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Quite awhile ago, I was heading back to the Northcrest location with a co-worker when we spotted this poor unfortunate soul sweltering in the mid-summer heat. You can see the Onyx sign just over his shoulder. I parked, grabbed my camera and returned on foot where I encountered his father standing nearby in the shade of the Marta stop. After reading the sign, I managed to partially conceal my amusement enough to ask the man if he would mind my taking a picture. “Hell no, I don’t mind, Take as many as ye’ like!” Amazingly, his sign describes a trouble combination I actually did not achieve. It certainly took me back to a tumultuous time when my father excercised similarly rigid disciplines. I commended the man on his creative punishment citing similar father/son interactions. He saw my Onyx shirt and asked if I owned the company behind his son. When I replied, he said to his boy “You see that? This guy did dumb stuff like you and he owns that company over there. You wanna grow up and do something or you wanna go to jail?” I told the kid to hang in there and walked away feeling a little weird but laughing to myself regardless. He was out there all afternoon - more than five hours. Good luck to you Pot Kid!
A blog about chairs……my my…….yawn…..Oh well. I do blather on.
Five years ago, when we opened our first (company owned) location on Northcrest, we decided it might be nice to stop sitting in the miserable collection of garbage we’d acquired off the side of several roads and other crappy chairs repositories. My first thought was the ever constant Herman Miller Aeron. A great chair to be sure. A chair that always conjured the image of success and good taste. But alas, thanks to the dot-com boom and bust of the Clinton era, I now associate the chair more with pretentiousness and failure! All those Herman Miller chairs on E-Bay selling from all major city’s circa 2001 - briefly owned by hordes of dot-commer “would be” visionaries. Coffee swilling, turtleneck wearing, PDA obsessed tech junkies sitting at the helms of a thousand sinking ships in their mighty AERON!!
Feh!
I always wanted one. When the day came that I could finally afford and justify one, I didn’t want it anymore. Same thing with Harley Davidson’s! So I called an associate who is a member of the interior designer’s guild and asked him what his thoughts were on chairs. We were ready to spend some real money for once and I wanted to weigh all our options. “Aeron’s are nice,” he said “but they’re kinda’ passe’ now. There’s a great line out now from Humanscale that you should check out.” And so we did. The first round we ordered for the Northcrest store were the “Freedom Chair” models - a refreshing design detour from the overwrought technical look of the Aeron. I just want to sit down, not meld my ass to H.R. Giger’s bad dreams - fer cryin’ out loud! For the Decatur store, we just ordered a whole mess o’ the “Liberty Chair”. OK - the patriotic themes are pretty amusing. Even our toilet at Northcrest is called “The Patriot” ! What the HELL is going ON here?! Anyway - the Humanscale chairs are pricey - like all high end chairs, and various people have scoffed at the amount of dough we shell out for these things. But “here’s the thing”:
1) The chairs come with a lifetime warranty. ANYTHING that breaks is fixed at our location from their local office branch in Atlanta. Great service.
2) If you want to keep your people happy while they pound on hardware repairs and wheedle out solutions for all manners of IT issues all the live-long day, you damn sure need to provide a high quality, comfortable cradle for their hams to luxuriate in while they do so!
3) They look cool and they’re not made by Herman “freakin’” Miller. That IS his middle name btw.
4) We’ve got a “connection”…….you think I’d pay full price for these things?! Hells No my friend!
YES. I blogged about chairs. Time to up the dosage I guess.
A while ago, one of my younger brothers (a VP at Qualcomm) sent me an excerpt from a body of work intended to help the Qualcomm folks deal with this hideous mob of petulant children infiltrating the workforce - The Millennials. It contains summarized descriptions of generational characteristics from the WWII era to present day. We start with The Veterans (The Greatest Generation!) and we slide slowly downhill from there with Baby Boomers, faster still with Generation X, and then we really start picking up speed to start swirling down the toilet bowl at a breakneck pace with The Millennials! Here’s the PDF - read it and weep:
http://onyxconsulting.com/docs/WorkforceGenerations.pdf
After Charles and I read this over, we exchanged a look of amazement. Here were all the observations we’d been voicing to each other regarding many of the interviews we’d conducted over the years. It also illustrated a commonality amongst the bad hires we’d made when a “true” millennial slipped into Onyx under the wire. This prompted me to learn more about this plague upon our nation. Here’s another article that accurately describes our observations of these bed-wetters:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/11/08/60minutes/main3475200.shtml
The more I learned (and confirmed), the more I realized the challenges it foretold for our own growth. The pdf from my brother attempts to focus on the positive attributes of the millennials. A 16,000 person corporation has to grimly accept that there’s no way around this generation. They absolutely can not avoid them and therefore must figure out how to make the most of things. The study makes a very transparent attempt to wrap a bow around a giant shit sandwich of useless individuals obsessed with their own short term gratification. Citing as positives, they say Millennials are “plugged-in, tech savvy, interested in meaningful work over income, hold multiple interests” blah blah blah.
I say take the damn bow off and call it like it is. Millennials are “overly fascinated with shiny things that light up and go beep, lacking survival skills due to parental “mollycoddling”, jacks of all trades but masters of none, unable to focus or complete projects from beginning to end.” In short, a generation of candy-assed wimps.
