fulfill the spirit of the promise in “Plan To Win.”

The obvious immediate advantages are that:

  • Such a comprehensive and affordable program is inevitable; but if you follow someone else’s initiative on this (inside or outside of GM), you will only again appear to your workers to be insincerely imitating another more progressive organization, and they will show the same contempt for your offering here with which they imagine you regard them.
  • Initiating such a program therefore demonstrates for your employees that you care about them and their families, as indeed they feel you should.
  • After the last decade of layoffs, they are naturally shaken and feel “unsafe” in their positions. This spells absenteeism; unhealthy workers; dangerous work conditions. Your initiating this program is a clear signal that genuine cooperation, and a sound philosophical direction has been set out.
  • Pinkerton and GM Security Chiefs have given the program contents their blessings.
  • You will be sending an admirable, personalized message about family values, the essential call for security and safety, and your commitment to an integrated, contented and productive workforce in the new world of auto making.
  • You personally have the capability to make this happen before the concept is bogged down in the typical corporate indecision and power games.
  • Employee enthusiasm is the driving force for the “Plan To Win” initiatives, so their confidence and belief that they are respected members of the GM family is essential.
  • You have a natural pipeline for promoting and communicating the importance through CSG’s.
  • This bolsters relations with the UAW and encourages them to cut costs by co-sponsoring.
  • It will arrive as an unprompted selfless gesture out of genuine regard. No more empty mottos or symbolic gestures typical of other companies.
  • The best reason of all: it’s the right thing to do.


There are far too few opportunities in massive organizations to present something that genuinely benefits one’s co-workers without strings attached. Especially, without dictating or demanding rigid conformity to principles or regimented objectives. The company, without fanfare, generously extends an invitation to be as safe in their families as we want them to feel and be at work. This is a demonstrative bestowal that can, if you wish, herald the new inclusive GM culture, where the way one makes a car becomes again a proud inheritance rather than a resented happenstance.

“Own Your Own” is not one more inspired, handy ploy or catchy concept. It is a perfectly essential strategy precisely because it is not a strategy at all, but good intentions made palpable, practical and purposeful.

Ultimately, a respected and useful workforce will make itself safer, as the family reasserts its place in the community.

No one has done this yet, quite this way.
But they will.
We must, first. Now.

EDITORIAL RESPONSE, 2003 (back to top)
Flag-waving suddenly-reborn-patriots making brave pronouncements on Iraq from their easy chairs abound these days. Witness Nolan Finley’s (“Mission of Freedom”) May 2 commentary in which he unwittingly convicts rather than exonerates with his weak defense of the course, still undefined by the administration, which we continue to prosecute at such a price in Iraq.

Of the many errant, irresponsible and, one hopes, unconsciously prejudicial assertions Mr. Finley makes is that the Iraqis have recently decided they wanted us out...when that fact was announced the second day of the erstwhile “liberation” by the Iraqi people themselves.

Our response (from a military whose commander-in-chief never bothered himself to chart a “course” for the perceived primitives in the first place) has been to shut down a newspaper for printing viewpoints that departed from ours...strange behavior for champions of freedom. As Finley would have it, such acts signal nothing like an intention to “exploit, not dominate...” only “to deliver freedom.” Really? Our behavior quite before the revelation of what we will soon know were widespread tortures, violations of international law and human dignity - which the media chose not to report until now - rather puts the lie to his fairy tale.

In fact, Finley’s bigoted attack continues a long-held anger in some circles that when we force our will on others they should at least be polite and thank us. He fails to to consider that the Iraqi people are more intimately knowledgeabl