The Future of Success (24 page)

But Jennifer has no grounds to complain about her plight or her flight. The cost of her trip was far less than the cost of Michelle’s. It was probably less, in fact, than Jennifer has paid ever before. Airlines are under increasing competitive pressure to reduce prices for budget travelers, and technological improvements like highly fuel-efficient engines, advanced aerodynamics, and computerized reservations and tracking systems have allowed them to do so. But Jennifer also received less personal service than before, because she and other budget-conscious customers like her are more interested in paying a low price than in being pampered. Jennifer chose to pay less, and so she got less attention.

“The principle ‘you get what you pay for’ is recognized in America and around the world,” says Donald Casey, executive vice president of Trans World Airlines, in explaining the airline’s new strategy.
¹⁷
TWA, like most airlines, is beefing up its business-class service—adding more flight attendants, more lounge attendants, more pampering services, more personal conveniences, more attention overall. But instead of hiring additional people to provide all this attention, most airlines are reallocating their existing personnel to focus more of their attention on customers who want to pay for it, and less on customers who don’t.

There’s a simple economic reason why airlines are lavishing more attention on elite business travelers like Michelle and less on budget travelers like Jennifer. It’s the same reason why Merrill Lynch wants its brokers to shift their attention to the high rollers: because that’s where the revenues are. In 1999, the top tier of business travelers represented just 9 percent of all airline passengers, but they contributed 44 percent of airline industry revenues. So even as airlines are battling to offer better bargains to budget travelers like Jennifer, they’re also busily courting people like Michelle who will pay a lot for personal attention.

As long as the Michelles of the world continue to want more personal attention and seem willing to pay for it, they’ll get it, along with higher fares. As long as the Jennifers want better bargains and are eager to shop for them, the cost of discount travel to them will continue to fall. Michelle will receive ever more lavish personal service; Jennifer will get the benefits of advancing technology with fewer and fewer personal frills. Michelle and Jennifer are, in effect, paying for two different products. Jennifer is paying just to get there. Michelle is paying both to get there
and
to be pampered along the way.

Incidentally, it’s doubtful that Michelle paid for her luxurious trip out of her own pocket. It was a business trip, which means that it was paid for in part by Michelle’s client (or, more accurately, its shareholders, if a publicly held company) and in part by other taxpayers, who always fill the gap that’s left when companies deduct business costs from their taxable earnings. Michelle made the trip for business rather than for pleasure, even though she may have got some pleasure out of it. But the cost of the pleasure is a business cost, too. This is the coming pattern. Exquisite personal attention is lavished on people who are busy earning a lot of money,
as
they earn it. The pleasures of being pampered at a five-star hotel, joining clients to watch the World Series from a catered skybox, or dining with suppliers in a swank restaurant come as tax-free perks enjoyed in pursuit of money. Companies are willing to foot the bill for all this attention in order to attract and retain talented people, appreciative clients, and reliable suppliers, especially since the rest of the tax-paying public is picking up part of the tab.

PAYING TO BE PAMPERED

In a world of more technology and less time, the essence of luxury is to have time lavished on you by another human being—the charming concierge who personally arranges your stay; the hotel housekeeper who provides fresh flowers, folds the towels just so, fluffs the pillow, lays out the soft cotton kimono and plush terry slippers, and asks if you need anything else before bedtime; the wake-up call at 6 a.m. from a real human being instead of a voice-synthesized clock. It’s the restaurant maître d’ who knows your name and ushers you to your favorite table, where waiters hover and the wine steward offers his personal recommendation as the chef prepares your favorite dish. It’s the doorman of your co-op apartment who obligingly hands you the package that has been delivered, and inquires after the family.

