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.

• 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.

There are two questions:

• Is what would replace mail better for the environment? If someone drives a few miles to a retail store, Table 9 shows that the two types of automobiles identified, the medium-sized car and the SUV produce the equivalent carbon footprint of 40 pieces of mail for between 1.8 miles of driving (for the SUV) and 3.3 miles of driving for a medium-sized car. If ads are placed on TV, we know than an hour of TV watching is equivalent 2.8 pieces of letter mail. As noted, substituting advertising dollars for a paid search engine on the Internet has its own carbon footprint.
• Among all activities, is focusing on unsolicited marketing mail a good use of scarce resources in combating increased CO2 emissions, especially given the negative economic, social, and cultural impact the reduction in mail volumes would cause? These tables would suggest that we would get far more benefit from focusing on other activities that have less economic, social, and cultural value first.

This study is not the final answer on environmental issues, but it is an important step.

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.

What I learned is that the carbon footprint of an automobile using an internal combustion engine in city or suburban driving going to and from a retail store is roughly 450 grams of carbon dioxide for every mile traveled. Preparing, transporting, and delivering a piece of direct marketing mail, including the work of converting trees to paper, results in approximately 70 grams of carbon dioxide. Therefore, if we were to eliminate 100 pieces of unsolicited marketing mail, and assume no substitute form of advertising that would generate carbon dioxide emissions, the result would be the elimination of 7000 grams of carbon dioxide. There is a small amount of carbon dioxide emission from the shipping out of the item by the postal service or a common carrier, but that carbon footprint is relatively small. This data was obtained from an economist who spoke at the conference, Larry Buc, in response to a question I asked.

What would happen to those 100 people not receiving the mail? Some would simply not shop at all for the item for which the direct mail solicitation was sent. Others would learn about it through the alternative form of advertising the marketer selected. Some would seek out a web site to shop for the item, such as a Google search effort, which, by the way, would have a substantial carbon dioxide emission resulting from the electricity consumed at the data centers containing the web site, at the routers transmitting the web site data to the shopper, and at the shopper’s own computer.

However, some would obtain the item at a retail store. If only one shopper of the 100 did a round trip in an automobile, the carbon dioxide emission would exceed the total for the 100 pieces of mail all by itself if the round trip exceeded 17 miles, i.e. 8.5 miles each way. When you add in the potential carbon footprint from the other potential choices, the only way in which eliminating 100 pieces of mail is a good environmental outcome is to assume that no one drives to a retail store and that most of the individuals do not otherwise attempt to acquire the item that was the subject of the solicitation.

More work has to be done to model out the impacts of eliminating unsolicited direct marketing mail, and, clearly, if someone has no intention of buying the item solicited from any source at any time, it makes sense for many reasons to eliminate sending the letter. Therefore, our goal should be to give mail recipients the ability to describe their choices and preferences in as much detail as possible as often as possible.

That is why the Direct Marketing Association Mail Preference Service is the best choice for people. It is the most sophisticated and granular consumer choice system in place, and, unlike the other systems, it recognizes the complexity and confusion that surrounds some consumer choices.

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.

As a Company which has its oldest products based in the technology for imprinting postage on physical mail envelopes or labels, Pitney Bowes would seem to be in a business dominated by physical mail. However, as we trace the lifecycle of letters, longer documents, and parcels, it is striking how intertwined physical communications are with electronic communication technologies.

Think about a single letter we print and mail. Today, that letter is increasingly likely to be generated on a word processing program on a computer. If we buy a greeting card or personalized stationery and write a handwritten note, the creation of the greeting card or stationery has likely been controlled by software and has been subject to a considerable influence by electronic communications processes.

In production mail communications, such as a billing or statement production run, the original files reside in an electronic system and are converted to printer-ready files by electronically-delivered instructions. They continue to reside in electronic form on the biller or statement originator’s system.

Similarly, when we send a parcel to someone, we are increasingly relying on a web-based interface with the postal service or carrier that we use to get it to the recipient. The time we or others spend on line has a carbon footprint additional to that generated by the movement of the package. In the blog entitled “Don’t Neglect Document Management and Output For Improving Your Organizations Carbon Footprint”, discusses the ways in which companies can begin to improve operations, making them more effective, efficient and environmentally friendly.

