ELECTRONIC HOUSE CALL - May 17, 2002

I will be in Chicago this weekend at the National Restaurant Association show. If you are at the show, I will be at Cindy Casady's program on Saturday, Max Hitchins' session on Sunday and presenting my own program at 10:00 Monday morning. Please look me up.

Margene and I leave Wednesday for three weeks in Prague, Vienna, Budapest and environs. As is my custom, I will be posting a daily diary of the trip -- and what I learn along the way -- on the website under "What's Up With the Doc?" I may be a day or two behind depending on how easily I can get Internet access, so be patient. The EHC will continue as usual, but will arrive via my marketing partner, Cindy Casady. It will be faster for me to send her one copy for distribution to the list rather than sending 2100 messages from Europe!

A MARK BY ANY OTHER NAME . . .
Well . . . the topic of the week seems to have been chosen for me! By now you know that a phrase I originally mentioned in last week's EHC (since deleted from the archive copy) is a registered trademark. Do not adopt it in your new ad campaign . . . not that you would anyway. Doing something as well as you can is the booby prize -- doing it the way it needs to be done is where the rewards are. The whole incident is rife with lessons, some obvious, some a little more subtle. Since it is on my mind at the moment, let's take a look at what life has offered up this week:

Who's on First?
I doubt there are really any new ideas in our business, only some clever combinations of elements that have worked elsewhere. It happens occasionally that someone registers one of them as a trademark, service mark, trade dress or some such thing. If you hear about it second or third hand, you usually will not know that it is protected property. At the same time, you may have a registered mark that you want to protect, much as I have with The Restaurant Doctor, and in fact, you have an obligation to protect it or risk losing your rights to it. To protect your rights, however, you only have to advise the offending party that the mark is protected and ask them to stop using it. Give them the benefit of the doubt, just as you would want some slack if you made an innocent transgression. There is no need to get heavy-handed unless they continue to use it after being notified. The world can be harsh enough without adding to it.

Adopt vs. Adapt
Given that you never know for sure what is protected and what isn't -- and given that we are always looking for new ideas to help our businesses -- the best approach is always to adapt rather than adopt. This means that you do not "steal" anything that you see, but use the idea to spark your own creativity and see how you might be able to apply the principles that make the idea work in a way that is more appropriate for your operation or your market.

On the other side, you will often find some of your good ideas being used elsewhere. Are you really sure they are YOUR ideas? Very often someone else just had the same idea and never heard of what you were doing. My advice is to relax and stay ahead of them. Rudyard Kipling once said, "They copied and copied and copied, but they couldn't copy my mind. So I left them sweating and stealing, a year and a half behind." Good ideas work because they are fresh. After awhile, even good ideas get stale. If it ain't broke, break it! (or is that someone's trademarked line?)

Watch Your Words
As one who makes a living with them, I can tell you there is danger in written words, particularly when written in haste or anger. They have a life long past the incident that spawned them . . . and the author must bear the consequences of their impact, for better or worse. I have also learned that the tone of a piece often delivers a stronger message than its content. Regardless of the tone you "intend," you get the tone that people read into what you write and the way that you write it. If you have to advise someone that they are using a protected mark of yours, prefacing your remarks with, "You probably weren't aware of this, but . . ." would offer the benefit of the doubt and soften the tone of the entire message.

This also makes the case for patience. Any letter (e-mail, fax, whatever) that you write that relates to a matter with any sort of emotion attached to it, either on your end or the recipients, should not be written in haste. Even if you write it quickly, do not send it until you have at least "slept on it" for a day and -- very important -- had a disinterested third party review it for tone. I can't begin to tell you how many blow-ups I have seen along the way that could have been avoided with just this simple safeguard.

But I Ramble . . .
My dialogue has only been to try and help you take something away from this that can help you live more easily on the planet in the future. Perhaps I am just remembering all the messes I got myself in when I was young and invincible -- including a bankruptcy -- because I didn't listen . . . and didn't know that I wasn't listening. (God, I must really be getting old!) I can only urge you to take a few quiet moments to absorb the larger lessons that are available here if you want them . . . and then get on with your life.

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