MIAMI: The employees of Memorial Healthcare System can get an oil change and their clothes dry-cleaned without leaving work. General Mills workers can skip traffic and long lines when they mail packages or get jewelry repaired.

And Ernst Young staffers need only pick up a phone to have someone plan their vacation or research nursing homes for an elderly parent.

These workplaces are part of a growing number that are embellishing their benefits packages with “concierge services” - everything from flower deliveries and car detailing to restaurant reservations and clothes alterations.

Perhaps no company pampers its employees as much as Google, the Internet search leader.

The Mountain View, California, company offers a diverse menu of perquisites that include three free meals a day, plus other on-site conveniences like car washes, oil changes, massages, haircuts, dry cleaning, child care and medical care. The employees have to pay for some services while Google subsidizes others.

About 5 percent of the companies in the United States, according to one survey, have hired personal assistance firms to handle at least some services for their workers - whether that means arranging for a car wash or searching for airfare deals, for example. The employer pays the concierges fee, while staffers pay the cost of the wash or tickets.

Perks like this cropped up during the high-tech heyday in the 1990s, when companies were competing for the same talent, but dwindled when that bubble burst. Now these benefits are more commonly seen at Fortune 500 companies and places that angle for the “employer of choice” label. Experts say a tight labor market for nurses and other medical staff explains why some hospitals - traditionally low-frill workplaces - have started joining, too.

“It helps the employee not to have to burn up all their personal time doing all these chores,” said Wayne Wallace, the director of the Career Resource Center at the University of Florida. And while Wallace does not dispute that many people would not mind a bump in their paycheck, “it isnt all about the money,” he said. “The extras are nice.”

Erin Dunn, corporate services director for General Mills, said of the cereal companys largesse for staff at its Minneapolis headquarters: “Anything we can do to make life easier is something were interested in doing.”

At Memorial Healthcare, the concierge service has helped its admissions director, Jean Romano-Clark, who has been a frequent user of the perk ever since the Hollywood, Florida, hospital introduced it this spring. Memorial Healthcare System, which employs more than 10,500 people, pays $399,500 annually for the service. Errand Solutions, based in Chicago, runs the benefit for them.

Romano-Clark uses it to get her Honda Pilot scrubbed - she leaves it at a designated parking space in the hospital garage and finds it gleaming at the end of the day. She goes to the services onsite office to buy gift cards, develop photos and even get a watch fixed - leaving more time to spend with her 11-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son.

Instead of doing all of those errands on Saturday, “I can go with them to a football game or soccer game,” Romano-Clark said. “Its hard to balance work and children, and this has helped put balance back.”

Romano-Clark also appreciates not having to rush to her dry cleaner anymore. “My clothes would sit there for three weeks,” she said of her old vendor. Now she drops it off at the concierge office and picks it up there a few days later.

Marsha McVicker, the founder and chief executive of Errand Solutions, said she had started her company “because I wanted somebody to do my errands” and did not want to spend time waiting in line.

McVicker says that concierge services are going to become a must-have at companies. “Our lives are not slowing down. They continue to accelerate,” she said. “This is going to become a necessity.”

Errand Solutions and several similar companies said they did not collect commission from the vendors they use, and if customers preferred to use another vendor, the companies would use them as long as they met standards.

So what is the most popular concierge service? It depends on what part of the country you are in, McVicker said.

In Orange County, California, Errand Solutions can coordinate 40 car washes a day at one company. It takes a month to get that many car wash customers in the Midwest, where Errand Solutions mails up to 30 care packages to Iraq in a similar period.

A LANDLORD has taken the unusual step of trying to start a bidding war over a rented property.

Chris Rigby, 32, has refused to set a fixed monthly rent for his cottage. Instead, he’s going down the route usually taken by sellers and is advertising the property, on Aberdeen’s Footdee, at “offers over 900″.

However, the move last night raised fears that it might spark a new trend among landlords,

with critics describing the idea as “absolutely ridiculous and completely unfair”.

Aberdeen is now one of the most expensive cities in the UK to buy a home, with prices just slightly below London.

Many first-time buyers are thus forced to rent, with the average monthly rent for a two-bedroom property rising from around 689 to 805 in the last 12 months.

Mr Rigby believes prospective tenants will jump at the chance to rent the recently refurbished cottage and hopes to capitalise on the booming rental market.

He said: “I want to get as much money from the property as possible. I don’t want to put it on the market too cheap, so I’m offering people the chance to bid for the lease. If tenants really want it they’re going to have to pay for it.”

