Today, there is a steady, inevitable growth of what many commentators refer to the “sharing economy.”  The most wellknown example of replacing sharing for ownership of a vital asset is the Zipcar business (recently acquired by Avis-Budget).  Zipcar is based on the principle that many individuals need automobiles relatively infrequently and for relatively short periods of time, so that neither ownership, nor leasing, nor even daily rentals are the most cost-efficient solutions for them.  They become a Zipcar member, rent a car for an hour at a time, pick it up at one Zipcar lot, drive it and drop it off at any Zipcar lot.

However, the sharing economy is progressing beyond the temporary use of automobiles. Airbnb is an example of a service which facilitates a process by which people may share all or part of their residences with others for a fee that, for the person needing accommodations, is lower than the cost of a hotel, and more readily available.  This service has the advantage of not only being more flexible, but enabling the use of rental property that is more conveniently located than a traditional hotel, which typically has to be in a commercially zoned part of a community.

Similarly, there are many businesses in which individuals can rent the use of a room or a suite for a meeting for an hour at a time.  Companies like Regus have a large supply of available offices for temporary use of facilities.  In my case, I have a network of friends or service providers that let me use vacant offices or conference rooms for meetings, so that I do not have to rent a very expensive hotel conference room.  The informal version of this is the use of coffee shops and restaurant spaces for regular meetings.  For example, the local coffee shops in Darien, Connecticut, where I live, are regular venues for morning and afternoon meetings, in one case,  for men’s prayer groups.  These groups do not rent a space, but simply reserve a large table and preorder breakfast or coffee for a group of 12 people.

New York City has a wonderful set of public spaces in Midtown buildings like the Park Avenue Plaza, the Sony building and the IBM building that have open lobby areas that have been converted into meeting places or even spaces where individuals can sit at a table at no cost for hours at a time.  The Park Avenue Plaza between 52^nd and 53^rd Streets between Park and Madison Avenues has gone one step further in converting a portion of its space to a group of tables for individuals to use for chess games.

A variant of this temporary use of assets is the penetration of extremely short-term rentals of equipment needed for one-time tasks often of such short duration that a purchase or even a fixed term rental is not a viable option.  My wife and I rented a dehumidifier some years ago for a period of 3-4 days when our basement had been flooded and we needed to get moisture removed from our carpet.

For communities, the use of shared services is a great alternative to having each resident separately contract for services.  My wife and I have lived in such an association for almost 20 years.  We have 19 homes, a clubhouse, two tennis courts, and significant open spaces for play areas for children.  Our lawn management, tree trimming and removal, snow removal, road maintenance, and refuse collection services are shared across the 19 residences, and, as a result, we pay far less than we would pay if each of us contracted separately for these services.

Another form of facilitated shared services is the facilitation of peer-to-peer selling of books, music, DVDs, and other tangible assets by one individual to another through sites like Amazon.com, not to mention that Amazon.com is also a major provider of shared cloud computing services.  My son James made significant money during his senior year of high school and the summer after high school collecting salable items people we knew no longer needed and selling them online to others.  He particularly helped the local Boy Scout operation sell the items that remained unsold after the annual spring tag sale.

Still another formed of shared service, which has been around for several decades, but is getting renewed life, is the use of ride-sharing for trips to and from work, and to and from places like airports and train stations. Back in the 1980’s, when I was a reverse commuter from New York to Stamford at Pitney Bowes, the Company had no shuttle service between the train station and the Company headquarters.  While I enjoyed walking between the station and my office, there were times when walking was not a practical option, typically at night when I needed to get to the station quickly to catch a train back to New York. Many people picked up and drove me to the station.  I developed some great short and long term relationships with those who regularly helped me.

What has given the sharing economy new life is the Internet, which enables those doing the sharing to have three capabilities they never previously had:

• The use of online matching between those with assets to share and those needing the use of the assets;
• An ability to get a high degree of advanced knowledge about the person providing the asset to be shared and the asset itself; and
• The ability of prior users to rate the experience and give feedback available to all future users of that asset.

For the sharing of automobiles and rides, the increased availability of insurance against both liability and damage is another factor that has enabled the sharing economy to grow, since many people are deterred by the financial risk they would appear to be taking.

I am excited about the prospect of this economy continuing to grow.  We waste and consume too much, and, by buying items, we also end up with all the burdens of ownership.

Historically, shared assets and services often got damaged more easily and got excessively intensive use, which meant that their value to others was diminished.  Cooperative associations were valued less than pure ownership situations, and the ownership of assets was associated with status, power, and freedom.