With respect to electronic communications, the May 24, 2008, issue of The Economist, in an article entitled “Computers and the Environment” and subtitled “Buy our stuff, save the planet” pointed out that the corollary of “cloud computing” is “more and bigger data centers on earth.” An example of this can be seen in usage of a thin client servers, or access points, found in devices such as smart phones, PDA’s, and laptops that enables users to connect to the cloud for resources when they need them. The authors note that globally, data centers account for “more carbon dioxide emissions per year than Argentina or the Netherlands.”

The answer to the environmental challenge is not to eliminate electronic communications, or to phase out paper, but to make every part of the communications activity chain as environmentally friendly as it can be. Many electronic components are hazardous and are not bio-degradable today. We must find newer, less hazardous materials, and make sure that we do not deposit electronic waste in landfills. I was very pleased to see that the U.S. Postal Service has a program for helping consumers and businesses send electronic wastes back to firms that can properly recycle or re-use them. The “Mail Back” Program makes it easier for customers to discard used or obsolete small electronics in an environmentally friendly way. By allowing customers to use free, postage paid envelopes found in 1,500 post offices.

Similarly, while opponents of paper-based communications are wildly off base on the environmental impact of cutting trees (which, in fact, are part of a harvesting process that results in a new tree that takes more carbon from the air than the cut tree) or mail ending up in landfills (less than 1% of total landfill waste), paper manufacturers could improve the environmental friendliness of the pulp and paper mills, which account for more than half of the carbon footprint of the paper lifecycle process.

Paper and electronic communications processes should be joined together in such a way that the total environmental impact is minimized and that, over time, is reduced further. The mailing industry needs to continue its efforts to engage with responsible environmentalists to make this happen.

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

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.

• The public wants more recycling of mail, as they should. Today, newspapers are recycled at a rate of about 77% of the newspapers bought and read by consumers, whereas mail is recycled at a rate of about 35%. This can be improved by having more robust recycling capability at the municipal level, as well as better waste mail collection systems.

• The public correctly understands what some would call “junk mail” is not only of low value to them, but of low value and offensive to society as a whole. For example, mail that contains content aggressively selling credit cards and home mortgages is now at the top of the list of the mail considered to be “junk” by approximately 90% of those surveyed. The public correctly understands that when vendors use high-pressure tactics to sell services or products to vulnerable populations, like people with poor credit histories, those vendors are demeaning not only the services and products they sell, but mail as a medium. Policing deceptive content or content that is inappropriate for a particular recipient, such as the prohibition of pornography being sent to children, are critical to staving off “Do not mail” legislation, because this is the kind of content that makes voters more likely to demand legislation which has a significant risk of being over-reaching.

Three other observations:

• Members of the public who support “Do Not Mail” registries do not understand that the consequences are not comparable to what happened with the “Do Not Call” registry regulation. “Do Not Call” registries had no noticeable effect on the cost of a telephone call because outbound telephone solicitations are a tiny part of the total telephone message stream. On the other hand, if we saw a significant part of the advertising mail stream disappear, the price of postage would skyrocket and have other bad consequences:

• Non-profits and businesses that depend on the mail for attracting donors or customers would see their costs skyrocket by 20-25%, and would lose some of their donor or customer base. Ted Grigg reviews how direct mail is still the core medium for fundraisers in his direct marketing blog.
• Many small businesses that depend on the mail either to attract customers or to ship packages would have great difficulty surviving.
• Many popular magazines would no longer be published.
• Libraries and bookstores that ship books to us would be paying a lot more to get them to us.

• There continues to be no public comprehension that, to the degree that mail substitutes for a trip in an automobile, it is environmentally positive. There are groups that want to reduce consumption and change our well-established consumption habits. I do not think they have much chance of succeeding. If we eliminate direct mail as a trigger for consumption, consumers will find another way to acquire what was presented to them through direct mail. What we most need to do is find ways of making mail as a communications, marketing, and delivery medium as environmentally friendly as it can be. This Print CEO blog post reviews how the printing and publishing industry is moving toward the use of recycled paper and other methods to reduce its environmental impact.

• Finally, no one thinks about the relative environmental merits of electronic communications media. I think that the public tends to ignore the negative environmental impacts of electronic communication either because they have never seen the data centers used to store and transfer electronic messages or mistakenly believe that additional electronic messages do not require additional computer hardware. The impact is highlighted in this TechRepublic blog post. Not surprisingly, companies dependent on electronic messaging are not regularly broadcasting the impact of data centers on the environment. We must do a better job of educating the public on this subject.