The most exquisite pampering, and the most expensive, comes in the form of a person who acts as a trusted friend and confidant. Jeffrey Kalinsky, owner of the exclusive Atlanta Mall fashion boutique, handpicks items with a particular customer’s tastes in mind, then ships them to the customer to try on. He mails follow-up notes advising the customer how to wear the new purchases, answers late-night emergency phone calls about what to wear, lavishes gifts on his best customers and accompanies them to Europe to view fashion shows. Several of Kalinsky’s customers fly from New York to Atlanta expressly to visit him. “Jeffrey .         .         . encourages you to try things you’d never try. He has a total vision,” gushes one. And he trains his twenty-eight employees to do the same, perfecting the art of providing exquisite personal attention, the art of making people feel cared for.
¹⁸

If you’re one of the growing number of people who pay several hundred dollars a month to a “personal coach,” chances are you’re after more than advice. You also want someone who’s solely interested in your well-being—a
friend
you can count on to be there solely for you, perhaps because most of your real friends are too busy. “Best friends are wonderful to have. But is your best friend a professional who you will trust to work with you on the most important aspect[s] of your life and/or business?” asks an advertisement for the Personal and Professional Coaches Association. If you hire a personal coach, you can “[h]ave both—a best friend and a coach.”
¹⁹

That these “friends” have an ulterior motive besides friendship has not, apparently, dampened the enthusiasm of the people who seek them. The number of personal coaches has doubled each year since the early 1990s, according to Thomas Leonard, founder of Houston-based Coach University, which has already trained thousands of them. Valerie Olson, of Minnesota, earns close to six figures a year coaching thirty clients, each of whom pays her $250 a month for four half-hour sessions. “Coaches are trained to be completely focused on a client’s agenda—in human relationships,” she says. They don’t try to psychoanalyze their clients. It’s a matter of listening, providing empathy, giving total attention.
²⁰

In addition to personal coaches, there has been an upsurge in personal counselors, spiritual guides, spiritual advisers, and therapists. Bill Clinton made use of several spiritual advisers during his White House years but, to the best of my knowledge, no therapists. That may be because it’s perfectly acceptable to utilize a coach, counselor, spiritual guide or adviser. Most of us occasionally feel the need for an attentive confidant and cannot always find a friend or family member to do the job adequately. But someone who visits a therapist is still assumed to have a “problem.”

Until recent years, health spas were places where people of leisure vacationed, sometimes for months. They “took the waters” at sulfur springs, inhaled pine-scented air in remote scenic locations, ambled off on long walks in the woods. But most of the people who can afford such things no longer have the time for them, and yet still yearn to be taken care of. This explains the growing popularity of urban spas with staffs who lavish attention on the stressed-out affluent. The number of personal trainers doubled in the 1990s to more than 100,000. Add in massage therapists, Rolfers, trainers, personal estheticians, stylists, pedicurists, aromatherapists, and aerobics instructors and you have a small army of personal caregivers to the affluent.

The new saying is “Be good to yourself,” meaning that if you have the means to do so, you should not skimp on paying for such services. What’s really being bought and sold is not a series of exercises (you could exercise alone in your home or apartment), nor is it advice (you could get it off the Internet or from a book), but the pleasant feeling of being cared for by another human being.

Recall how well premature infants responded to being massaged. When the body is stroked, rubbed, or held, stress hormones seem to be reduced in the same way they are when someone gets the full attention of someone else. Staff of the Pacific Athletic Club, headquartered in Redwood City, California, travel to executive meetings in Silicon Valley to provide in-chair massages. Chic environs like New York’s Reebok Sports Club or the Elizabeth Arden Red Door Salon Spa send your clothing off for a quick dry cleaning while treating your body to such wonders as Sea Spa Pedicures (described as “facials for the feet”), Aromatherapy Salt Glow Escapes (coarse-salt body rubdowns, followed by a moisturizing lotion), Double Oxygen Treatments (cleansing the face with alpha-hydroxy fruit acid, exfoliation, and massage, followed by a fifteen-minute blast of oxygen that “boosts cell metabolism”), Hot Milk and Almond Pedicures (in which one’s feet are placed in a large bowl of warm whole milk, then rubbed with a mixture of sea salt and almond oil to rid them of dead skin), and Ginger Rubs (arms, legs, and back covered with grated ginger mixed with oil, designed to “detoxify” the skin and heat the body). At New York’s Felissimo, on West 56th Street, you can even treat your pup to aromatherapy designed to “revive your beloved dog with a euphoric feeling of happiness and joyful responsiveness.”

