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 talking with Dr. Robert Green, one of the handful of leading-edge researchers and thinkers on the promise of genomics in transforming health and healthcare, I have gained some quite interesting insights.

Dr. Green is a physician-scientist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Harvard Medical School and has focused much of his professional life on a subject of great passion to me, patient empowerment.  As strange as it may sound, he has had to do a considerable amount of clinical study work to prove to the medical community that the consequences of doctors telling patients that they are at serious risk of a degenerative and currently incurable disease are, on balance, positive.  His work in that regard has been done through a series of studies called the REVEAL Study, for which he has been the principal investigator.

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Many of my Republican friends (I am registered as an Independent) are bewildered that President Obama won. However, I believe in the voters’ collective wisdom, and would offer observations about some of the reasons Americans chose President Obama over Governor Romney.

The Republican Party platform and its U.S. Senatorial candidates frightened many people who would otherwise consider voting Republican because of harsh, insensitive positions on issues like immigration, abortion, and contraception.  Governor Romney’s path to winning the nomination forced him to support positions he probably would not have supported in a general election campaign.

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We think of extreme climatic events as happening only in this past few decades, but there were events that fundamentally altered our country’s demography in the 1920’s and 1930’s and 1950’s, and were more devastating than what we are now experiencing.

The Mississippi River flooded in 1927 and had short and long term impacts.  In those floods, 700,000 people lost their homes and Herbert Hoover became a hero for his leadership in flood relief efforts, which propelled him into the Presidency in 1928. The flooding disaster triggered acceleration in the migration by African Americans from the Southern delta farm areas to Northern cities, which was part of a major migration by African Americans from South to North between 1915 and 1970.  It also resulted in a significant increase in federal control of waterways and flood control systems across the country.

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Because of my focus on enabling individuals and families to maximize their health and get the best possible value from health care and health spending, I have often focused on those factors driving the use of the healthcare system that are not given sufficient focus by others.  One such factor is the intensity of healthcare usage caused by injuries.

As a result, I was gratified to read a major story in The New York Times Magazine October 28, 2012, issue entitled “The Dead Don’t Lie” by Robert W. Stock.  The story is a profile of an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins named Susan Baker.  The main message of the story is that Ms. Baker has spent most of her professional life focusing on healthcare encounters caused by injuries of various kinds.  The good news is that she has made great progress in many areas in which she sought to make a difference.  The bad news is that our society is seeing a significant increase in new sources of injury.

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Today, September 11, 2012, is the 11^th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and like that tragic day, is a clear, cool Tuesday.  I remember that day well, as do all of us with some emotional connection to the day’s events.

I was in my sixth year as Pitney Bowes’ CEO.  I was at a breakfast meeting with representatives from our Main Plant.  It was a difficult conversation, because I was explaining why the Plant would eventually close (it closed in 2004).  The reason for its closure was not a cost-saving play, but the fact that postal regulations around the world were driving us away from printing fixed meter impressions on envelopes and toward variable digital printing.  Ink jet technology was the only viable alternative, and companies like Canon, Hewlett Packard, and Brother owned all of the critical patents on that technology.  Inevitably, they, rather than Pitney Bowes, would manufacture the low and mid-range products that had been produced in that factory for over 80 years.

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Vocational and Technical Education

As we just observed the Labor Day weekend, there is a tendency for the media and for elected officials to reinforce obsolete views of labor and of vocational and technical skills required to compete in the global economy. There is also a tendency to celebrate the wrong qualities of people they would generally characterize as being part of the “working class.” As a result many of us have image of “blue collar jobs,” the skills required to do them well, and vocational and technical education required to prepare people for them that is wildly out of date.

Why What We Celebrate is Obsolete

Blogger David Burr concisely described why the Labor Day holiday was created:

“The holiday originated in 1882 as a result of the labor movement and was intended to be a day of rest to recognize the efforts of the average working man.”

We need to reinvent what we honor for this holiday.  Labor Day was designed to recognize the value of the “average worker,” collective activity, labor union membership rights, and “hard work.”  The typical image of the “blue collar” worker is someone using muscular power to do a physically demanding, backbreaking task.  When I think of Labor Day as it has been celebrated historically, I am more likely to think of either the folklore of John Henry as a “steel driver” or the cleaning woman celebrated in Donna Summer’s great song “She Works Hard for the Money.”

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President Obama’s recent quote that “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help” justifiably is getting a great deal of publicity and commentary.  The statement is true, but incomplete in its understanding of what it takes to succeed. It is being used by many people to justify redistributing income and wealth from successful people who are simply more “fortunate” in having better support systems to those whom these individuals consider to have been “less fortunate.”

