We’ve all been there. We make a call to a company to get in touch with someone, address an issue, or do some business. In these days of economy and business belt tightening, it is the rare company that still has a receptionist – either in person or on the phone. So, our calls are greeted by machine. And sometimes, (cue the spooky music), we are launched into “The Outer Limits” – the endless phone tree maze!

Check this one out. Like many of you, I have an elderly mother who needs a great deal of assistance with the tasks of living. I happen to handle all of her personal business, including paying the bills. She has moved recently, so address changes are an ongoing challenge. She is a retired state employee with a pension. (I will leave the state nameless.) I called the appropriate state office of retirement services to initiate the address change.

(Spooky music time! Theme music from Psycho? No! Jaws!)

I enter the phone tree. I am invited to enter Mother’s account number or social security number, neither of which I have at hand. I press “0”, attempting to bypass the tree and talk to an actual person. I am again invited to enter the aforementioned numbers. And again. I try entering anything, to move on and talk to a human. My entry is deemed unacceptable. I give up, hang up, and go find one of those numbers in Mother’s files.

Properly equipped with appropriate data, I call again. I proudly and carefully enter the necessary long number. The system helpfully reads it back to be and requests confirmation. It has doubled a couple of the digits! I retype, watching my entry VERY carefully. It does it again, missing another digit. How can this be? I know I entered it correctly. Third time’s the charm and, miracle of miracles, I progress.

They ask for tons more information, I forget exactly how much, but I get it all entered (multiple times in some cases – it keeps doubling digits) and the system finally rings through to a person. Five rings….now eight….I lose count. I am transferred to a recorded message and am informed that the person I am trying to contact has not yet set up the voice mail box and to press “0” for assistance. I do so, praying for a living human voice. Instead, I am routed all the way to the beginning of the #@$%^#&^* phone tree!

This is unbelievable! It’s bad enough for me, but consider for a moment the audience for whom this monstrosity is intended. Remember? This is the state’s Office of Retirement Services. It is likely to be contacted by people just like my mother – 84 years old, physically disabled, hard of hearing, and in the early stages of dementia. She would have been forced to give up the minute she couldn’t actually contact a live person. Her pension is her lifeline. What reaction from her would you expect? Tears and panic? Probably.

Let’s consider this from a business perspective. This abysmal phone tree is the first contact this organization’s customers have when they have important business to transact. If this were a for-profit business, rather than a state monopoly, would you want to do business with this organization?

Neither would I.

This morning, over breakfast, my husband brought a recent article in the Wall Street Journal to my attention. Entitled “The Price of Taxing the Rich”, it offers another perspective on the subject, pointing to a real danger in the rush to address current budget shortfalls by taxing them even more.

The basic premise of the article is this: An over reliance on income tax and capital gains tax collected from the rich is dangerous because this income is so volatile. The rich are hit far worse in a downturn and governments relying too heavily on them for revenue bear the brunt.

The result: Without addressing the overspending that comes out of boom times, states take it in the shorts and wind up with huge deficits. The article uses California as a case in point. As the subtitle reads, “The top 1% of earners fill the coffers of states like California and New York during a boom – and leave them starved for revenue in a bust.” An eye-opening chart included with the article indicates that 43.9% of California’s revenue comes from income taxes. And 45% of their income tax receipts come from the top 1% of income earners. Wow!

Bottom line? Well, Washington D.C. is tending to go the way of California. And that’s not good!

I sometimes feel like a voice crying in the wilderness on tax issues, especially given that I live in deep blue Washington State. However, I encourage my readers to check out this article, and as many others as they can on this difficult subject. As voters, we simply MUST become better informed before we cast those all important votes for the people who will be setting our tax laws. And this applies at ALL levels of government.

I had the pleasure of hearing an excellent speech the other day. I was attending a luncheon given by Seattle’s Women Business Owners. (Full disclosure – I am a long term member and just finished a three year stint on the board. It’s a great organization, worth checking out. End of shameless plug.) The speaker of the day was Brad Worthley. His topic and his expertise – customer service. Toward the end of his comments, he hit one of my current speech bugaboos. That is responding to “thanks” with “no problem”.

No problem? How did problems get into this? Whatever happened to that old standby? Remember? “You are welcome.” What’s wrong with that?

Brad suggested expunging the expression “no problem” from your own speech as well as the speech of all employees in your organization. Why? To improve customer service. I loved Brad’s suggested reply to receiving an expression of thanks. Not “no problem”. Not even “you’re welcome”.

When someone thanks you for your service, try saying, “It was my pleasure.”

Now, how would your customers react to that? I, for one, would react very well. I look forward to your comments.

