Switzerland is like a 5-star hotel in Mumbai, surrounded by
relative mediocrity & poverty. Everyone outside is enamoured by its
splendid facade, has heard stories of its spas & beach-facing swimming
pools, and the tabloids catch the rich & famous zipping in & out.
Back in the day, when this 'hotel' started out, some of its
enterprising owners realized their great location advantage, and invested in
creating the best infrastructure for the biggest marketing campaign of all time
- the Swiss Alps. Needless to say, it was a roaring success. And since so much
money & effort was put behind making all this infrastructure, the 'prices'
had to be prohibitively expensive. This meant only the richest of the rich
could come & 'stay'.
As this started happening, the enterprising Swiss figured a
common thread running through these rich visitors - their need to stash away
their cash, secretly. So the 'hotel' started offering 'other' services as well,
very discreetly. The rich paid more & more to enjoy the benefits. Over
time, everyone from the waiters to the guy who sorted the hotel trash started
earning enough to be driving around in Mercs - some did, some chose not to and
even left. The 'hotel' continued to get facelifts, and the common people
outside continued to look on with awe. But the 'benefits' that the hotel
provided, known only to the rich few, became one of the biggest USPs of the
hotel, keeping it well ahead of other magnificent hotels.
But then two strange things happened in quick succession.
The owners of the hotel were impressed with the stupendous
growth the hotel was seeing, and wanted more. They realized that too many
people were leaving and not enough coming in, especially for the kind of growth
they wanted. So they decided, undoubtedly correctly, to let anyone from around
the locality in to help work at the hotel. This was a strange thing as this was
never ever done in the history of the hotel, which was always a closed,
selective community. But it brought in fresh ideas & 'unspoilt' people who
were willing to do whatever it takes to make their lives, and by design, the
hotel's future a success.
The other strange thing that happened was that laws got
passed to have a 'camera' in all 'hotels', including Switzerland, with full
access for global governments. The carefully built, and biggest standing, USP
of the hotel was no more. The rich and famous could no longer come in & get
other services without having Big Brother watching them through that wretched
tin can on the wall. Many clients swore never to come again. There were murmurs
of some other hotels somehow having the ability to have a few rooms without
cameras. Many of the rich & famous promptly began going there.
Business dropped dramatically at the hotel. Enough clients
were not coming in.
What's worse, some of the original inhabitants of the hotel
started complaining that the stream of folks from the locality were getting too
many. There were meetings & demonstrations, and open rejection of some of
the cultural ideas of the ‘new ones’.
The owners had no clue what had hit them. They had two
problems to solve at the same time. One, how to get business back. And two, how
to quell this discontent amongst some of its inhabitants against the people
coming in.
Interestingly enough, these problems might be linked. But
more on that, and the first problem, later.
Bowing to pressure from this dissenting group, the owners
did the unthinkable. They made it everybody's problem by asking them to vote on
whether the people from the locality should be allowed in. They thought, rather
naively that this group was a minority and the problem would solve itself with
the vote saying that everything's fine, “keep 'em comin' in”.
The result of that
vote came on Sunday evening. A shocker, to say the least. 44% of the people
didn't even bother voting. Of the 56% that did, 50.3% were the dissenting
group. That's well less than a third of the total. But as it happens, the
owners have to go by the result, and tell all those locality groups that they
cannot allow people to come in indiscriminately. The two problems are now even
bigger.
Had the owners' thoughts of a victory in the vote
materialized, the people from the locality would have come in, with fresh
ideas, hard work & ambition, and helped solve the first problem, of
business going down. Because people trying hard find a way, eventually.
The once magnificent hotel is now at a crossroads, its
future uncertain. The best bet for the owners would probably be to go back to
the original USP, around which in the first wave of business was built -
beautiful, natural gifts complemented with amazing infrastructure, and a
dazzling marketing campaign. But they would need people, and if not recruiting
from around the locality is a constraint, they might well fall short. They
might need to take down pricing in pockets, so as to gain volumes, but then
would existing infrastructure suffice?
Strong positive, business building steps need to be taken…
Else, the hotel is destined to die a slow, painful death,
eventually taken over by those dissenters who think they can do without help.
---
As a new member of the hotel staff, I find myself in the
midst of this calm chaos. The natural wonders that this place possesses coupled
with the painstakingly built infrastructure is even more amazing than what it
looked from the outside. But the murmurs of dissent against 'us' just got a
voice today. Albeit only 28%. Hope they realize that we're all eventually
working for the prosperity of the same hotel, that's how the system was
designed.
--
Here's a link to the vote that happened - http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/09/swiss-referendum-immigration-quotas