My fundamental observation is that many actions taken for environmental reasons end up having unintended negative environmental consequences, such as the substitution of electronic communications for mail.

At the same time, this survey indicates that, although the consumers responding to the survey may have gotten the environmental arguments wrong, their opinions about what is valuable about mail and what is inappropriate are right on target, and we ignore those opinions at our peril.

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.

But regardless of what happens to these categories of mail, there are some great growth opportunities in the remainder of the mailstream.

I have discussed remote commerce a lot in this Blog and in public speeches, so I will not elaborate on my view that when people receive something they need through the mailstream, rather than having to experience the inconvenience of driving somewhere and waiting to be served in a retail process, this is a great use of mail. For example, think about the difference between receiving your motor vehicle registration in the mail, as opposed to waiting in a long line to be served in a motor vehicle bureau.

But there is another potentially big opportunity, and it is described as the growth in businesses, non-profits and even governments having regular dialogues with their customers, some of which will go through the mailstream.

In the business world, retail establishments generally are remarkably poor in getting to know their customers, and communicating regularly with them. Most successful retailers understand that they need a great location for their store, the right products and services at the right prices, good presentation of the offerings inside the store, and, depending on the amount of assistance needed, the appropriate quality of in-store personnel.

However, they do not take advantage of what they can learn about a customer while he or she is in the store, and what they can communicate and learn when the customer is away from the store. In effect, they do not have an institutionalized knowledge base about the customer that helps them get to know customers as individuals. When I refer to an “institutionalized knowledge base,” I mean a usable computerized record of critical information about the customer.

The transaction history is a good place to start, but many retailers either retain a transactional framework that involves cash, debit cards, or credit cards, none of which are designed to give individual retailers a comprehensive transaction history about an individual customer.

There are three easy ways to get customer information:

• Granting credit and billing the customer through a retail account relationship;
• Creating a loyalty or reward points program; and/or
• Getting customer data through techniques as simple as soliciting business cards for a drawing or requesting that customers complete survey forms.

None of these approaches are expensive or complicated, but few retailers use them. The Customer Evangelism blog further reviews the advantages of implementing and maintaining a comprehensive customer database.

Non-profits also need to get to know donors better. Most still do “elephant hunting,” meaning that they go to big organizations like the United Way, large corporations, or large foundations to solicit funds. They need to get wealthy individuals to donate, but finding a wealthy donor is like finding the proverbial “needle in a haystack.” The easier way to get larger individual donations is to nurture those who have given small donations in the past, and to get them to increase their donations over time. In the Getting Attention blog, nonprofit marketing expert Nancy Schwartz reviews strategies nonprofits can use to enhance their marketing programs. In this post many of her recommendations are centered around improved communications and targeted messaging.

Personalized mail that conveys relevant and powerful information is an essential tool in both the business and the non-profit processes. Sometimes the mail is nothing more complicated than a thank-you note, a reminder, or a postcard suggesting a link to a web site. Sometimes, it is a newsletter or a survey. Sometimes, it is a seasonal greeting card that has a personal touch to it. But, whatever the technique used, it needs to be part of a regular dialogue to keep an organization connected to its customer. Yaro Starak discusses the need for more personalized contact in his blog Entrepreneur’s Journey. While the specific post I have cited focuses on email, the philosophy can be applied to all forms of communication.

Even government can improve its use of the mail. When it sends out its reminders on motor vehicle or drivers license registrations, it can include public service messages the citizens would find valuable. It can also send postcards to notify citizens about public hearings broadcast on the local cable TV channel. Where I live, Cablevision broadcasts state government meetings on Channel 84 and local government meetings on Channel 79.

The efficiency of mail is further debated in this Branding & Marketing blog post. The author feels that a combination of both online and offline communications is the most effective approach at establishing and building relationships with customers.

Customer, donor, and citizen engagement through the mail as one channel in a multi-channel relationship or conversation is a tremendous growth opportunity for those who sell mailing solutions. I always get tremendous satisfaction when one of our sales professionals breaks through with a customer to teach the customer how to use the mailstream in this very effective way of growing its business.

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.”

But the other part is to be brutally honest about what is bad about the medium, and to work actively to reduce or eliminate mail that diminishes the power of the brand. We cannot defend the indefensible, and we must be candid about what is indefensible.

