Good Image For the City

0

Some in the business community may have some qualms about Antonio Villaraigosa. But his recent trade mission to Asia was the kind of gesture that, for the most part, appears to have gone down well with business folk.


The conduit of business between Los Angeles and Asia is an important one, and the mayor helped widen it a little. He unveiled a tourism office in Beijing, the only city to have one there. He opened the first “Made in L.A.” clothing section in a department store in Shanghai. He touted Korean investment in Koreatown, and in Tokyo, he unveiled a program that will tout tourism in Los Angeles in thousands of Japanese convenience stores.


It didn’t hurt that he was accompanied by a group of L.A. business leaders (including the Business Journal’s publisher, Matt Toledo) who may use the trip to dream up new business ties in Asia. (Those who accompanied the mayor paid their own way.)


Sure, some could say the trade mission produced little of substance. After all, many of the business links Villaraigosa touted were already in the works. And some may question the half million or so taxpayer dollars spent on the trip.


Still, Villaraigosa demonstrated in a tangible way that business vitality is important to him. Since he’s a former labor leader, that goes a long way toward easing any business-community qualms about him.


Beyond that, the position of mayor tends to be more PR-oriented than other political positions. Villaraigosa excels in that arena; his charm creates a good image for the city.




Are you overwhelmed by e-mail?


I’ve talked to a couple of business people lately who said they more or less ignore their e-mail, since they get such a torrent of them. I don’t ignore my e-mails, but I’m starting to envy those who do.


I remember a survey back in 2000 in which executives said they got an average of 35 e-mails a day. I marveled back then at how much time an exec must spend dealing with 35 whole e-mails every day. How na & #271;ve I was. Now, of course, you probably get 35 an hour.


I recall an article about four or five years ago that began with an anecdote of a worker who returned from a two-week vacation to discover he had 400 or maybe 500 e-mails in his in-basket. He was so shocked and overwhelmed that he quickly deleted them all. Now, I have 400 or 500 on a typical Monday morning.


The problem is that even with a spam-catcher, too many e-mails of marginal pitches, male enhancements and unalloyed jibberish slip through, clogging up inboxes everywhere. It is becoming ever-more time consuming to pick through all that electronic flotsam to discover the few e-mails you want to read.


If you apply the old time-benefit rule, you may conclude that it’s just too time consuming for the benefit. I have heard a couple people not many, just a couple who ignore their inboxes and say, “If it’s really important, someone will call me.”


E-mail has been the preferred mode of business communication for years, of course. Now you have to wonder how much longer that may last.



Charles Crumpley is editor of the Business Journal. He can be reached at

[email protected]

.

No posts to display