Today, the world is different.  We have virtual offices, which are enabled by our ability to stay in touch with the world via our smart phones, Ipads, and laptops.  We have more ubiquitous cloud computing, which obviates the need for us to own servers.  We also have more online networks that are changing how we share information with one another across organizational and community boundaries. The concept of sharing space and other assets is not as strange as it once seemed.

I have learned how to do more of this with the need to manage a start-up business, Dossia, and to manage our film project.  It is a wonderful trend that, over time, is making our quality of life far better than it once was.

What is a “safe investment?”

As I have attempted to secure investors for our feature film From the Rough, I have gotten extremely frustrated by comments many people have made that our investment is much “riskier” than putting their money in publicly traded stocks and bonds, or even real estate construction.

An article entitled “Tim Cook vs. Steve Ballmer” written on April 23, 2013, by Zach Epstein, the Executive Editor of an online portal called BGR, points out that investors are calling for the ouster of Tim Cook, the Apple CEO, who has presided over a 40% decline in Apple’s stock since he succeeded Steve Jobs, just as they have called for the ouster of Steve Ballmer, the Microsoft CEO who succeeded Bill Gates in 2000, while Microsoft stock has declined by 43%.

http://bgr.com/2013/04/23/tim-cook-vs-steve-ballmer-nyt-459167/

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I just finished reading Cissy Houston’s remarkable book Remembering Whitney, which is partly Cissy Houston’s autobiography and partly a story of her daughter Whitney Houston.  It is a remarkable book in so many ways!

What makes it most remarkable is Cissy Houston’s ability to recall small, but important, moments in her own life, as well as the life she shared with Whitney Houston.  Relative to her own life, she shared several stories about how she would use a new technique in background singing to give a prominent artist’s song more life and richness.  She clearly took her craft very seriously, but, more importantly, she opened the minds of the artists she supported as to the potential for their musical performances they had not previously appreciated.

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Celebrating everyday heroes

Type 1: the person who performs a single dramatic heroic act

When we talk about celebrating everyday heroes, we should pause to redefine what we mean.  When I was growing up, a hero was someone who did something “extraordinary” and positive for others or for the community at large.  We became accustomed to defining heroism in terms of saving someone’s life, such as a firefighter who entered a burning building to rescue someone or the police officer who saves a citizen’s life.

Type 2: the person who plays a vital role in a bigger heroic effort

More recently, we have expanded our definition of a “hero” to include those who provide a vital contribution to a major accomplishment, such as the work many unsung heroes played in winning World War II, as Paul Kennedy profiled in his great book Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War.  On Saturday, March 16, 2013, I attended a wonderful event for the Explorers’ Club, which celebrated both a few very famous people, like Senator John Glenn and Mercury Astronaut Scott Carpenter, and both of these kinds of heroes.

The Explorers Club celebrated a Sherpa who saved many people’s lives in mountain-climbing accidents in Mr. Everest, who would be like our first kind of hero. James Cameron, the director of Titanic, who did a number of deep oceanic exploration efforts, credited a number of engineers like a wonderful gentleman named Kevin Hardy from San Diego’s Scripps Oceanographic Institute with being essential to his success.  Hardy, with whom I spoke at dinner Friday evening, designed and built the unmanned capsule that descended to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the ocean in the world, took photos and captured other data essential to preparing Cameron for his deep dive in 2012.

Type 3: The person whose cumulative body of work is heroic, but is insufficiently recognized or rewarded

However, there is a third kind of hero, which we do not explicitly celebrate, but should:  the person who consistently develops innovative solutions that make a big difference in the lives of those he or she touches every day.  Often, these innovative solutions are not documented, and, as a result, they are not celebrated in books, movies, plays, or even in recognition events like the Explorers Club event, although the Explorers Club comes closer than any organization I have seen to recognizing this kind of unsung hero.

Along these lines, I was pleased to read today that baseball will be honoring Dr. Frank Jobe at the July 27 Hall of Fame induction ceremony for his pioneering work in what is now called “Tommy John” surgery.  Dr. Jobe invented that surgery on the baseball pitcher, Tommy John, who had damaged his pitching elbow to the point that his chances of recovering and pitching again were estimated at 1 in 100.  His ligament grafting process, invented in 1974, increased the chance of full recovery to over 90% today. Dr. Jobe has contributed to the career successes of several dozen pitchers and position players and has probably been responsible for billions of dollars of enhanced value for baseball team owners, only a fraction of which has gone to him.  Although he is a wealthy man, he is a relatively unsung hero in baseball and other sports.

