As we move into May, this is junior prom season at high schools, and I have a son who is planning to attend the prom. I remember my junior prom, which took place in May, 1965. It was a wonderful evening with a wonderful date, but what I also remember is that Brother Joseph Clark, our principal at my high school, Bishop Kearney High School in Rochester, New York, decided that the prom would start at 10 pm and end at 4 am. He said that no one would be allowed to leave the prom before 4 am unless he or she was picked up by parents. His explicit reason for this decision was to keep us in the prom venue until after the bars and nightclubs around town closed.

Today, this same issue has surfaced in a different way. New York City has decided to order all bars closed at 2 am, instead of 4 am. In the Sunday, April 27, New York Post, in the Page 6 Magazine, there were actually two op-ed pieces published on this subject, one opposing the earlier closing hour, and the other favoring it. The proponent, a female freelance writer, made the great comment that nothing much good happened between 2 am and 4 am. In fact, those extra hours probably led to more behaviors that people later regretted, if they could remember them, than during any other 2-hour period during the day.

However, the opponent of the 2 am closing hour made the argument that the earlier closing would cost jobs and income, particularly for under-employed actors and actresses, and that the bars and nightclubs that stayed open that late were integral to the New York City social scene. He also pointed out that the owners of the bars and nightclubs would suffer severe financial hardship in an already difficult economy.

My high school principal, Brother Clark, was very wise to make the decision he did because, in those days, unlike what I have seen in our town, most students drove to and from proms, usually with two couples in a car. Today, more students are sharing stretch limos to avoid having to deal with late night driving. It does not stop them from abusing alcohol, but, at least, it avoids the risk of automobile accidents caused by alcohol-impaired teenage drivers. Also, in those days, the liabilities for serving under-age drinkers were not as strong as they are today, so there seemed to be more flagrant and frequent violations of the rules against serving under-age drinkers than there are today.

At the same time, the judgment about the degree to which government should govern adult behaviors is more complex. I personally favor New York City’s decision because it is a statement about how much we value the health of citizens. I also believe that it will achieve the purpose intended, which is to reduce alcohol abuse and the consequences that flow from it. However, we have to recognize the economic hardship factor in some way.

We also have to recognize that reforming our health care system, or promoting health through changing diets and focusing more on nutritionally healthy foods will be difficult to achieve all at once because too many people make too much money selling the unhealthy stuff we consume today. Those selling unhealthy food will be in denial that they are hurting other people’s health, but the sooner we acknowledge the real issue, which is how they cope with the economic change a healthier environment brings, the better. By creating a healthy environment that enables individual’s access to healthy foods will encourage people to adopt healthy behaviors.

On Saturday, April 26, I watched a TV program hosted by Tim Russert. He and the commentators were reflecting on the broader implications of how an off-the-record comment by Senator Obama at a San Francisco speech could achieve worldwide exposure in a relatively short time. Their conclusion is that, at this time and irreversibly going forward, “everything is on the record.” I would add one other phrase as well: “Everything that is on the record is likely to stay on the record permanently.”

The combination of cell phone cameras, the ability to upload digital images to web sites, and the broad reach of user-generated content on sites like YouTube and Facebook mean that all of us have the potential to live our entire lives out in the open, not unlike the lead character played by Jim Carrey in “The Truman Show” a few years back. Scott McNealy, the Chairman of Sun Microsystems, made the comment almost a decade ago that, with the Internet, there is no privacy and all of us need to get over it. He’s right. More »

On April 6, I had an opportunity to speak on The CEO Show with Robert Reiss. I shared some ideas for how small to medium-sized businesses can improve their customer communications and take advantage of valuable marketing opportunities. I also reflected on some strategies I used as CEO, and discussed how Pitney Bowes is working to evolve, adapt to change, and enhance the “customer experience” through innovation.

I enjoyed this interview very much. Please click below to listen to the recording.

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At Pitney Bowes, we have done a lot of thinking about how to innovate successfully. As a result, we have challenged conventional wisdom about how innovation actually occurs. There are two traditional views about innovation with which I am familiar:

• One is the idea that institutions have large research and development budgets, begin a number of projects, have many failures, and funnel down to a handful of successes. The “funnel” metaphor is used to describe this idea.
• The second is the idea that organizations either invest in entrepreneurial companies, or create entrepreneurial “skunkworks” which operate outside the company’s annual budgeting processes and produce innovation. This was a popular theory, supported by the IBM PC launch in the early 1980’s.

