Dear Readers, this will be my last regular "Perspective" column. After two years and about a dozen articles, I will be taking a break to pursue some new responsibilities in my job. Though I will continue to be involved in mail, it will be only one of my responsibilities. So this seems a good time to pass the baton.
When Mailing Systems Technology Editor Dan O'Rourke offered me the opportunity to write this column, I was flattered but a little perplexed. Dan and I had never met, and the only writing of mine that he'd seen was on the cuni-mail email list to which we both subscribed. Either I was a much better writer than I thought or Dan was really desperate. I've suspected all along that it was the latter. Certainly, he took a risk by recruiting me and even more so by telling me I could write about anything I wanted.
My first article probably did little to reassure him. Expecting perhaps an insightful essay on the future of the mail business or a penetrating analysis of the latest rate case, he instead got a movie review. Granted it was a review of Kevin Costner's The Postman, but I'm sure he began right then to draw up a list of possible replacements. But hewing to advice to new writers to stick to what you know best, my subsequent articles were more directly related to mail. Dan, I'm sure, breathed a sigh of relief.
Writing for Mailing Systems Technology has been a challenging and fulfilling endeavor. Many times I found myself staring at my computer screen in the wee hours of the morning, eyes glazed over, straining to sculpt a phrase or wring some clarity from a handful of disjointed sentences. In these long, dark nights of the soul, I cursed whatever arrogance made me think I could be a writer. And believing that Dan had truly been desperate to hire me, I cursed him for taking advantage of my bloated ego. (One curses editors but quickly retracts the curse. No one wants to bite the hand that feeds.)
But for every moment like this, there were many others far more rewarding. The sense of pride in a well-written paragraph or an erudite turn of phrase. The way that writing forces you to master your subject and discipline your thinking. And perhaps most valuable of all, hearing from readers that my blathering was occasionally helpful.
But enough reminiscing. I thought I would take the opportunity of my last regular column to look broadly at how the mail business has changed in the closing decades of the 20th century and muse about the future.
24 Years of Mailing Innovation
My first job in the mail business was as a supervisor of a manual inserting operation at a large bulk mail house in
And what changes there have been in 24 years! It's hard to imagine now, but before automation, all bulk mailings were hand sorted. There was no software of which to speak and no technology more sophisticated than an inserting machine. It's fair to say that in the middle 50 years of the 20th century, mailing technology changed very slowly. But in the last 25 years, the pace of change increased dramatically, and in the 90s, it has absolutely gone through the roof. This mirrors, of course, a trend in society as a whole.
When things change slowly, one can predict the future at least the immediate future with reasonable certainty: It will be much like the past. But when change is moving at a breakneck pace, as it is today, all bets are off. Anything can happen. Seven years ago, the World Wide Web was a twinkle in a software engineer's eye. Today, it has practically conquered the world. The "e-conomy" barely existed four years ago, but now is the most rapidly growing sector of the economy and is generally credited with the unprecedented growth of the US economy in the late 90s.·
It's that "anything can happen" reality that has the Postal Service worried as it should. Even the most technologically clueless can see that electronic communication is in the ascent and that traditional hardcopy mail will no longer hold the place it has in our society and our economy. Beyond that, however, uncertainties abound. All the crystal balls are hazy.
USPS Struggles with Its Fate
This has very real implications for the role of the Postal Service in our society. Like any business, the Postal Service knows that its place in the future is not assured. IBM, AT&T and other giants of the past were humbled by developments they failed to anticipate or to which respond. The same fate may befall the behemoth of the 90s, Microsoft. Despite its quasi-governmental status, there's no reason to believe that the Postal Service is immune to a similar fate, and USPS executives know it.
In recognition of this, the Postal Service has launched several new business initiatives in recent years, some directly tied into mail products but others much farther from traditional lines of business. Recent ventures include an electronic bill payment service, electronic document delivery, brokering bulk mailings over the Internet and more.
