I was prepared to post another blog recently, but decided that it was important to post some observations about John Wooden, the great basketball coach of UCLA who died on June 4 at age 99.  Like most people passionate about sports at all levels, I admired John Wooden as a coach, a teacher, and a leader.

Wooden won the NCAA championship with a very small, fast team in 1964 and 1965, with two dominant centers, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (then called Lew Alcindor) and Bill Walton, between 1967 and 1973, and with a team of physically strong forwards and guards in 1970 and 1975.  He made his team the center of attention rather than himself.

What were his secrets?  Every successful college coach has to be a great recruiter, a great team builder, a great teacher, and a great game coach.  However, what struck me most about Wooden was a quote about him in the June 14, 2010, issue of Sports Illustrated, in an article by Alexander Wolff entitled “Remembering the Wizard, ” as well as a quote on a sign he posted on his office wall.

The quote about him was “His great strength was a knack for knowing when and what to change, and when to leave things be. He let sands shift, but only over bedrock.”  The quote on his office wall was “It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.”  The combination of these two statements is the essence of a great human being: someone who continuously learns and tests his or her ideas, and, through continuous learning, discovers what changes, as well as what is unchangeable.

The stakes for continuous learning have been raised by the scientific research summarized by David Shenk in his book The Genius in All of Us. The research to which Shenk refers us makes it increasingly clear that what we thought were genetically-determined traits in ourselves and our children and grandchildren may very well be changeable, based on our behaviors and attitudes. Shenk’s point is that, by our actions to learn, grow, and become healthier, we can alter the genetically-expressed traits in future generations, especially for future offspring or for children still under our environmental control.

In this stage of my life, I have transformed myself from a secure corporate executive to a person who is engaged in a number of entrepreneurial pursuits.  Although my life is at a more frantic pace than ever before, I feel more energized and healthier than ever.  I am making mistakes left and right in my new pursuits, which include investments in health care companies, charity service providers, a reality TV incubator, and even two full-length feature films, one of which is fully produced and is Fog Warning, and the other of which is at the pre-production stage through a newly-formed production company called Gyre Entertainment.

The words describing John Wooden ring true to me because virtually every transformational success that occurred in my life happened because I broke the rules and followed a path different from those who seemed to have mastered conventional paths to success that were no longer working predictably.  I am particularly finding that today in the film industry.  No one in their right mind would say that anyone in the film industry has a working formula for success.  Most films fail, andmost investors never get their money back.

The most successful film industry people with whom I have spoken are respected because they have a less poor record than others, and, perhaps, had a single blockbuster hit or a single Academy Award nomination that validates them.  There is an old (and, as expressed, politically incorrect) statement that “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed person is king.” However, I aspire to be consistently successful, not to get a hit 1 in 10 times, so I know that I need to use a radically different approach to making and distributing a movie.  Similarly, the person who is successful 10% of the time is a failure in my book.

The movie industry reminds me of the direct mail business, in which direct mailers celebrate a 1% response rate as an exceptional success in an industry in which the average response rate is .25%. To me, a 1% response rate is an abysmal failure. It means that 99% of the people threw the mail into the wastebasket without responding.

What do these two industries have in common and how is John Wooden’s wisdom relevant to both?  What they have in common are a lot of relatively successful and wealthy people who depart from Wooden’s maxim that it’s what you learn after you think you know it all that matters.  These industries are dominated by people who stop learning after they “know it all” because they achieve a certain level of success.

I am not wired that way.  I strive to succeed all of the time, although I know that is impossible, simply because I know that striving for continuous success means that I will approach a problem radically different from the mainstream people in an industry.  I also know that many of them will ridicule me, and tell me that what I am trying to do will not succeed.  Their deep skepticism often is grounded less in logic or facts, but in a deep-seated need to believe that their approach is unassailable, even if it fail 90% of the time (as it does in entertainment) or 99.75% (as it does in direct mail).

How do we distinguish between what must change and what is foundational, something John Wooden understood in the context of basketball coaching and educating?  First, anyone who tells me that they have a consistent playbook or formula for success that has worked for several decades is automatically suspect.  Similarly, anyone who tells me that all the rules that have governed the past no longer apply is also suspect.  The current and future environments will always be a mix of the new and the time-tested.

