During the course of determining whether I should invest in a documentary film about dogs, I gained some quite interesting insights into the potentially new role dogs can play in our health care system.  Because dogs have a sense of smell that is 40 times as acute and discriminating as that residing in humans, some researchers have explored whether dogs can detect diseases as accurately and reliability as much more expensive technologies, with no need for invasive and time-consuming diagnostic processes.

Two organizations, the Pine Street Foundation in California and the Sensory Research Institute at Florida State University, have each done reported studies which have concluded that dogs can reliably detect various kinds of cancers, such as prostate, breast and skin cancers, because tumor cells give off different odors from regular cells.  It will be quite interesting to determine whether their reliable detection is such that they can detect the presence of these diseases even earlier than more high-tech alternatives like 64-slice CT scans or MRI’s or nuclear magnetic resonance systems.  Dogs apparently have demonstrated as well that they can detect the imminence of an epileptic seizure minutes before the individual subject to the seizure has any symptoms.

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As I have thought about how to change human behavior to get people to do healthier things, I remember the 1984 movie The Karate Kid. In that movie, the lead character, Daniel LaRusso, played by Ralph Macchio, finds a master teacher, Mr. Miyagi, played by Pat Morita.  He believes that he is going to receive conventional instruction on how to be a karate black belt.  Instead, he gets assigned one chore after another, such as painting fences and waxing cars.  It is only after he is doing these chores for a while that he realizes that each task is also serving to strengthen him for karate.  He develops his capabilities while doing something else.

I believe that the only way we will change societal behaviors and get people to do things which make them healthier is to make healthy activity unconscious and fun.  For example, on the web site Thefuntheory.com, there is a video which shows the building, installation, and use of a stairway adjacent to an escalator in what appears to be a Swedish train station.  Because each step in the stairway looks like a big piano key and each one sounds a note as someone steps on it, the result is that stairway usage increases by 66%.

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One television show I enjoy watching is Mad Men, which takes viewers back to the world of the early 1960’s advertising agency.  Through the series, we get reminded how far we have come on reducing gender discrimination and sexual harassment and smoking.

We also realize that life was a great deal slower then and that there was an element of unreality and unsustainability in how people lived then.  There was no hint of global competition or even of the brutal competition that would characterize the American business world even two decades later. (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.

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…)