• Mailpieces with legends on the outside of the envelope that identify the contents as “Official Communications,” when the content is a political fund-raising solicitation;
• Mailpieces knowingly and repeatedly addressed to deceased people;
• Mailpieces knowingly trying to market products and services to vulnerable populations. For example, many parents do not want credit card solicitations going directly to their children, and many loved ones do not want individuals with severe existing credit problems to continue to get credit card solicitations, but less reputable marketers ignore the recipient’s wishes.

By the way, some people would claim that saturation mailings, that is, mailings addressed to “resident” and mailed to everyone in a community, are indefensible. I have a different point of view. While some of us might not want to receive a newspaper-like mailpiece with dozens of coupons falling out of the newspaper when we pick it up, enough people in the community value the shopping ads and the coupons, that this type of mail has brand value. Requiring it to be more targeted would add so much cost that it would not available to lower-income citizens or to individuals who want to shop frugally for other reasons.

As I have said before, the “Do Not Mail” proponents are unfortunately playing upon citizen dissatisfaction with our industry’s slow response to mail recipient needs, but all the marketing research our industry has done for a long time indicates that Americans, as mail recipients, want a remote control device that gives them the ability to block certain channels, not one that offers them only an “on/off” switch

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.

Let’s get a few facts on the table. Paper used in the mail does not result in the reduction of the tree population. Forest products companies routinely plant more trees than they cut for paper pulp, and they work with sustainable forestry organizations to make sure that they are managing forests in environmentally sound fashion.

An increasing volume of mail is using recyclable paper and ink, and mail production processes are increasingly sensitive to carbon footprint. All mail tossed into the wastebasket consumes about 2.5% of landfill space and is biodegradable and non-toxic, unlike the metal and plastic component, waste from the electronic devices that would be used in place of the mail.

Regarding the issue of identify theft, a Presidential Commission looking at identify theft found that only 3.5% of all cases were related to the mail. Considering all communication channels, mail is an extremely safe medium. More identity theft occurs from people who are tricked into giving up their credit card and social security data on the internet than from mail-related transactions.

There is a legitimate annoyance factor from unsolicited, unwanted mail, but let’s look at these annoyance factors one at a time:

• Improperly addressed mail: To some degree, direct mailers are at fault for not using the best available tools for updating addresses on their mailing lists. But overly-broad privacy laws handicap people from getting complete and up-to-date addresses on everyone on their lists.

• Poorly targeted mail (getting mail marketing products and services in which we have no interest): This is a solvable problem. Marketers could collect a sufficient amount of information to have an intimate knowledge of our preferences, but many of us would not want anyone to have that level of detailed information about us.

• Poorly timed mail: Getting catalogs we want, but getting them more often than we want them. Again, this is a solvable problem if consumers are willing to share more detailed preferences with marketers.

• Mail that arrives too late: Getting an announcement on a sale that has already happened. Intelligently using mail scheduling technologies can eliminate this problem.

• Mail that is offensive to us because of its content, because it is sent to children, adults who need guardians or conservators, or people that have passed away, or because it misrepresents its intent. Some of this mail, particularly the fraudulent content mail, can be suppressed by the Postal Service, and the Postal Service actually has an enforcement agency, the Postal Inspection Service, that diligently shuts down mail with fraudulent content.

• Having an unsatisfactory experience with what we bought, because it was not as represented: More accurately representing what marketers are trying to sell would solve much of this problem.

For many causes of unwanted mail, getting what we do not want is a result of a marketer having imperfect knowledge about our preferences and sending us something inconsistent with those unknown preferences. Much of the remaining mail can be stopped in other ways.

So what’s wrong with a legally-mandated “Do Not Mail” registry? The fundamental problem is that it is a massive, costly overreaction to a relatively minor problem. People who want to get off mailing lists can do so today without the intervention of legislators or regulators. In fact, there is even a business that is trying to offer a viable and valuable service to help mail recipients identify what they want and do not want. That company, Earth Class Mail, is trying to be an intermediary for your mail and learn about your precise preferences.

Furthermore, it is our state governments that are considering these measures, but mail is integral to interstate and global commerce, and has been carefully policed by the Postal Inspection Service relative to offensive content. Does it make sense in a global economy to have different states adopting different standards for products and services regulated in Washington?

