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Slats Grabski

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I found Slats Grabski at his usual booth near the back of the bar, but for a change he wasn’t reading the sports section. Instead he was looking at a Newsweek story about Kosovo.

“Hiya,” he said. “Hey, I just figured out why 80 percent of your beginner skiers drop out after Day One.”

“O.K., explain.”

“You know how countries like Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union and even Czechoslovakia and Ireland splinter into squabbling ethnic factions when there’s no strong central authority to make ‘em cooperate? Looks to me like what happened when ski resorts were getting started.

“We all know what the real problem is. You show up to a ski area for the first time and stand in line for 40 minutes to rent gear for the whole family, and once you get to the desk it still takes another half hour to get the paperwork done and the gear fitted. Then you go stand in another line for a half hour to get everyone into ski school, and there’s another ton of paperwork to do, especially for the kids. Then you stand in line 10 minutes for lift tickets, and 15 minutes in the cafeteria for hot chocolate, and your wife waits 10 minutes to get into the can. Then at 10 o’clock you wait out by the ski school meeting place for half an hour while the instructors get their crap together. So it’s two hours, or closer to three, and you haven’t skied yet.”

“Bummer.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. We’ve tried to get all this stuff consolidated into one operation, but the rental guys and the ski school guys say they can't make it work. They have their own systems.”

“Bingo. And why is that?”

“They developed their systems at different times, with different people and different equipment.”

“Why?”

“Because they started out as independent businesses?”

“Yeah. And when the ski resort acquired them, why weren’t they forced to adopt a single system that every department could use?”

“Weak management?”

“Yup.”

“Well, we have strong management now, but no one wants to change the system.”

“You’re running this company like it’s Yugoslavia. You got no Marshall Tito to make the Serbs and Croats and Muslims get along.”

“You’re exaggerating.”

“Am I? Who founded the ski school and when?”

“Um, that would have been Sepp Hinkel. Back in ‘47.”

“Where did he come from?”

“Austria.”

“What did he do in the war?”

“I don't want to know.”

“Who started the rental operation and when?”

“Bernie Klein. About the same time.”

“How did he get here?”

“His dad had a sporting goods store in town. Bernie just hauled some of the inventory up here and set up shop.”

“Did Bernie and Sepp have any reason to drink beer together?”

“Umm, no.”

“Who owned the place? Who sold the lift tickets?”

“Old man Tanta started it on his own land. He hired some waspy kid from Middlebury to do the sales and administration stuff.”

“Any reason Seppi and Bernie should have listened to the Middlebury kid?”

“Umm, no.”

“Okay, so the key businesses here—I guess you’d call them profit centers—were run right from the start by guys who had nothing in common ethnically and no interest in hanging out together. And old man Tanta wasn’t Marshall Tito. He didn’t see trouble coming. Anyway, the lines weren't long enough back then for anyone to worry about it. His problem was to figure out how to bring in more skiers, not how to handle the crowds, ‘cause there weren’t any, yet.”

“But now the ski school guys and the rental guys and the ticket guys talk to each other in the Wednesday morning management meeting.”

“So? You still got no Marshall Tito. Not one of those managers wants to turn over any control to someone who would train a sales staff to sell all three products.”

“Well, there's more to it than that.”

“Bullshit. You still have a system where if the ski school director yells about the crappy rental equipment his customers get, the rental manager feels free to spit in his eye.

“Kids show up to ski school without lift tickets.

“You still treat your best customers as if they might be criminals trying to sneak onto the lift for free.

“The system is broke, but no one wants to fix it. If some Marshall Tito came along and ordered these guys to figure out a new system, you’d just hear a lot of whining. The ski school director says, ‘Ski lessons are too complicated! We need our own people to sell them!’

“The sales manager says, ‘Too many security issues with lift tickets! We need our own systems!’

“The rental shop guy says, ‘We gotta have the rental guys hands on with the customers from the start.’

“And the comptroller says, ‘We got no budget for a new system!’”

“Well, I guess it is a sort of cultural problem.”

“Right. And the screwy thing is that it’s happened before in this business, and keeps happening every generation.”

“What do you mean?”

“After World War I there was this big squabble between the Alpine countries and the Nordic countries over who was going to control European skiing. The Nordic guys dragged their feet for 20 years before they allowed Alpine racing into the Olympics. That was basically a culture war between the Scandihoovians and the Lugers, until Hitler settled it by invading Norway. These guys just didn’t want to talk to each other.

“Then in the 70s, you got freestylers and alpine racers throwing rocks at each other, and telemarkers throwing rocks at everybody. Don’t get me started on snowboarders. This business is founded on contempt for the guy who uses a different kind of binding.”

“So what do we do?”

“Talk to your marketing guy. Marketing spends big bucks to drag people up here, then all the other departments show ‘em a hard time. So the newbies never come back. Maybe they go bowling. Bowlers get bad rental shoes, but at least they can drink beer while they wait for an alley. You know, if I was a marketing director I’d make damn sure my incentive package was based on the number of new bodies I produced, not on the retention rate.

“But if I was Marshall Tito, I’d make sure everyone’s incentive was tied to retention.”