Tomsky wrote that one of his superiors, Andy, developed a technique of making an angry guest back down by getting more mad about the situation than they were. "'I just came back from lunch, and my room has not been cleaned yet,'" a customer would say. "'Anyone planning on cleaning it!? Is anyoone actually working here!?' 'WHAT?!' Andy hissed. 'I cannot BELIEVE they FAILED TO SERVICE YOUR ROOM, SIR.... NO, no. NO, sir. Trust me, it is NOT OKAY AT ALL. SOMEONE IS GOING TO LOSE THEIR JOB FOR THIS,' Andy yelled, jamming his finger down hard on the front desk and ripping the phone receiver from the cradle to dial housekeeping... The guest waved his hands before the desk and said, 'It's not really that bad. Can't we just get it cleaned now? That would be fine.'"
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