Unless you have been hiding under a rock in Washington State, you are aware of the fact that there is an initiative on the ballot that will create our first state income tax. Bankrolled by Bill Gates, Sr. and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), it imposes stiff new income taxes on income above $200,000, or $400,000 for married couples. There’s a lot more to it than that, however. As always, the devil is in the details. There are also many other consequences of going this route. Consider these:

• We are one of only 9 states without an income tax. This is more than a benefit to each of us as residents. It also draws businesses here and keeps them here. Compare the job growth numbers of these nine states (18.2 %) to those states with the highest income taxes (8.4%). Are you looking for a job right now? Do we want to go this route and risk jobs in our state? I don’t think so.

• Think you will be spared the tax because you don’t earn $200K? Think again. There is a provision in the bill that would allow the legislature to extend the tax to everyone after two years. And this by a simple majority! Think our big-spending legislature would have any problem with this?

• Our state constitution specifically forbids an income tax. This initiative calls it an “excise�?? tax. Who do they think they are fooling? This is an end run around our constitution!

I could go on, but why? My biggest concern is this: At a time of severe economic crisis, with so many people feeling the pinch, it is way too easy to say, “Let’s soak the rich! They can afford it.�?? Then, people will vote for this idiocy and we will be stuck with it. Unfortunately, this will lead to unintended consequences that will hurt everyone. Don’t kid yourself that it will be otherwise!

There was an excellent opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago. Entitled “The Gates of Confiscation�??, it gives the most succinct analysis of the initiative and its likely results that I have seen. I urge my readers to find it and give it a thorough, thoughtful read.

If this convinces you to stand against this initiative, please pass the word! Stop this runaway train before it crashes!

I’ve had the pleasure of being onboard a Nordic Tug, so this news made me sad on more than one level. Most importantly for this blog post, it is an example worth considering in the context of our economy and what is being proposed to help it. I speak of tax increases, particularly the drive to raise taxes for the “wealthy�??.

There are two specific tax increases to consider here. First, there is the upcoming expiration of the Bush tax cuts, which will result in a huge, across the board tax increase as of January 1, 2011. (No, the Bush tax cuts were decidedly NOT just for the richest 1%. That is a political lie that has been repeated so often, and not challenged enough, that many believe it as truth. It is not.) There is talk of a delay, but there is also much talk of delaying all but the taxes that fall on the “wealthy�??. Second, there is an initiative on the Washington State ballot, proposed by Bill Gates Sr., that would initiate an income tax, again on the so-called “wealthy�??. This one bothers me on two levels. The first, that it is a blatant end run around our state constitution which expressly prohibits an income tax, I will set aside for the moment. The second problem it shares with the national debate on the Bush tax cuts, namely allowing them to expire for the “wealthy�??.

Why use that word in quotes? Because when you are talking about taxes, “wealthy�?? is a concept that depends on who defines it at the moment. It is also a fluid term that absolutely will change in time. To support that statement, one has only to read up on the history of the Federal Income Tax.

I am really tired of the class warfare rhetoric! This is America where everyone is supposed to have the opportunity to become really successful and wealthy by virtue of creativity, entrepreneurship and old-fashioned hard work. Why must we continually punish that success with ever higher taxes? Punish a behavior and you will get less of it. Reward it, and you will get more. We are currently rewarding non-work and punishing success. This is a really bad idea!!!

These two proposals, Federal and State, both set the bar for “wealthy�?? around the $250,000 per year mark, if I remember correctly. At that level, you hit two key constituencies that will get you more results just like the closing of Nordic Tug. Let me explain.

First, you will punish small business owners, a large proportion of who pay taxes at individual rates rather than corporate, since they are subchapter S corporations. Tax them more and you slowly kill the goose that has laid the golden American entrepreneurship egg throughout our history – that job creating machine that has fueled our amazing economic success.

Second, taxing the people with disposable income, i.e. those evil rich people, and they can’t buy things. That kills the market for products like Nordic Tugs. Now, before our natural envy of people with money kicks in, remember that their consumption is the fuel in the engine of that job creating machine.

A lot of people lost their jobs when Nordic Tug closed its plant, dedicated and highly skilled workers who took personal pride in creating a quality product. Contemplate that for a while before jumping to the conclusion that taxing the rich is a good idea.

I started with the largest, thickest dictionary on my shelf – Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary. That’s “unabridged�??, i.e. left alone, not shortened, nothing left out. Sounded like the right source to me.

What did I find? I found the venerable, and correct, noun – “incentive�??. No reference to “incentivize�??, or even “incent�??, which is a shortened version that at least sounds better, if just as incorrect.

I moved on to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. This was the dictionary my mother gave me in the 1960’s. It made a big splash at the time because it included all the naughty words, the swear words, and the four-letter words. Mother, being an English teacher, got a kick out of handing out dictionaries to both of her kids and all of her nieces and nephews on Christmas Day. (To the dismay of her siblings and siblings-in-law, she also informed each child that they could look up swear words in that dictionary. To her delight – no dismay here – , they all dove right in.)