When I think of his remark, I remember the scene at the end of Superman II, in which Lex Luther, the master criminal  played by Gene Hackman, attempts to curry favor with the evil General Zod, played by Terence Stamp, by directing him to put Superman in an enclosed chamber in which Superman will lose all his powers.  Superman tricks Luther and Zod and ends up retaining his powers, whereas Zod and the two evil creatures with him lose theirs.  After this happens, Luther approaches Superman and says: “Wasn’t it great how we fooled them?  I was with you all the time, Superman.”

External resources can support, hinder, or be neutral in someone’s quest to achieve a goal.  In most cases involving transformational change, the individual has to work smartly and hard to steer those resources toward helping him or her, rather than being hindrances.  Essentially, there are five flaws with the implications of the President’s statement:

• Great leaders and innovators “connect the dots” in ways that others do not. Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers uses the example of Bill Gates having access to a computer lab at his school when he was growing up to illustrate that Gates’ success was clearly attributable to that unique set of circumstances, and to the support the school provided.  That’s true, but Gates was not the only student in that school.  His family was not the wealthiest in the school, and he had no unique privileges that gave only him the ability to take advantage of the free resource that triggered his success.  Gates was unique in taking the initiative and having the vision to understand and use the available asset.  Great leaders find or create assets and support that others cannot imagine, much less use.
• Most successful people have the passion and the tenacity to pursue their goals under circumstances and against obstacles that discourage other people.   This is especially true of entrepreneurs who transform a marketplace.  Years ago, I read the story of Intuit, a great company that brought innovative consumer-controlled financial management software to the marketplace.  On many occasions, founder Scott Cook encountered obstacles that put him very close to going out of business, but he kept going.  Most people would not attempt to start a new business, much less endure the multiple setbacks it takes to succeed.  Great leaders and innovators have more tenacity and patience to realize the benefits of whatever support systems they can use.
• Unfortunately, most leaders who make a difference have the moral courage to take unpopular positions, even to the extent of being ridiculed by others.  Working hard is a virtue, but being willing to work hard often leads to a militant conformity with the status quo, not breakthrough successes.  Great leaders and innovators are unusually good at being immune from the discouragement that comes from external resistance from the so-called “support resources.”
• Great leaders and innovators find a way to win over neutral or even change-resistant people.  They are unusually gifted at finding common ground to move people toward their point of view.  Great leaders and innovators are accomplished at turning adversaries into supporters.
• Transformational change is never a linear, standardized process.  It requires a great deal of adaptation.  Great leaders and innovators are comfortable with being adaptable, not adhering to rigid rules and processes.

We are going through a very painful time in our country in terms of the changing nature of work, business, technology, healthcare, education, and the role of government.  Because of disruptive innovations in every sector of our society, the old rules about how people succeeded are gone, but it is unclear what will replace them.

The major changes that are horribly disruptive to people’s lives are these:

• Because every marketplace is changing more rapidly and radically than ever before, the value of decades of experience in a job, a company, or an industry is less than it has ever been.
• Because experience is less valuable, everyone is less secure in his or her current employment than ever before.
• When someone loses his or her job, the path to future employment requires more substantial adjustment than ever before.  Moving to the same job in a different company or industry is less and less likely.
• For many people, the right kind of paying employment may be in an independent contractor position, as opposed to a job with an employer.  In fact, many employers are going to sites like www.freelancer.com  to hire workers to perform tasks, without having to create a “job” without fixed responsibilities, pay levels, benefits, and taxes.  For someone to make a living, it is more important that he or she seek “paying work” than to seek a “job.”
• Adaptability and innovation are more important than conformity, a skill most people are not taught in the educational system, which rewards conformity to what the teacher believes is the “right answer.”
• Categories and definitions of what we think about the world are subject to challenge and are less permanent than they have ever been.  The ways we describe what is going on in the world are more likely to be challenged than ever before.  For example, when we use the analogy of a blueprint to describe our genetic code, a common metaphor for describing genetics, we are reflecting an obsolete understanding of genetics, since we now know that we are shaped by the way our genes are “expressed” or “switched on.”  Even something as seemingly fixed as our genetic make-up not only changes during our lifetime, but the altered genetic “expression” can also be passed on to our children.
• Education is increasingly about “learning,” from wherever source we can learn best, as opposed to “teaching.”  Teaching implies that there is a fixed body of knowledge that is imparted from teachers to students.  Learning changes that paradigm by inducing students to seek insight and knowledge from whatever sources they might be available, and to recognize that there are no fixed bodies of knowledge, but continually changing assumptions and paradigms within every body of knowledge.

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Recently, I stumbled on an online article about the Google effort to lobby the State of Nevada to allow self-driving automobiles to be used within the state.  That article is available at the following link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/science/11drive.html?_r=1

A more recent and broader article about self-driving cars was posted on Friday, March 31, 2012.

http://news.yahoo.com/coming-soon-self-driving-cars-120300164.html

If self-driving cars were to be broadly available, they would profoundly affect how society functions today.  There are many obvious consequences from having the ability to acquire and use a self-driving car:

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