Patrick Donahoe
US Postmaster General
By Eric M.
Seidel, CEO
The Media
Trainers®, LLC
It’s a
quotation many of us first heard as children and related it to the Pony
Express: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these
couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”
According
to Wikipedia: “This phrase was a translation by Prof. George H. Palmer, Harvard
University, from an ancient Greek work of Herodotus describing the Persian
system of mounted postal carriers c. 500 B.C.E.”
But, that’s
a different story for another day.
Unfortunately,
Herodotus did not take into consideration the Internet, email, social networks
and, of course, budget deficits. The U.S. Postal Service has been hemorrhaging at
staggering rates for years now. So, Saturday mail delivery (excluding packages)
will be going the way of the Pony Express as of this coming August.
And
Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe is the guy who has to take the heat on this
one. He’s not the most compelling (read: exciting) speaker you’ll ever see
and/or hear, but, in this case, that serves him well. He also appears to be
fairly unflappable.
In a Fox Business Network interview, Donahoe held his own quite well when confronted
by an aggressive Denis Kneale. However, for the sake of brevity and technique, I’d
like to select two specific Q&As in the broadcast.
First, an obvious
question, why not privatize the service completely? Sell it to corporate
America. Donahoe’s response, in essence, some people would be left out,
especially in rural areas where delivery is not necessarily cost-effective. That
was a good message for many viewers.
Another question:
there’s so much junk mail, why not raise the rates for the senders?
Unfortunately, Donahoe failed to answer this one, although he made a terrific
case for the effectiveness of “junk mail” and the ROI it provides the
businesses that mail it out…which would lead you to believe, raising the
postage rate for junk mail could be one helpful solution. But, because he
failed to respond to the specific question, a really good answer may have been
lost on his audience.
Spin or
evasion are counter-productive. There are ways to be responsive to questions
you don’t like, and still stay on message.
Patrick
Donahue did an okay job with most of the questions, but on this one, he swung
and missed.
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