Both views are flawed, because they oversimplify how innovation really happens. I got the best insight on innovation from my 15-year-old daughter, who is not only a serious musician, playing the harp, flute, and piano, but an avid student of popular music history. She read and gave me a copy of Bill Wyman’s Rolling with the Stones. Wyman was one of the founding members of the Rolling Stones. More »

In the April 9 Wall Street Journal, there is a front-page story about the impact of sub-prime lending on ordinary citizens. Featured in the story is a 74-year-old self-employed tailor who put her entire $55,000 life savings into a high-interest-rate notes issued by a Philadelphia lender called American Business Financial Services. When the firm went bankrupt, she and others lost their entire life savings. The blog entitled The Importance of Being Financially Literate reinforces the fact that Americans lack financial knowledge even in the most basic savings and investment decisions.

While the story is a tragedy, it brings to mind the urgency of focusing on teaching all Americans financial literacy. The National Urban League and its affiliates have specific financial literacy programs, specifically focused on first-time home buyers. Operation HOPE, headed by the very impressive John Bryant, is specifically focused on broad-based financial literacy. These are great programs, and they provide individuals with good nuts-and-bolts tools. Other notable mentions on behalf of the National Urban League in partnership with Honda amid the turbulent economic climate include their offering of personal financial management classes. The acclaimed “Know Your Money Program” seeks to provide economic empowerment and financial literacy to those individuals in communities seeking to change the attitudes about money and money-management. The program is highlighted in this Honda Blog post. More »

On Monday, April 7, I was in New York City, and the subject of Mayor Bloomberg’s congestion pricing became part of several conversations. The depth of the discussion was clearly driven by the outcome of the plan that failed to gain popularity amongst the democrats who ultimately refused to put the bill to a vote on the floor of the state assembly, as highlighted in an article published by the New York Times. I believe that any discussion about infrastructure finance usually is explicitly more complex than publicized with regards to whether or not the public versus the users should be taxed for infrastructure-related capital projects. However, just below the surface of any discussion about raising taxes, fees, tolls, or implementing congestion pricing is a lack of trust about whether the money raised by the government will be spent for infrastructure improvement or absorbed into general revenues. More »

Anyone who has read my past blogs knows that I have commented that too many health care reform advocates focus too much on universal health insurance coverage, and insufficiently on improving health, the supply of health care professionals, and the quality of health care. While many proponents of universal health care pay lip service to the value of prevention, those who advocate universal health care clearly want to address the visible and important issue of affordable coverage independently of, and prior to, the issues I have identified.

Unfortunately, they have it backwards. To solve the universality and affordability problem, the others have to be addressed. A compelling story appeared on the front page of the national edition of the April 5 New York Times, entitled “Universal Coverage Strains Massachusetts Care: Influx of Patients and Shortage of Doctors Create Long Waits.” More »

Recently, because I concluded the first phase of a two-part assignment as Chairman of a commission created to recommend reform of the Connecticut Department of Transportation, I have been asked to share my observations about government to a number of audiences. I will begin that process in this blog, but, because I have learned so much, I will probably cover this subject over several blogs.

By the way, my comments are not meant to be critical of individual government officials, most of whom I respect greatly. In fact, as you will see, government officials have to overcome huge structural and political obstacles to get anything done, and, given the constraints that have been put in their path, anything they do has to border on the heroic. More »

As a person who studied Communications, Political Science, and Law during college and law school, I am acutely aware of the power of language to shape how we think about and act on problems.

The main example that comes to mind is the way we characterize how government positions are filled.

When I was growing up, like most American history students, I read about the 1881 assassination of President James Garfield, who was killed by a “disappointed office seeker.” I learned that this tragedy gave rise to “civil service reform”, which, if I remember the history books, characterized the change as being one which replaced an appointment system based on “patronage” or “spoils” with one based on “merit”. Like most Americans, I came to believe that the civil service system was an unqualified positive development for American government, and the old system was corrupt, to the point of being “un-American.” In fact, on the radio this past week, I also heard a radio commentator refer to “patronage” appointments in a very disparaging way. More »

People who should know better, such as sophisticated investors, members of the media, or experts, are always surprised when a successful firm, or for that matter, a successful industry such as financial services, experiences a rapid and severe decline. I am not surprised, because virtually every kind of success contains within it the seeds of future failure. There are four reasons for this.

First, successful companies that achieve a dominant position in a market are most vulnerable to disruptive technologies precisely because they have the greatest stake in maintaining the business model that made them successful. Clayton Christiensen eloquently and cogently discussed this in his landmark book The Innovator’s Dilemma. Thus, even legitimate success can become a trap that prevents a firm from adapting to a threat. More »