What’s also being bought and sold is a relationship—the easy familiarity with which your personal trainer greets you, the friendship of a massage therapist, the little confidences shared with your Rolfer or even the person who parks your car. “Members develop relationships with the [parking] attendants the way they do with their trainers. It really adds to that service aspect,” says Phil Swain, director of operations at Los Angeles’s Sports Club.
²¹

ATTENTIVE CARE OR CUSTODIAL CARE

Busy people often lack the time and energy for giving family members the quality of caring attention they need—listening to them, talking to them, massaging their tired muscles, making them feel cared for, respected, loved, acknowledged. Some of this caring attention can be bought, even though the paid givers aren’t motivated by familial duty. Familial bonds don’t necessarily generate more caring attention than financial ones. Both can be nurturing; both can be abusive.

But personal attention is the first thing to go when a family can’t pay any more than what’s absolutely necessary, and when government insurance programs or employer-provided benefits are squeezed. No-frills medical care is coming to mean lots of technology but fewer humans offering caring attention. In fact, medical care is evolving into a two-tiered system—one comprising doctors paid directly by patients to provide them with lots of time and attention; the other, of doctors paid at a lower rate by health insurers to fix up patients as rapidly as possible. The income of doctors (as well as nurses and nurse’s aides) in this second tier depends on how many people they deal with in a given period of time rather than on people’s subjective feelings of how well they’re being cared for. (Apparently female doctors in this second tier are generally more willing to sacrifice additional income for extra minutes with a client or patient than are male doctors. One recent study found that male doctors dispense with most of their patients in less than eleven minutes each, while female doctors match this remarkable pace with only a third of their cases.
²²
)

Yet, in fact, personal attention
isn’t
a frill. The research cited at the start of this chapter suggests that people who are sick or disabled, as well as the elderly and young children (and perhaps all of us), are likely to benefit physically and emotionally from a caring relationship. Without it, they and their health may deteriorate. Sociologist Timothy Diamond tells of a night-shift nursing-home aide who popped in to check the vital signs of one eighty-seven-year-old resident, asking, “Is there anything I can do for you, Rose?” “Yes,” responded Rose. “Stay with me.” The aide couldn’t comply with Rose’s request because he had twenty-nine other residents to check on and record the vital signs of.
²³
Yet all Rose really wanted and needed was human attention. Rose’s vital signs will probably decline faster without someone keeping her company.

Nursing homes provide custodial care, but not much attentive care. Custodial care aims merely to keep people safe who might be endangered if left on their own. Attentive care builds a relationship with them, relieving them from the stress of isolation, interacting with them, sometimes touching and holding them. Working families are often hard-pressed to provide either form of care, but the attentive kind is a luxury.

The elderly population in the United States is growing by 2.7 percent a year and will soar when the baby boomers turn sixty-five, starting around 2011. This elderly boom will impose even more of a burden on working families already hard-pressed by a new economy to give adequate attention to their children. The nation as a whole will have fewer young people to take care of every older person. In other advanced nations whose populations of young people are flat or declining, as in Japan, the percentage of elderly is already rising precipitously. Keeping all these aging people safe will be difficult—bathing and feeding them, cleaning bedsores, lifting them out of bed, changing their diapers. (I recently heard about the invention of a robot for nursing homes, capable of doing some of these operations.) But giving the elderly adequate personal attention will be a larger challenge. Currently, the U.S. government pays two-thirds of the cost of caring for America’s 1.6 million nursing-home residents (mostly through Medicaid), yet very little of the cost of long-term home care or community-based elderly day care—both of which would keep most elderly as safe, but also allow for more attentive care by friends and family members. And even when government insurance does pay for home health care (usually through Medicare), it’s strictly for medical procedures, not for attention.
²⁴