In the past month, I have had the privilege of immersing myself in a number of health-based dialogues. As we think about how to get people to engage in healthy behaviors, we must understand the importance of the social networks of which people are a part in driving behavior change.

At Pitney Bowes, we start with the realization that the most important social network is the family unit. If we can reach the individual who makes health-related decisions for the family and persuade that individual to drive healthy behaviors in the family, we have gained a great deal. That’s why we did a home mailing in October to urge our employees and their families to get flu shots.

The workplace peer group is the second most important influence because individuals typically spend more waking hours at work than anywhere else. That’s why we have emphasized creating a culture of health in the workplaces we control. (more…)

Having recently read a great book called Why Politics Matters by Gerry Stoker, I came to realize why it is so critical to get voting and other forms of citizen engagement right. Without a secure, convenient, reliable voting system and without broad-based citizen participation in some way in the decisions affecting a group of citizens, it is very difficult for elected officials to govern. Their legitimacy would be consistently questioned.

The major question Stoker tackles in his book is why, with all the many ways in which citizens can interact with government today, with the tremendous increase in two-way communications, with higher “responsiveness” by elected officials to citizen demands than ever, citizens today are dissatisfied and alienated from elected officials in democracies than ever before. They have less confidence in their elected officials than ever before.

This is not a phenomenon confined to one country, one political party, one type of leadership, and one set of economic and political circumstances. There is a remarkable uniformity in the intensity and the level of growth in dissatisfaction. Why? (more…)

One of my passions ever since I was a teenager has been government. As a teenager, I actually wrote an op-ed piece for the Rochester, New York, daily newspapers advocating reduction of the minimum voting age from 21 to 18, which happened years later.

Today, I believe strongly that we are best served as a society to the degree that all of our citizens participate in some way in helping government function better.

The first and most important way to help government function better is to vote. I believe strongly in making voting secure and having complete integrity and trust in the voting process, but, at the same time, we need to make it easier for eligible voters to register and vote. That’s why we have provided secure voting-by-mail solutions through our Relia-Vote system. That’s why I have believed that states should allow “no-excuses” voting by mail as an alternative, very much the way California offers voters the choice of either voting in person or registering to vote by mail. The states that have complete voting-by-mail systems, Washington and Oregon, have higher participation rates, on average, than other states. One could argue whether voting by mail is the cause of that or whether an already engaged citizenry in those states demands voting by mail, but I believe it has to help voter participation to add choices on how voters can exercise their right to vote. (more…)