Im trying to say people made mistakes. Or made decisions without considering all the available facts or consulting their colleagues. I probably should have called it a failure of management systems instead of what I did
What I'm talking about is the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing. Others with more managerial experience than me, used the word "silos"
For example: wjappraise has posted here that he saw extra points in his account, and that he notified someone at Wyndham. The response that he got was that there was no problem. There was a computer problem but that no one at Wyndham could see it, or admit to it, was a "people problem"
Another example. We all knew that there was a problem with credit pooling. There came a time when what used to be a 5 minute phone call would take hours on the phone. The problem was a computer problem. But that the owner care staff that were in the middle of it, didnt get management people interested, was a "people problem"
I found it shocking that in my first meeting with Wyndham, after my accounts were suspended, they asked me how I did it. I thought it was a trap to get me to tell them which if their employees I had paid off to give me "extra" points. Their assumption was the same one you made somewhere upthread and that was I must be working with someone on the inside. They were looking for names. When I told them how I did what I did, they were genuinely confused. They didn't get it. I had to educate them on how their own system worked and how I used it.
Here's a short story that will tell you just how little they knew about their own club. One of my interrogators asked me if I ever used a technique known as "cancel and rebook" to capture discounts. My answer was "yes, this rental thing that I do dosent work without it. That's were the profits are". He followed that question with another, asking me if I was VIP. That took me aback and I asked him if that was a serious question. When he said yes it was, I exploded. "0f course I'm a VIP owner, you know that, you just asked me about discounts. VIP owners are the only owners that get discounts. You either don't know your own system or you are playing the lawyers trick of asking the same question over and over trying to catch me in a lie". I went on to say that I understood that they had a problem and that I drove the three hours to meet with them to open my books and show them exactly how I did what I did, with the expectation that we were going to work toward a solution of their problem. I asked that they get someone in the room that knew what they were talking about and that would treat me with a little respect.
That was a people problem and once they got the right people involved we moved forward to a resolution
It's easy to blame all this on computers but it goes deeper to what i called the "human systems". As I said above I should have said management systems