Second, I am immediately suspicious of someone who tells me that a product or service that depends for its success on the stupidity and irrationality of the public is also suspect.  As Abraham Lincoln once said: “You can fool some of the people some of the time, all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”

Third, I get suspicious of anyone who tells me success is totally random or totally formulaic and predictable.  Fourth, I get suspicious of anyone unreceptive to my ideas because I am new to a field. Someone who judges me based on my track record rather than the strength of my ideas will undervalue what I am saying or proposing. Finally, I value entrepreneurs or thinkers who continually test out their thinking and adapt, based on what they learn. Transformative thinkers are highly secure people who are not scared to admit they might have been wrong.

John Wooden has left this earth, but, fortunately, his example and his teaching will stay with us and be available to inspire and teach us forever.

Last week, we posted on the Pitney Bowes web site at www.pb.com/mailimpact a white paper detailing preliminary findings on the environmental impact of mail. Several points stand out when we look at the study:

• Mail is a relatively minor source of carbon footprint compared with common personal and household activities, such as taking a two-minute shower, which has the same carbon footprint as receiving 40 pieces of letter mail.
• Electronic communications, on the whole, have a carbon footprint similar to paper-based communications
• As noted on pages 21 and 22, the ultimate question is not whether mail or paper-based communications have an environmental impact that could be reduced. No one questions the need to reduce the carbon footprint of mail or paper-based communications, and the paper talks about sustainability initiatives. (more…)

As anyone who has read my past blogs on environmental issues knows, I believe that eliminating unsolicited direct marketing mail may help reduce the “annoyance factor” some mail recipients experience, but there’s no assurance that it will improve the environment.”

I have been concerned that if some of those individuals who stop receiving unsolicited mail get into their automobiles and buy an item at a retail store that they would ordered through a direct mail solicitation, the environment is worse off. Until I attended the recent Center for Research on Regulated Industries Conference, I did not have data to support my point. Now I do. (more…)

In many blogs, I have commented on the issue the mailing industry faces with respect to the attacks on unsolicited marketing mail by environmentalists or privacy advocates. In particular, environmentalists argue that it would be better for the environment if everyone communicated electronically, instead of doing so in paper-based communications.

I am in the process of reviewing the increasingly robust research which suggests that electronic communication has substantial environmental hazards, in some cases, greater than physical mail-based communications. But the insight I want to share in this blog is that the boundary between physical and electronic communication is not clear, and is getting more muddied as time goes on. (more…)

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Eleanor Trickett, the editor in chief of DM News, about the inaugural DM News/Pitney Bowes survey on direct mail and the environment.

The survey reveals that consumers greatly overestimate the environmental impact of direct mail. Eleanor and I discussed the implications of this survey and how the industry can implement new technology and other initiatives to reduce the environmental impact of mail. We also discussed how industry leaders can work to improve the public perception of mail, and grow the value of mail as a medium in the long-term.

Listen to the Podcast

Recently, our mailing industry has spent a lot of time thinking further about the continued strength of “Do Not Mail” legislation. Our company also sponsored a survey conducted by the respected industry publication DM News.

The findings are quite interesting:

• To the degree that “Do Not Mail” proponents have cited environmental arguments, they have successfully left with the public a number of misimpressions about mail’s environmental impact, all of which grossly exaggerates mail’s negative environmental impact:

• While mail constitutes about 2% of solid waste in landfills, the public believes it constitutes over 33%.
• Similarly, the whole issue of the cutting of trees to produce pulp and paper has been wildly misunderstood. The practice of cutting and harvesting older trees and replacing them with new plantings, usually accounts for very little negative environmental impact.
• The public correctly understands that poorly addressed and poorly targeted mail is wasteful. As a Company, Pitney Bowes has been passionate about selling solutions to reduce the production and delivery of wasteful mail, so I could not agree more with this perception. (more…)

Not surprisingly, I get asked about the future of mail. People point to the decline in personal correspondence, the tendency of large transaction statement providers like banks and insurance companies to encourage customers to receive bills and statements on the
Internet, the decline in magazines and newspapers on newsstands and through the mail, and the likelihood that catalog and direct mail recipients will find ways to stop getting mail they do not want to receive.

Every one of these parts of the mailstream has different future prospects. Paper-based consumer-originated personal correspondence has been declining for a long time. Transaction statements are a mixed bag. Some bills and statements are going electronic, such as bank and insurance statements. Others, like health care statements, are growing as we all spend more on health care. Mass circulation magazines and newspapers are declining, but a high-end publication like The Economist is growing nicely.

