Diluting the butler brand – Modern Butlers

The Modern Butlers’ Journal, January 2021, Butlers In the Media

Message from the Chairman

by Steven Ferry

Just three mentions of butlers in the media this month.

The investigative South African TV program Carte Blanche aired an responses to the video as well as the number of people writing to the editor, expressing relief that action was finally being taken to rein in the excesses of this organization that they had witnessed themselves;
Bloomberg has an interesting article on the rise of robots in response to the fear generated concerning social distancing to avoid the spread of the rather unremarkable threat posed by Covid-19. The basic message: More robots will be employed and less people. Even though robot butlers are listed, the truth is that no robot, R2D2 notwithstanding, can ever take over from a multi-dimensional human in the service of another multi-dimensional human. The current and future levels of Artificial General Intelligence being generated by today’s software companies have as much possibility of achieving the complexity of human thought and action as the flint stones of the caveman had for achieving inter-stellar flight.
On a more mundane note, a mildly useful product to salvage soap fragments and reshape them into personalized bars just had to be called a Soap Butler.

The Institute is dedicated to raising service standards by broadly disseminating the mindset and superior service expertise of that time-honored, quintessential service provider, the British Butler, updated with modern people skills, and adapted to the needs of modern employers and guests in staffed homes, luxury hotels, resorts, spas, retirement communities, jets, yachts & cruise ships around the world.

The Modern Butlers’ Journal, December 2020, Butlers In the Media

Butlers in the Media

by Steven Ferry

Home builders providing more services for condominium owners in China is a good idea: They dress like butlers and are called butlers, but the idea goes off the rails when we learn that “Each chief butler leads a team whose duties span everything from security and cleaning to repair, maintenance and other services to take care of up to 50 families.” As a profession we risk the concept of the butler being diluted and losing all meaning as the word is redefined into something else, the sheer volume of its use with the new meaning and reality becoming the norm. It reminds me of a time I was lecturing at a university in Thailand and the attendees were under the impression that the profession began in hotels a few years before. The onus is on the butler teaching profession to maintain the standards if they are not to disappear.

Another example of this dilution in the media this month: Equating butlers with digital assistants.

The Institute is dedicated to raising service standards by broadly disseminating the mindset and superior service expertise of that time-honored, quintessential service provider, the British Butler, updated with modern people skills, and adapted to the needs of modern employers and guests in staffed homes, luxury hotels, resorts, spas, retirement communities, jets, yachts & cruise ships around the world.