In terms of more specifics regarding why this approach is unwise, consider the following. With a broad-based “Do Not Mail” registry, many businesses would not survive. Mail is the most cost-efficient way to communicate with customers, and many businesses throughout the US depend on the mail because they can’t afford radio or TV spots. Others utilize it in conjunction with other communication mediums, such as the internet, TV, newspaper advertisements and radio.

If a registry stopped American companies from finding new customers, besides damaging those businesses, many jobs would be lost from significantly reduced mail volumes, which would lead to much higher postage prices on the rest of the mail.

The environmental consequences of less marketing mail might be a significantly greater carbon footprint. Some of those people who shop from catalogs to buy holiday or special occasion gifts would almost certainly get into their cars and pollute the environment. Reputable groups are trying to get consumers to make informed choices to take control of what they receive, but the one profiled in the New York Times is not getting sufficient revenue per customer to make that happen.

At Graph Expo, vendors offered technologies to improve address quality, enable better targeting, quicker responses in sending a marketing piece to interested prospects, and more precise representation of what is being sold by the printed material and graphics. They are trying to offer solutions that will preserve the mail medium, but reduce its annoyance factor.

Our Emtex software helps customers with large printers produce precise colors consistent with the marketer’s desire to represent accurately the color and appearance of the actual item being sold. Our friends at MCS Incorporated actually work with marketers to make sure that the same quality and precision is obtained whether the marketer is printing an image on a glossy postcard or a recycled envelope, no easy feat to accomplish, when the marketer is printing at very high speeds.

If you run a business, you need to make mail recipients and your marketers aware of the Direct Marketing Association Mail Preference Service. It is selective, broadly followed, highly effective, and being continuously improved.

There are some problems with the volume and types of mail some consumers are receiving, but the problem is addressable without legislative or regulatory intervention.

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.

• The communities surrounding these schools, as well as the school buildings themselves, evidence a far more upscale college and university population than was the case when I was in school. One indicator of this fact is the spending power marketers assume that students have. At one of the mailrooms I visited in June, the number of undeliverable direct marketing catalogs filled several large postal sacks, and many of these catalog marketers were upscale retailers that clearly believed that college students had sufficient disposable income to buy very expensive items.

• Students also have expectations about amenities far beyond anything we had. They expect state-of-the-art technology in their dorms, apartments, classrooms, libraries, and laboratories. They also expect to have the latest and greatest consumer electronics tools, and have laptops, cell phones, PDAs, and broadband television reception. They are also far more fashion-conscious and frequent a better class of eating establishments than we did. As a student at the University of Wisconsin, I used to go to a Rennebohm’s drug store diner and coffee shop for breakfast (images of famed drug store). Today, someone in my situation would be going to a Starbucks and paying many times as much for a simple cup of coffee. Students also expect far more convenient services like dry cleaners, copy and print shops, beauty salons, and even mailing and shipping centers to be on campus and open long hours.

• Colleges and universities are very fragmented and siloed organizations. Departments and schools do their own separate fund-raising, and share relatively few resources with other parts of the university. In fact, even the centralized print and mail centers of large universities find that much of the work they should be doing is outsourced by individual departments or faculty members to print and mail shops outside the university. One of the most frustrating consequences of this fragmentation, according to many people familiar with colleges and universities, including parents of other students, is that it is very difficult to get a complete understanding of how much has to be spent to educate a college student. There are multiple expenses, and they are invoiced in a very fragmented way to the students and their parents.

• The fragmentation relative to how universities operate is one explanation of why tuitions just keep increasing in good and bad times. In addition, policy towards tuition increases from the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. Another explanation is that colleges and universities spend heavily to build their capability to attract top students from around the world. Unlike governments, which cannot keep raising taxes, or businesses, which are subject to severe competition, great colleges and universities are perceived to have a lifetime economic value for students who graduate from them that enables them to charge what the market will bear.

• Contrary to the popular view that mail is going away, colleges and universities aggressively market themselves to younger and younger students through direct mail. My 16-year-old son gets postcards, letters, and even think marketing kits every day, and my 14-year-old daughter has even started to get some postcards from a few colleges and universities. They also market heavily to alumni, to parents of current students, and to other potential donors. Much of their communication with students is web-based, such as the description of courses and the grade announcements, but the marketing material is still heavily paper-based, and there is more of it than ever.