Any dictionary that includes four-letter words ought to include newer English creations, Americanisms and/or slang, right? Wrong. No “incentivize�?? and no “incent�??. (It does include many other interesting words, however. I can still remember the day, shortly after the Christmas of the Dictionaries, when Mother called to me from the kitchen, “Margaret, look up chicken shit.�?? You can imagine the rest and, yes, it is there.)

I turned next to the World Wide Web. How did we ever exist without this resource? Here, I was more successful. They list newly created words, bastardized expressions, and illegitimate results of crimes such as verbicide. Dictionary.com defined it as a verb meaning “to give incentives to�??. They added that it originated in 1965-70 and was an “Americanism�??. (Is that good or bad? Maybe it depends on which side of the pond you are on.) They also quoted the World English Dictionary (their source being Collins English Dictionary), which defined it much the same, but spelled it “incentivise�??.

Then I found www.onelook.com. Jackpot! They obligingly search multiple dictionaries and present the searcher with a handy list of links. I worked my way down the list. Most indicated that the word originated in the business world, that source of so many examples of bad English, and that it was created in the 1960’s or 1970’s, then shortened in the 80’s or 90’s to “incent�??.

Beginning to get bored with the repetitious list, I worked my way down to the Urban Dictionary, www.urbandictionary.com. This one made my day, to quote Dirty Harry. They listed a couple of helpful definitions, along with examples of usage. Let me share at least one. You can surf over for more. First, their definition:

“A corporate-jargon non-word meaning “motivate,” coined in 1968. Some 10 years later, it was shortened to the equally annoying verb “incent.” Unfortunately, both are recognized by both Merriam-Webster and the OED. The only respectable form of the word is the noun “incentive.�??

And now, the example:

“I would like to motivate him to never say “incentivize” again by telling him I will rip his windpipe out of his throat the next time I hear him say it.�??

I roared with laughter! My husband entered my office for explanations and to share the laugh. My thanks to the Urban Dictionary! I will be surfing over there again, let me assure you. Of course, The Word Cop would never threaten such violence!

“Go ahead. Make my day……….�??

Part art as well as science, the ability to work well with subordinates isn’t something that should be taken for granted. Business owners, if you want a productive workplace, with loyal employees who deliver great work and stay with the company, pay attention to your first line managers. Make sure they get the guidance and training they need.

One of the more difficult tasks any supervisor or first line manager faces is delivering bad news to an employee. That news can range from “you didn’t do that right�?? to “you’re fired�?? and still be challenging. I got over the hump as new manager by reminding myself that, if I didn’t tell the employee he/she was doing something wrong and give them a chance to fix it, I was doing them a grave disservice.

Why do managers hesitate to say anything? The most basic reason is fear of confrontation. I believe this is the reason most times. I like to believe that people are basically good at heart and wouldn’t stoop to ignoring an employee in order to make him/her miserable enough to leave. Not only is this rather sadistic, it is counterproductive to the company. Poorly performing employees can do a lot of damage, both in their own jobs and by creating a miserable work environment for others.

My message to managers: Have the courage and the compassion to be direct with your employees. Don’t sidestep issues. They will fester and grow like cancers. If you need help delivering the bad news, get some. Talk to a business coach, a fellow manager, your own manager, an HR specialist. Think through your delivery carefully and rehearse it. The first time you have to do this will be the worst. It will get better with time.

Ultimately, your employees will appreciate your honesty and your guidance.

Today I learned of the untimely passing of George Shangrow, gifted Seattle musician and conductor. He was killed yesterday in a car crash on Highway 20 near Winthrop, in a driving rainstorm. He was only 59.

Many of my current friends and colleagues may not know this, but I began my career as a professional musician. After leaving music for the business world, I continued to pursue my music after work. I was privileged to perform many times with George and Orchestra Seattle/Seattle Chamber Singers. I worked with many other conductors in the Seattle area, too, and George was by far the best. He was so incredibly gifted that the rest of us had to scramble to keep up with him. He needed to be reminded occasionally that we needed a little more rehearsal than he did. Highly intelligent, George was also an incredible character. Working with him was a truly unique, challenging and entertaining experience

One of my most treasured memories was a performance of Mendelssohn’s Elijah. There is one movement that ends with a long decrescendo, slowly trailing off into hushed silence. George conducted it perfectly and the choir and orchestra followed. We froze at the end, as all good performers will, to prolong the effect. For a fraction of a second, the silence held. Then we heard it – an audible snore. We all choked – silently. I was in the choir, facing George. The look on his face as he attempted to maintain control was utterly priceless. I will never forget it. And I will never forget George.