Denise Merson, from the Aberdeen Solicitors’ Property Centre, said she was surprised because the plan places the emphasis on cash instead of finding a quality tenant.

“Most landlords are looking for good tenants who will care for the property and pay their rent on time.

“They’re more interested in solid tenants than simply trying to get a few extra pounds every month.”

Becky Adam, who hunted for a house for more than a year before eventually sending out letters begging people to sell to her, was appalled by the move.

She said: “This is absolutely ridiculous. It’s completely unfair and is just going to pile the pressure on people who are struggling to find somewhere to live.

“First-time buyers are having a hard enough time getting on the property ladder, so forcing them to bid for a rental property is unbelievable.”

Emma Leiper, from Aberdeen University’s information and advice centre, said an increasing number of people are approaching the service.

She said: “Although most private landlords are sympathetic to potential people who are taking advantage of the housing crisis.

“They want to make as much money as possible from vulnerable tenants.”

From Higher Aims to Hired Hands:
The Social Transformation of
American Business Schools and
the Unfulfilled Promise of
Management as a Profession
By Rakesh Khurana; Princeton; $35
- ( below) Editor’s Review The Good An important and surprisingly disparaging look at B-school education. The Bad Be forewarned–this is an academic book, so not for everyone. The Bottom Line A cry from a traditionalist for higher professional standards.

Business schools have long been haunted by an inverted version of an old quip: If you’re so rich, why ain’t you smart? From the beginning, administrators and donors have looked more favorably on business education than have academics, some of whom felt it did not deserve a place in the temple of higher learning. In 1924, when banker George F. Baker gave $5 million to Harvard Business School, The Harvard Lampoon devoted an entire issue to satirizing the institution. A poem asserted:

Great Mammon now rules where Minerva did reign
And her silly old owl has no use for its brain.

Even business educators acknowledged that their discipline was ill-defined and lacking in standards. That perception prompted a 25-year effort to make B-schools into genuine professional institutions in the mode of law and medical schools. In the end, says Harvard Business School professor Rakesh Khurana, the effort failed. More profoundly, he adds, the ruling ideology in B-schools today, which holds that managers are loyal only to themselves, represents “a thorough repudiation of professionalism.”

Khurana’s From Higher Aims to Hired Hands is an important and surprisingly disparaging look at business-school education in the U.S. from the late 19th century to the present. In his previous, celebrated work, Searching for a Corporate Savior, Khurana flayed the idea that magnetic leaders could boost corporate bottom lines. In the new volume, he strikes closer to home, concluding that “fundamental questions exist as to whether business schools retain any genuine academic or societal mission.” An MBA diploma, Khurana says, has only two functions: It’s a signal to employers that grads are committed and productive, and it provides a network of contacts, much like “an exclusive fraternity or country club.” As Khurana supplies layer upon layer of evidence in this admittedly dense work, it becomes increasingly difficult to disagree with his conclusions.

The business school was born in the late 19th century, when professions from medicine to accounting were seeking to define themselves better. The Wharton School, established in 1881, was the first university-based institution devoted to business. How could such schools rise above mere vocationalism?

That question prompted the American Association of Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) to pursue various initiatives, beginning in 1916, that would attempt to raise educational standards. Meanwhile, through the 1920s, enrollment and the number of business programs skyrocketed as did jobs for grads. Then came the crash, the Great Depression, and ultimately World War II.

The B-school education that emerged after the war was hugely different. Business was adopting new quantitative tools—including cost-accounting systems and linear programming—that had come out of the military. New thinking emphasized managerial expertise not in particular fields but as a general skill—an approach especially apt for ever-more-numerous conglomerates. These changes increasingly influenced B-schools, especially after the Carnegie and Ford Foundations took a key role in shaping programs.

Then came the economic shocks of the 1970s. Among those blaming the woes on corporate managers were economists out of the University of Chicago who saw them as self-interested barriers to the maximization of shareholder value. As this point of view took hold, a rising number of students eschewed managerial posts for investment banking and consulting.

For the schools’ historic managerial mission, only the coup de grвce remained. That, says Khurana, came in the form of B-school rankings first published in BusinessWeek in 1988. Rather than scholarship, press rankings stressed such commercial criteria as graduates’ number of job offers and starting salaries.

Whither B-schools now? Khurana argues for “the reinvention of management itself” to help foster virtues such as “custodianship, duty, and responsibility.” Sound old-fashioned? Often , it seems, traditionalists can be the most insistent advocates of change.
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