Coach Catana Starks: the ultimate example of the third type of everyday hero

However, to me, the everyday hero we should celebrate in entertainment, books, and recognition events is the person who innovates everyday in multiple situations, changes the lives of many other people, but does not get recognized publicly for much of what he or she does, and often is far more under-rewarded than Dr. Jobe.  That is why I have put the story of Dr. Catana Starks on screen, and why her story and others like it need to be told.

Our film could only scratch the surface of what Coach Starks was able to do over a lifetime of coaching.  Part of the reason was because she did her job in such a quiet way that it was difficult to dramatize some of her accomplishments within the time constraints of a full-length feature film.  Part of the reason was that she did not think to tell us what she had done because she did not appreciate how heroic it was.  Finally, the major part of the reason was that her heroism was not the single, easily definable accomplishment that could be the subject of a large project, but the cumulative effect of many smaller, innovative acts that made a big difference in the lives of those she touched.

What we would have liked to celebrate, but did not get a chance to celebrate, were many small acts of daily heroism about which we either learned from Coach Starks after we finished shooting the movie, or from others.  There are many stories about Coach Starks, and they fit into three categories:

• Redefining adversity as opportunity;
• Seeing opportunities to make a difference in situations that no one else saw; or
• Using scarce resources in novel ways.

Redefining adversity as opportunity

Coach Starks did not have the budget or the established, prestigious program to recruit the most sought-after golfers, so she often had to recruit people who were from less advantaged backgrounds.  Her genius or “heroism” was her innovative way of convincing them that their apparent “disadvantaged” backgrounds prepared them better for the competitive challenges of life than the so-called “advantages” bestowed on their competitors.

My favorite story about Coach Starks in this regard was how she figured out that the “disadvantages” of not having enough money to afford hotel rooms the night before a tournament and of not having a big enough van to enable everyone to have a sleeper seat could be turned into an opportunity.  In the beginning, the person who sat upright in front with her on a long overnight drive was disadvantaged, but she gave that person a special treat, in terms of hours of conversation in which she presented life lessons.  The golfers with whom I spoke told me that they eventually came to see the front seat position as a better option for them than a sleeper seat, even though they had a less comfortable sleeping position.  Every one of them remembered those long conversations years later.

Seeing opportunities where others did not

Coach Starks was a teacher.  Many teachers have invited inmates from local prisons to speak to students about the problems of drugs and how they lead to bad behavior.  Coach Starks did that as well.

However, she went one step further.  She had one drug dealer speak who had been sentenced to life imprisonment from three felony convictions during his teenage years.  It prompted her to use her accumulated knowhow on coaching and mentoring to persuade the prison system to give him an opportunity to get treatment and eventually be released.  She became an advocate for reducing the sentences of those whose drug-related offenses occurred early in their adult lives and who had reformed during their prison tenure.

Using scarce resources efficiently

Coach Starks did not have the high-priced instructors or technology to help her team refine its golfing skills.  She came up with two innovative solutions:

• She tapped volunteers in the Nashville area who gave her golfers free instruction at the driving range or on the public courses.  These volunteers became mentors beyond the help they gave players relative to their golfing skills.
• She used a video-cassette recorder to capture the golf strokes of her golfers and then urged them to send the video cassettes back to their coaches in their countries or communities of origin.  This accomplished two things:
  • It gave the golfers instruction from someone from whom they had learned to play golf and who was intimately familiar with their technique; and
  • It reinforced a lifelong support system they would need for not only golf, but also everything else they would do.

I could have used many other examples of her innovation solutions to problems caused by resource scarcity, but there are too many from which to choose.  Her decades long success as a coach and teacher is the result of many small innovations, no one of which is dramatic enough to be the foundation for a piece of feature film or documentary entertainment, but the cumulative effect of which was huge.

Her story deserves to be told, and it will be told in public venues, beginning later this year in From the Rough.

James B. Stewart, a reporter and author wrote on Op-Ed piece in the Saturday, February 16, 2013, issue of The New York Times, entitled “The Myth of the Rich Who Flee From Taxes.”  His major argument is summarized in the following statement:

“At least three recent academic studies have demonstrated that the number of people who move for tax reasons is negligible, even among the wealthy.”

As a person who knows many wealthy people who have moved to states with no income or inheritance taxes, and many who have chosen not to do so, I am often asked by many people why we do not leave Connecticut and establish a primary residence in a state like Florida, where I could save millions of dollars in taxes over the rest of my life.  My view is that Stewart is only partially correct and partially wrong in his assertion that higher taxes do not drive people to change where they live.

