When a check is a personal statement

Nation's Business, March, 1998 by Michael Barrier

We have in hand a catalog from Styles Check Co. of Lake Forest, Calif. It offers an unusually large number of designs for illustrated checks, at prices starting at $13.95 for 200, considerably higher than what you'd pay for plainvanilla cheeks.

You can buy a set with three rotating designs devoted to cats, for instance, or horses, or -- if your tastes are a little more exotic -- reptiles. (Actually, paying your taxes on a Gila-monster check would be kind of satisfying, wouldn't it?) There are checks adorned with playing cards and dice, the perfect choice for those who must cover their gambling losses. And there's even a set devoted to Joe Montana, the former pro quarterback.

There are checks with job associations: hair-styling, medical, dental. And there are checks with business themes, including leadership and persistence, that are like miniposters with slogans at the top. (To receive a catalog, call Styles at 1-800-356-0353).

A spokesman for the Federal Reserve tells us that the Fed -- which is in charge of such things -- doesn't care what's on a check as long as the check is of a standard size and "machine-readable" so that the Feds sorting machines can pick up the coding at the bottom. (For that matter, you can write a check on a shirt if your bank will accept it; but the Fed will charge the bank more for handling it.)

In other words, there's nothing to prevent you from using your checks to proclaim your affinity for cats, or Joe Montana, or, for that matter, a business. If a big company were to offer you free checks -- with an advertising message on each one, so that each check you wrote was a plug for Wal-Mart, perhaps, or Coca-Cola -- that would be OK, say the regulators.

No doubt there are more-efficient ways to advertise, but it's a little surprising that you don't see checks of that kind, given the tendency for a selling message to work its way into any empty space. The Internet is increasingly full of such examples. (You can download free software for sending and receiving electronic mail if you're willing to take ads along with it.)

Our favorite, though, is what happens when you call a business and get put on hold. Instead of listening to someone's poor choice of a radio station, you're increasingly likely to hear a slickly produced commercial for the business that's making you wait. We spoke recently by phone (of course) with John Bersin, whose Tulsa, Okla.-based company, Impressions on Hold, produces on-hold messages for more than 10,000 clients across the country -- businesses of all kinds. "The only qualifier is that they receive phone calls and place people on hold," Bersin says, "which happens in every kind of business. We have everything from funeral homes to car dealerships."

Bersin's staff includes a dozen program managers and writers, who turn out 1,000 messages a month. He has three recording studios on the premises, all in use daily from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Customers buy the company's services for one, three, or five years -- most often three, at $139 a month. In return, they get "digital playback equipment" and "as many changes [of message] as they want," Bersin says, at no extra cost.

So insinuating are Impressions on Hold's messages, Bersin says, that some of them actually achieve that nirvana of commercial messages, the blessed realm inhabited by such things as those funny European TV commercials that Johnny Carson used to show. In that realm, the commercial message is no longer the parasite, but the host; it's what you came for.

Says Bersin: "We've actually had customers say, `Hey, I was listening, can you put me back on hold?' -- which is always a compliment."

Back To The Source

They come in a never-ending stream, all those business books with recipes for success. You're likely to get the feeling after a while that the authors are recycling a handful of sturdy ideas -- and you'll be right.

For that reason, it's a bit of a shock to encounter a business thinker whose ideas were new, and who was in fact the source -- many generations removed now -- of a lot of today's slickly packaged advice that's making big money for its authors.

That thinker was Frederick Winslow Taylor, whose concept of "scientific management" still reverberates in thousands of American businesses. Forget Marx, management guru Peter Drucker said; it's Taylor who belongs with Darwin and Freud among the shapers of the modern world.

We've been reading about Taylor reoently in The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency, by Robert Kanigel (Viking, $34.95). It's a good story, and after reading it, you may be inclined to buy fewer of the business books that offer only pale shadows of Taylor's ideas.