So why am I sharing this and, do I ever have anything positive to say? Well, I’m venting - come on! And yes - I do have something positive to say. I try to conserve my positive energy for my loved ones, my employees and my customers - but here goes: We are in the fortunate position of being able to refuse acceptance of this generation - for now.
Roughly one in three people we hire below the age of 26 have actually been raised properly and were telling us the truth about all of their wonderful convictions, work ethic, drive, ambition, accountability etc when we interviewed them. The other two are either fired quickly, or they manage to fool us for several months of painfully wasted time and money. The staff has actually become instrumental in helping sniff out the phonies who sneak in. Of all the resumes and interview’s we endure, I’d say (within our industry) there’s roughly one genuine, hardworking individual for every two-hundred bullshit artists I sift through. That’s better than ZERO! I have the utmost respect for the ones we have managed to find and a debt of gratitude to their families for doing a fine job of raising them. They are the reason I haven’t collapsed in a pile of despair! There is hope - and who knows, maybe this trend is largely industry specific, but somehow I doubt it. As I mentioned before, Qualcomm HAS to embrace them. Fortunately, we don’t and we won’t. THERE - there’s the positive side! Savor it.
So here at Onyx, we have resigned ourselves to the painstaking task of sifting this rubble on a non-stop basis so that we may grow our company one person at a time with the least amount of compromise possible. It is an all-consuming task. We do it relentlessly, and we do it better than our competitors - and that, my friends…….is why we are so good.
Now - I’m going to go check my blood pressure, soak my head, hug a tree or two and get ready for more interviews this week. God Bless America.
P.S. Jared Diamond is the author of one of my top 10 all time favorite books “Guns, Germs and Steel”. He wrote another book called “Collapse”. This book details how civilizations fail. It asserts the average life span of a democratized society is approximately 200 years. Clearly our Republic is more democratized with every new day. I would name the Millennials as the 80 Million horsemen of the apocalypse. Not an uplifting read, but very informative. Sunshine and lollipops for everyone!
Well it’s over……I didn’t set foot in the mall ONCE, and the majority of my relationships survived with no nicks, cuts or abrasions. This year I opted to knock out most Christmas gifts with the iPhoto book-making software. Although I’ve known about this product for a long time, I never sat down and actually utilized it before. When I showed it to Bernadette, she got all charged up and took the reins to make books and calendars for several family members. Upon receiving the finished product it became very clear to me just how watered down the experience of viewing photos in iPhoto can be - especially when you have 5000-plus photos. The quantity just crushes the experience. Then when you see an arrangement of selected photos in a book you’ve designed specifically for an individual, it really hit’s you! The photos take on new meaning in the collection you created. It grabs hold of your heart strings and YANKS on them! I knew if they had this effect on us as the givers, our family members would be blown away - and they were. Success! I also had the advantage of Bernadette’s keen design sense. She did most of the work. These books become family treasures. I highly recommend making one - or TEN.
The other resource for this years gift giving was the company “Paddywax”. Paddywax was a wonderful long term client of Onyx, but I’d never fully utilized their offerings like I did this Christmas. These folks make a superior product and have an outlet location near Dekalb Farmers Market where you can load up on high-end artisan candles at low prices. They also have a well developed web presence and fulfill orders all over the country. The outlet is kind of a well kept secret. All kinds of Hollywood hot-shots seem to have discovered them as well. Check them out.
WHO (might you ask) is The Apple Service Alliance? Well, I’ll tell you. The Apple Service Alliance….WAS a name used by a group of cowards who tried to stop us from becoming a competitor many years ago. When we were no more than a few techs with a newly acquired commercially leased office space, we applied for Apple Authorized Reseller and Apple Authorized Service Center status. Word got out to the handful of Apple affiliated service providers and they did something very sleazy. This consortium of incompetent blow-hards felt so threatened by 3 guys in their mid 20’s (us) that they gave themselves a title “The Atlanta Apple Service Alliance” and set out to prevent us from throwing our hat in the ring. These seasoned professional business “men” pooled their collective cranial capacities to construct one very sad and very inflammatory letter to Apple. In this letter they implored Apple to withhold authorization from the likes of Onyx Consulting for we were suspected of “disreputable business practices” and would only dilute the fine quality of service currently offered by The Atlanta Apple Service Alliance. Thanks to some well placed allies, we became aware of the content as well as the identities of the companies and clowns behind the letter. That was the day the gloves came off.
In their wisdom and to their credit, Apple ignored this repugnant effort by our adversaries and we became fully authorized. Next order of business was payback time. The beating delivered over the next 6 years was sufficient in rendering each one of these entities permanently punch-drunk where Apple service was concerned. It was a long hard fight and quite frankly - we kind of miss having them around to beat on. So much was learned, lost and gained through those times. Alas, our youthful aggression and combativeness gave way to a more fruitful directing of energy. We turned all efforts and attention to improving our company and forgot about the miscreants. Now they’ve all but finished themselves off.
Did we really NEED to be so heavy handed in our competitive rampage? I myself am not too sure, but I think it was certainly warranted by the actions of the AASA. Many AASA clients are now long term Onyx clients. In retrospect, it sure seems like everything happened exactly as it should have, but I suppose that’s easy for us to say.