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In the Saturday, December 22, 2012, issue of The Wall Street Journal, there was an inspiring story written by James Zweig called “The 107-Year-Old Stock Picker.”  The subject of the story was 107-year-old Irving Kahn, the chairman of the Kahn Brothers Group, an investment management firm based in New York City.  As Zweig describes him:

“He personifies the virtues that Graham (Benjamin Graham) spelled out in his classic 1949 book “The Intelligent Investor,” from which this column takes its name.”

Later on in the story, Zweig tells us more about Kahn:

“Discipline has been a key for Mr. Kahn. He still works five days a week, slacking off only on the occasional Friday.”

In answer to a question about his remarkable longevity, Kahn responds:

“Millions of people die every year of something they could cure themselves: lack of wisdom and lack of ability to control their impulses.”

Irving Kahn appears to be an individual firmly grounded in the real world, and as active as a 107-year-old can possibly be. Zweig commented: “In some ways, Mr. Kahn says, these are the good old days.”  As an investor, he correctly notes that he has more tools than ever available to level the playing field between investors and those from whom they buy securities.  His goal is to know more about the stock he is buying than the investor who is trying to sell it to him. He is energized by his job and his daily life, and his physical faculties have declined relatively slowly.

Although I have had many role models in my life, certainly Mr. Kahn has to be added to them.  I believe that the key to health and longevity is a continuation of one’s passionate commitment to family and friends, causes, and work.  When someone completely “retires” from active living, he or she actually increases his or her psychic burden.

The other key to healthy longevity is to live every day with the appreciation of life that a productive very old person carries through the day.  When I have met such people, very little that bothers me would bother them, because they have had a few extra decades in which to put life into perspective.

How do they think differently from someone at my age or someone far younger than I am?

• They have been through enough up-and-down cycles in life to realize that neither success nor adversity is permanent.  Life has a mix of both every year for us.
• Just as those who have had near death experiences tend to worry less about just about every other problem, those who have relatively short life expectancies tend to consider daily problems to be of lesser consequence.
• They celebrate small successes every day.  At first glance, this would appear to be an acknowledgment that a person has failed to achieve more ambitious goals, but it actually increases the likelihood of more ambitious accomplishments.  Efficiently taking small, successful steps often gives an individual the ability to adapt to changed conditions and achieve success with fewer big failures.

Conversely, by encouraging older people to retire and disengage from active work, we inadvertently put them in a much more psychologically vulnerable position.  They lose the ability to see past the news headlines into the many good things that are happening.  They get fearful, when they should be celebrating the progress we are making on many fronts.

Why do I believe that to be the case?  Someone in the flow of the business, political, cultural, and community world has a much better understanding of reality than someone who gathers information from the mass media.  The TV media, in particular, is designed to report what it calls “news,” but what is typically a highly distorted and negative selection of the broader flow of events and trends.  Initially local news editors, but now national and global news editors as well, on all news stations select stories for broadcasting or printing based on the principle of “If it bleeds, let it lead.”

For this reason, although the world is less violent than it was two decades ago, and the absolute level of crime is the lowest it has been for decades, the sensational reporting of crimes gives the impression that violence is at an all-time high.

Recently, I met a highly accomplished journalist and author named Greg Behrman, who feels the same way I do.  We spend far too much time covering what’s wrong in the world, and not enough time spotlighting the things we are doing right, and that require considerable innovation in solving problems.  Think about this point for a minute in a number of contexts:

• As a country, we are seeing a significant increase in the percentage of people that are overweight or even obese.  We have a true public health crisis in slow motion.  That is no longer news.  We see it all around us, particularly in the Southeastern United States, and in the lower income parts of big cities.

However, I learned that New York City has actually stopped and even reversed the incidence of childhood obesity, but I did not learn it from the news media, but from a speech given by Dr. Tom Farley, the City’s Public Health Commissioner.  I am sure that the advisory board meeting at which Dr. Farley spoke was not the first time at which this news was made public, but it would be difficult to find this story in the popular media.

• We get the impression that we are a more violent world than ever before, but Joshua Goldstein recently published a book called Winning the War on War, which documents that the absolute level of armed conflict is declining over time.  Why do we not see these statistics dominating the airwaves?

• The U.S. has had great success in several public health campaigns over the last four decades in reducing the percentage of adults who use tobacco, the likelihood of automobile related fatalities, the likelihood of workplace-related accidents, and the incidence of alcohol abuse.  This is not broadly or frequently reported.