The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) has just launched a new mail preference service that will allow mail recipients to register to receive more of what they want and to eliminate or reduce what they do not want. The DMA has delivered a significantly enhanced service for mail recipients who want to have more control over what they receive. (more…)

One of my major areas of focus today is helping our industry define the brand value of the mailstream. The many attacks on the mail from environmental and privacy zealots are largely misguided, but they have more life than they should because they zero in on parts of the mailstream that diminish the value of our brand. I am a passionate environmentalist and a protector of privacy rights, but the “zealots” to whom I refer are those who advocate their positions inflexibly, ignoring facts that undercut their position, often attacking the motives of those who oppose them, and and also ignoring the consequences of what they advocate, even if those consequences are inconsistent with a clean environment and a strong protection for privacy. Not everyone who advocates a significant reduction of unsolicited mail is a zealot, but I believe many of the most vocal advocates who get the greatest media exposure would fit into this category.

When I note the size of our industry and the number of people employed in it, I do so solely to point out that the industry is important enough to make sure we get the brand issues right, not to say that we should always be as big as we are today or that we should defend every mailpiece and every job. In fact, we may need to see a reduction in certain kinds of mail and certain kinds of jobs to enable longer-term growth in mail and jobs.

So what do we need to do to defend this brand? Part of the effort is to promote what’s good about the mailstream: its vital role in helping people connect emotionally with one another through greeting cards and gifts sent through the mail, its role in transactional activity, its role in helping people market to one another and to fulfill transactional commitments through e-commerce, its role in connecting citizens with government, and its continuing role as an entertainment and educational medium. As Denny Hatch recently points out in his blog BusinessCommonSense, “because of junk mail, the United States Post Office is in business, reaching every address in America every business day.” (more…)

In the past week, I read a New York Times article which favorably reported on the initiative of a for-profit company, which has a business based on getting people to pay for being taken off mailing lists and for having a tree planted on their behalf. I also attended the premier trade show for the production print and mail industry, Graph Expo, which showcased the best-in-class solutions for direct mailers and chaired a meeting of our Mailing Industry CEO Council to discuss strategies for improving the value of the mailstream.

I was struck by the contrast between the absolutely arrogant and uninformed view of direct marketing mail reflected in the article and the sophistication and thoughtfulness of the people who provide the print and mail services to direct mail marketers. I was also struck by the fact that, as I have learned more about the many for-profit organizations that are peddling services to get people off mailing lists, their motivation is to make money by playing upon the fears of identity theft or the apparent environmental benefit of reducing mail-related waste to make money. The most startling learning is that they have essentially rejected the fundamental principle of the Direct Marketing Association’s Mail Preference Service, informed consumer choice, to get people to do something detrimental to them if it costs them as little money as possible and if they can increase their profit margins.

Most of us receive unsolicited and unwanted marketing mail in annoying quantities every year, and the direct mailing industry can do a great deal more to reduce the volume and annoyance factor of that mail. But banning 80-90% of all unsolicited marketing mail, as the company referred to in the New York Times article wants to do, is wildly off the mark and would be horrible for the American economy and the environment. Most Americans don’t realize the mail supports $900 billion in economic activity and nine million jobs. (more…)

In the last few weeks I have found myself on the campuses of many colleges and universities. Some are Pitney Bowes customers, some have been venues for meetings I have attended, some are campuses I have shown my 16-year-old son, who is starting to look at colleges, and I have visited my 21-year-old son, who is a student at the University of Southern California, and my 14-year-old daughter, who took a summer class at Princeton University. I also had occasion to visit the University of Wisconsin and Harvard Law School, the schools from which I received my degrees.

I have several observations:

• All of these schools have more global reach than ever. Our primary and secondary education systems are inferior to many other countries, but we still are a magnet for undergraduate and graduate college students from around the world, especially from the Asia-Pacific area. I also am seeing an increasing number of students from Eastern European countries – who not only come to school here, but are most likely to be filling the summer jobs at resort areas and in big cities that used to be filled by American students.

• There is an incredible amount of construction going on everywhere on every campus I visit. Interestingly enough, some of the buildings being replaced are newer than some of the buildings being renovated. At the University of Wisconsin, some of the buildings built in the 1950’s and 1960’s are being demolished, whereas older buildings are being renovated. I was also surprised to learn that much of the Harvard Law School is under reconstruction and renovation and will be resituated within Cambridge over the next few years. I get piecemeal announcements informing me of these events, but its impact is much more dramatic when you actually see it happening. (more…)