My deepest condolences to his family and friends! Go with God, George. You will be missed.

Margaret Wright Purvine
Cellist & Mezzo Soprano, OS/SCS in the 1990′s

Rather than politics, my message today is one of awareness and preparedness. This isn’t something Americans, especially business people and business owners, can ignore. There is a tsunami of tax increases building, the first wave scheduled to make landfall on January 1, 2011. My message to my readers: Be aware and take action as appropriate. (Yes, that may include political action. I will leave that up to each of you.)

The tax cuts enacted during the Bush administration are expiring in January of 2011. Contrary to popular myth and political sound bites, these tax cuts were NOT just for the rich. They were across the board cuts in tax rates. All of these end in January, because the current Congress and Administration have chosen to allow it.

In addition to the tax rate increases (the bottom rate, for example, will go from 10% back to 15%), the corrections made to the marriage penalty expire. Married couples with both spouses working and making similar amounts of money will wind up being taxed more because they are married.

Another biggie is the Estate Tax, also commonly called the death tax. The rate goes back to 55%, if I remember correctly. In addition, if your estate tops $1 million (a very low ceiling when you consider the value of real estate in this area), you will have to pay Estate Tax. This number used to be about $5 million, if memory serves. (I promise to check exact numbers in a later post. Time presses this morning, but I want to initiate this topic without delay!)

I have two huge issues with the Estate Tax. (Sorry, but the opinion just had to creep in.) First, it is blatantly unfair. Those dollars have already been taxed during the deceased’s life time, with income tax, property tax, and capital gains taxes. Why tax them again? Second, this tax nails small business owners. Without careful tax planning and succession planning, many heirs wind up losing family farms and businesses because they can’t pay the taxes. The value is in land, fixtures, equipment, etc., all the things needed to run the business, not in cash. Many must liquidate critical assets or sell the business to raise the cash to pay the tax bill! Now, exactly how is this going to benefit our economy and the jobs picture, especially given that small businesses make up the lion’s share of the job creating engine of our economy? So, my major beef here is that this tax is really stupid!

Now, I realize that governments at all levels in this country are hurting for dollars, big time. Many are way past cutting fat out of their budgets and are slicing deeply into muscle. But time and again, they prove that raising taxes does NOT put more money into their treasuries. Au contraire. Taxes dampen the economy still further, resulting in less income, property, etc. to tax, so tax revenues drop. Read your history!

In contrast, tax cuts allow our economy to take off, producing more income and ultimately bringing more into the government coffers, even though they are collecting it at a lower rate. Again, history has proven this over and over. Now, isn’t a booming economy with lots more jobs and dollars for everyone, including government, the real goal?

Please, gentle readers, forgive this opinionated and VERY concerned blogger and give all of this some serious thought. We must all prepare for the coming onslaught. And, as appropriate, we must take action.

As an old-fashioned American patriot who finds it difficult to sing the Star Spangled Banner without choking up, I also celebrate by contemplating the founding of this country, the incredibly difficult and bloody struggle of our War for Independence, and the courage and wisdom of our founding fathers as they laid out a form of government.

Perhaps the greatest of the founding fathers was George Washington. So I took some time today to look up some of his words to share with my readers. First, on the subject of commerce, he had this to say, from a letter to Benjamin Harrison on October 10, 1784:

“A people… who are possessed of the spirit of commerce, who see and who will pursue their advantages may achieve almost anything.�??

To me, this speaks to the spirit of entrepreneurship. With energy and an environment that encourages commerce, a person can do great things. And in this country, we have!

On trade, he said this in his Farewell Address, September 19, 1796:

“Harmony, liberal intercourse with all Nations, are recommended by policy, humanity and interest. But even our Commercial policy should hold an equal and impartial hand: neither seeking nor granting exclusive favours or preferences; consulting the natural course of things; diffusing and diversifying by gentle means the streams of Commerce, but forcing nothing; establishing with Powers so disposed; in order to give trade a stable course.�??

Sound like a recommendation for a stable economy – regulation by “gentle means�??, “forcing nothing�??. Words of wisdom for Washington D.C.? Especially now as the pendulum is swinging from too little regulation to way too much?

In a letter to the Marquis de Lafayette, dated June 19, 1788, he said this:

“I hope, some day or another, we shall become a storehouse and granary for the world.�??

We have. Let’s not lose it!

Let me close with a couple more quotes from our first, and one of our greatest Presidents, George Washington, a man I greatly admire.

From his Annual Message, December 1793:

“If we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known, that we are at all times ready for War.�??

One more from his Farewell Address, September 19, 1796, words about Patriotism:

“Citizens by birth or choice of a common country, that country has a right to concentrate your affections. The name of American, which belongs to you, in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of Patriotism, more than any appellation derived from local discriminations.�??

Amen. Happy Birthday, America!