• Our air is cleaner, there is a lower incidence of acid rain, and the level of hazardous waste discharges in our factories is far lower than it was 40 years ago, but there is very little reporting on these positive environmental trends.

• In many respects, medical science has enabled us to achieve a better quality of life than was possible when I was growing up.  My wife was an early beneficiary of lasik surgery, which eliminated her need to wear contact lenses or glasses for everyday distance viewing (although she still wears reading glasses.)

Whenever I am down, I think of Irving Kahn, but more importantly, I think of the old Frank Sinatra song That’s Life, particularly one section of the lyrics:

I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn and a king

I’ve been up and down and over and out and I know one thing

Each time I find myself flat on my face

I pick myself up and get back in the race

That’s Life, That’s Life

I tell you, I can’t deny it

I thought of quitting, baby but my heart just ain’t gonna buy it.”

We should take a moment upon reading this and celebrate Irving Kahn and everyone like me who keeps getting “back in the race.”  For, in doing so, he has clearly discovered the true fountain of youth.

As we end 2012 and enter 2013, I have some observations about the world as I see it.

The economic environment

This is a very difficult economic environment for people of all ages, but particularly for young people leaving college, graduate school, or professional schools, except for those with very specific trade-based skills in which demand exceeds supply or for men and women with science, technology, engineering and math degrees.

Our colleges and universities are run highly inefficiently and tuition, book, room and board costs are wildly inflated.  They burden our students with huge debt loads and force them into long term financial servitude with education that, in many cases, is of marginal value in terms of their earning power.

However, what makes the situation worse is that what we reward throughout traditional education, including college, is the mastery of a bodies of knowledge as defined by school boards and individual teachers and professors, not the skill to use that knowledge to solve problems and propose solutions.  Our young people coming out of school are generally clueless on how to navigate the worlds they enter, whether those are business, government, the educational sector, or the nonprofit sector.  Part of this navigation process is recognizing that knowledge gets obsolete fast, but adaptability and emotional intelligence skills need to continue to improve.

The most destructive aspect of our education system is that it teaches both conformity and the creation of regulatory and legal obstacles to engineer risks out of our lives, and, while it achieves destructive conformity, it can never succeed in getting rid of life’s inherent risks.

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As my family and I celebrate the holidays this year, we truly feel that we have gone through a rebirth from the many challenges we have faced in the past few years.  Objectively, our path to get our film into the market has been strewn with obstacles, some of which resulted from our inexperience and others of which resulted from the fact that we are trying to do something very different from the kind of film traditional studios produce, finance, and/or distribute. Similarly, my efforts to battle the day-to-day challenges of leading Dossia have presented challenges I did not encounter when I led a more established business at Pitney Bowes.

Oddly enough, we are more energized and happier at this time than ever before.  As I reflect on this strange feeling of happiness as a result of the adversity we have experienced, I think of a quote from Helen Keller:

“A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery, of hardships.”

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Many people have asked about the status of our From the Rough film project.  It is alive and well, and we have taken most of 2012 to take a fresh look at every component of the project. We are getting close to finalizing it, and expect the film to be released in 2013.

We looked more closely at the origin of our title, which came from a quote by Seve Ballesteros, the late, great Spanish golfer, who, when asked about what he would have wanted to be different about golf, said: “I’d like to see the fairways more narrow. Then everyone would have to play from the rough. Not just me.”

Initially, we understood his comment to be half-kidding and half-serious.  The serious part of his comment arose from the fact that he was the best player of his time, maybe the best of all time, in designing and executing on shots from the rough, or from any difficult lie or location.  What we did not understand was how these unique skills were foundational to who he was and why he succeeded.

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The reinventions of great companies

Pitney Bowes built a wonderful set of businesses that have served it well for 92 years, and the Company celebrated its 92^nd anniversary on November 16^th.  On that evening, I attended the 75^th Anniversary of the founding of the Company’s Oval Club, an organization that celebrates long service employees, by bringing retirees and long service active employees together.

One long tenured employee, Bob Hoffman, who retired after 56 years of service in 1995 and is now 92 years old, was very important to my success.  I worked closely with him early in my time at the Company.  Even then, I had many ideas about what the Company should do to grow its business.  He would politely and thoroughly tell me which ones had merit and which ones had been tried and discarded because they were fatally flawed.

The longer I spoke with him, the more I appreciated those who came before me. The most important lessons I learned from Bob were that the leaders of the Company over several decades had been highly sophisticated and innovative, and had to make courageous decisions under extraordinary circumstances.

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