February 2, 1995
Dear Editor:
This letter is a response to the article "Problems served to SCGB," (Dec. 13, 1994). Some have said that the article has brought poor PR for the Student Center and its vendors. We are not in the business of PR. We are here to provide services. Some vendors have expressed that the article did not portray them fairly and said the numbers were skewed.
We have to take the excuses away. We have to create an environment where people can't blame anyone else for the situation they're in -- where they see they make a real difference, where there's no gray area. But can it happen, it is said that communicating is one of the most difficult challenges in any business, because people hear what they want -- not what is said. As a third party, the Gater and its article made aware the problems with the process -- basically, a thorough sense of what's going wrong.
It is my job to make the Student Center a better facility for students, faculty and staff. In order to do this, we have to establish a working relationship. A step toward that direction is to achieve consensus on an informal standard where people make specific commitments to one another. They agree to carry their weight by meeting those standards. Without these commitments, there is no basis for the relationship, just different forms of manipulation and coercion. Someone once said that if you can get people beyond the day-to-day issues, if you can appeal to something they really want to do, they'll blow by every obstacle. Thus, we can come out, we can see the whole field before us. We know who is where, how the relationship is unfolding, and what each of us has to do to make sure we keep moving closer to the goal line. In the words of Mary Parker Follett, "the first test of business administration...is whether you have a business with all its parts so coordinated...so interlocking...that they make a working unit."