Because of Whitney Houston’s recent tragic death, a number of articles have been written about the continuing challenge of helping prevent and treat drug and alcohol addiction.  Not surprisingly, the articles have particularly focused on the failure rate of treatment programs used by entertainers and other celebrities.  As a former CEO, and a 30-year veteran of life in a big organization, I knew, and became aware of, many people with drug and alcohol addictions.  I even have a few long time friends who are recovering addicts.

I am not surprised by hearing that celebrities enter an expensive residential drug or alcohol treatment program, and then experience a relapse relatively soon after finishing the program. The first critical success factor in addressing an addiction is recognizing that the behavior occurs in a particular set of social settings.  Success means removing the addicted person from the social settings supporting the addiction.  Unfortunately, most celebrities return to the same world from which they came, and, even if they disengage from the particular relationships that spawned the addiction, they find other destructive relationships.

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One of the recurring challenges my wife and I have experienced, both in business and in our personal lives, is identifying people who are honest about what they have done or can do, versus those who lie or exaggerate their capabilities.

In desperate economic times, more people have learned about resume inflation, or about inflating their accomplishments in conversations and meetings.  This resume inflation is at its worst in the entertainment industry, but it exists everywhere.  What have we found?

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In the January 21, 2012, issue of The Economist, the main focus of both the feature articles and the special report was on the resurgence of “state capitalism.” The magazine’s reporters described a world in which major companies in major markets were either owned directly by national governments, or subject to control or heavy influence, even if they were privately owned or had issued shares to the public.

The stories reminded me that, for the last 21 years of my Pitney Bowes career, I dealt continuously with the encroachment of state capitalism in the postal sector.  In the late 1980’s and throughout the 1990’s, we successfully fought a series of battles with the U.S. Postal Service to keep it from becoming another entity with all the powers and privileges of the federal government, but with none of the regulatory constraints associated with federal government agencies.  Several senior postal officials aspired to create a power base similar to many government-owned entities, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority (which Marvin Runyon, the Postmaster General from 1992 to 1998, had led) or the New York-New Jersey Port Authority.

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