While some of these initiatives have raised eyebrows, a few have generated harsh criticism that the Postal Service should stick to its traditional role and leave electronic communication to the private sector. But on the face of it, this is a recipe for disaster. What executive in her right mind would suggest in these turbulent times that her company stick to what worked in the past? (Answer: one who will soon be unemployed.) Yet this is exactly what some critics would have the Postal Service do.
I don't buy it. While there is some potential for the Postal Service to use its quasi-governmental status to unfair advantage, the alternative, the status quo, is potentially much worse in the long run. Moreover, the possibilities for USPS funny business can be contained through existing regulatory processes. In other words, it's possible for the playing field to be reasonably level.
One possible outcome is that one or more of these ventures will fail. So what if they do? The USPS would either go back to the drawing board or concede that it doesn't have what it takes to succeed in that particular line of business. Either outcome provides valuable lessons.
But what if the USPS does succeed in one of these ventures? Moreover, what if it succeeds in circumstances where most observers would agree, even grudgingly, that success is based on merit versus unfair advantage. Would that not demonstrate the USPS' fitness to serve that market according to all the accepted rules of our competitive economy?
The trouble with all this, of course, is that it's very theoretical. In reality, it's hard to imagine the USPS capturing any new market based strictly on merit because the USPS still hasn't got all that it takes to succeed in the rough and tumble business world. For every advantage bestowed by its monopoly position, there are numerous disadvantages related to being, in essence, a federal agency. Primary among these and perhaps the USPS' greatest internal challenge, is its corporate culture, which is, well, not very corporate. Things have improved noticeably in the 90s, but the USPS is still far from where it needs to be as a business which leads me to postal legislative reform.
Postal Reform's Uncertainty
If you accept that the USPS must venture beyond its traditional markets in order to survive, then it stands to reason that the Postal Service needs to be free of unreasonable constraints on its ability to operate more like a business. At a recent National Postal Forum lunch break, I happened to share a lunch table with someone from the General Services Administration. A policy analyst recently assigned to work on postal legislative issues, she was attending the NPF to learn more about the mail business. I sounded off on the need for postal legislative reform, arguing that Congress should do this and do that. A Washington veteran, she just shrugged. "That's not how Congress works," she said plaintively. "Congress doesn't know how to prevent problems. It just responds when things are broken, by which time it's often too late." And of course she's right.
While foreign postal services have been granted new freedoms to respond to the "new economy," little has changed for the U.S. Postal Service, the world's largest. Between Congress and the masses of cash flush lobbyists that roam its halls, postal reform has largely been a case of gridlock. If this goes on for much longer, it could become a case of fiddling while Rome burns.
Lest this sound like a paid advertisement for the Postal Service, I should say that I have my own reservations about postal reform. Near the top of my list is executive · compensation. Few would argue that the top executives of a $60 billion enterprise are worth more than $150,000 a year, but how much are they worth? Does postal reform mean multi-million dollar stock options, lavish perks and golden parachutes for Postal Service executives? Compared to executives in other industrial countries, executives in the US make obscene amounts of money. Many corporate boards have lost all sense of the relationship between corporate performance and executive compensation. If being more businesslike means copying the worst aspects of American business practice, well, that's where I draw the line on postal legislative reform.
Unlimited Possibilities
So those are a few thoughts about issues that I believe will be important as the 21st century gets underway. This is an exciting time to be in this business because a lot of things are going to change over the next 10 to 20 years. Just remember anything can happen.
In closing, I would like to thank Mailing Systems Technology Editor Dan O'Rourke for giving me the opportunity to write for the magazine, for his courage in giving me carte blanche and for his infinite patience with my appalling lack of adherence to his very reasonable editorial deadlines. Thanks, too, to the magazine's editorial staff for its oh-so-gentle editing style and for repairing some of my more tortured prose.
Bill McCart is the mail services manager at the
Editor's Note: Mailing Systems Technology would like to thank Bill for sharing his mailing experience and expertise over the past two years to educate mailers and lead the industry as it continues its upward climb, gaining more respect and prestige.
