Thursday, I completed my final presentation of the strategic
analysis of Monterey Language Services.
It went wonderfully! My team
mates were fantastic, totally spot-on with their parts. After the presentation was over, we didn’t
get many questions; I think partly because our presentation was very complete,
and partly because of the confidence we expressed while discussing it.
Saturday was the commencement, which I didn’t attend. But still and yet, I have graduated! I now have my bachelor’s in business
administration. Now to figure out what
I’ll be doing next.
Cooking: LOL, What?
This week, I didn’t do much cooking at all. Sunday I made a beef, asparagus and mushroom
stir-fry. Monday, we had barbequed
try-tip at my parent’s house, and Tuesday we had leftovers of that. Wednesday, we ate pizza. Thursday we had dinner out. Friday, the husband cooked. Saturday, we ate leftovers and fast food.
But I did make mushrooms on toast, which is a classic
British breakfast food. It’s very simple
to make: Just sauté mushrooms with a bit of butter, and then served on
toast. It’s usually topped with a
poached egg, but we had ours with fried eggs instead. I really liked the earthiness of the
mushrooms contrasted with the eggs; Peter thought it could use a little
something, but he’s not sure what.
Either way, it was a hearty, delicious breakfast.
This happened about mid-week; a business that Ramsay was
working with on the United States version of his Kitchen Nightmares show was so
awful and backwards that he refused to work with them. One of the things that came about was a
social media war against their detractors, who had gone onto Facebook, Twitter,
Reddit and Yelp and trashed the business for their misleading practices. I bring this up not so much because of the
connection to Ramsay, but because I keep seeing this happen to small
businesses, even good ones. I think that
the issue here is that these businesses are built by the blood and sweat of the
owners, and they are very defensive, even when they are wrong.
I’ve seen this happen to Franklin Goose and Help Remedies;
they do something wrong, and rather than admitting that they’ve made a mistake
and trying to fix it (or even just apologizing), they blame customers. It turns into a huge flaming internet war,
posts complaining about the company are deleted from Facebook, and so on. I think one of the most important things to
remember in situations like these is that humans are fallible; people make
mistakes, and companies make mistakes.
Customers are much more accepting if a company owns up to its mistakes,
acting constructively, rather than destructively. Blaming your customers and acting rudely to
them does you no favors, no matter who is wrong.
Forbes even published an article describing lessons that can be learned from the dabacle. Pretty spot-on.
See you next week! :D
