http://www.nypost.com/p/sports/yankees/stuff_start_Q8XILKn7AcY70jJEiJpjOK

The core message of all this commentary is that a successful closer, in addition to having the required athletic skills, must have the temperament to bounce back quickly and decisively from adversity.  In reading this commentary, I am reminded that I believe this quality to be required for all great leaders and for business people who have important jobs.  Adversity is a given; how people respond to it separates the successful people from those who will fail.

In fact, the ability to learn from, but emotionally distance oneself from, adversity is important in all competitive endeavors.  My younger son James competed at a very high level in chess for many years.  What astounded me about him and other high-level chess players was their ability to lose a long, grueling, and highly disappointing match, often because of an avoidable mistake, and to be ready to compete fully in a new match a few minutes later, as if the prior defeat had never happened.

I also saw this quality in my predecessor as Pitney Bowes CEO George Harvey.  Whatever happened, good or bad, was put aside quickly so that he and the organization could focus on the challenges ahead of us.  I also see this quality in abundance in the Eaton CEO Sandy Cutler, and saw it particularly during the horrific economic crisis in 2008 and early 2009, which hit the diversified industrial companies particularly hard.  Decisions were made in terms of the best way to address adverse market conditions, and the organization methodically executed on them.

This is an underestimated and undervalued quality of great leadership, and it is why Mariano Rivera’s response to his injury is particularly noteworthy.  He could have withdrawn quietly from the competitive arena and gone on to have his surgery and undergo his rehabilitation.  However, he did not do that.  He announced quickly that he would be back and quietly, but forcefully, communicated that he would continue to be a mentor to the other pitchers and to the rest of the team to help them through this transition.

The tone he set in his remarks was quite interesting.  I heard several messages, in addition to the encouraging message that he would return:

• He would influence the speed of his recovery, rather than leaving it to chance.
• The organization and the team would be fine because no one, including him, is indispensable.  His modesty over his entire career is uncharacteristic of many world-class athletes, who are often highly self-absorbed.  This combination of incredible self-confidence and modesty was specifically described as a core capability of great business leaders in Jim Collins’ From Good to Great.  Collins referred to such leaders as Level 5 leaders, individuals with ferocious competitiveness and self-confidence, but a strongly modest demeanor.  If Mariano Rivera were a business leader, he would be a Level 5 leader.
• He believes that the team will step up and that many people will perform better individually and collectively to take up the slack.
• He was glad that he, rather than someone else, would have to bear this burden, because he believed himself fully capable of managing it.
• He is a strongly religious and faith-driven individual who is confident that grace will be visited upon him if he submits to a higher power.

Great leaders articulate and live these kinds of values.  Even those who are not fans of the New York Yankees admire Mariano Rivera, not only for what he has accomplished, but the task he has undertaken and will accomplish in helping himself and his team through this difficult process.

Many statisticians making the compelling case that closers are overvalued, and as a baseball statistical buff, I would agree with their conclusion.  However, Mariano Rivera is more than a closer; he is a true leader and inspirational figure whose value cannot be captured in his on-field accomplishments.  He has never won a Most Valuable Player award for a full season, but, oddly enough, the way he has handled this situation may make those who never voted for him think differently about the value he provides to his team.

He is the last player to wear uniform number 42, the number worn by Jackie Robinson and retired by Major League Baseball for all players in the future.  When Rivera retires, no one else will ever wear number 42 on a Major League Baseball field, except as a temporary tribute to Jackie Robinson.

No one can compare with Jackie Robinson, in terms of the impact he had, not just on baseball, but on sports and society as a whole.  However, Mariano Rivera has carved out his own niche as one of the most inspirational athletes of all time, with an impact far beyond baseball.

Like many people, I will eagerly anticipate his return.

http://www.themanufacturinginstitute.org/~/media/A07730B2A798437D98501E798C2E13AA/2011_Skills_Gap_Report.pdf

What distresses me when I read a report like this is the dysfunctional direction in which parents of college-age children and the colleges and universities nudge young people.  Given what I know about the exciting and innovative products and services industrial companies like Eaton Corporation (a company led by a once-in-a-generation CEO, Alexander “Sandy” Cutler) provide to the global marketplace, I would jump at the chance to get started in a career in a manufacturing-oriented company.  Moreover, unless I had a passion for a four-year college education, I would seriously consider either a two-year community college degree, or a time-compressed college education (graduating in 3 or 3 ½ years, instead of four).

Unfortunately, I see several bad decisions made across all sectors of the socio-economic spectrum:

• In wealthy communities like the one in which I live, parents start years before the college application process begins to build and execute on a plan to get their children into the most prestigious universities, whether or not that goal is the right one for their children.  Many parents, including those planning a college admissions strategy for a daughter, drive their children to focus on athletics, particularly in sports like lacrosse, racquet sports, rowing, and horseback riding, because those become tickets to admission to prestigious universities.

Unfortunately, the students who get into universities this way often do not know what to do when they get there.  Every one of us has to decide who we are, and what we want out of life.  Those who fulfill their parents’ fantasies and dreams end up finding out, often after years of misery that living out someone else’s dreams is not a ticket to future success.

Many young people at prestigious universities who make a decision about a future career gravitate to the most fashionable career path at the time they are graduating, not the one which matches best to their skills and interests over the long term. During my lifetime, rocket science, law, journalism (as a result of Watergate), medicine, business school, and marketing all were temporarily fashionable.  Information technology was popular in the late 1990’s because of the temporarily inflated demand for IT professionals due to the Y2K problem. Auditing became hot after Sarbanes-Oxley legislation.  The one common thread about all of these fashionable courses of study is that a sizable percentage of people who pursued them became unemployed years later when talent surpluses were created in those fields as demand waned.

Similarly, students who go to four-year colleges and universities without knowing what they want to get from a college education often only secure one thing from their four-year college experience, a heavy long-term debt load from student loans.  College education does not exist solely, or even primarily to prepare individuals for specific jobs, but if a student has no idea why he or she is there, other than that a college degree is an essential credential, that credential will yield no value to that student.

Companies like Eaton Corporation manufacture and market solutions to society’s most pressing problems.  Eaton’s power management solutions are innovative in improving the energy efficiency of automobile engines, data centers, aircraft, construction equipment, and farm equipment, to name a few examples of the end products in which Eaton components and subsystems are used.  Young people, who are often mission-driven, can not only get excited about working at a company like Eaton, but will be at the cutting edge of addressing issues that will be with us years or even decades later.  These kinds of companies sometimes do not tend to have the right applicants for some available jobs for many reasons:

• The societal skills gap in the United States is persistent and unlikely to be eliminated because the work is perceived, incorrectly I believe, as unglamorous.
• There is a huge demand for people to perform highly skilled and innovative manufacturing and engineering work all over the world.  These globally competitive diversified industrial companies have operations on every continent and freely move people where there is growing customer demand.
• The way these companies solve major societal problems does not lend itself to 10-second sound bites and or national TV advertising.  As a result, the average parent or student is unaware of what companies like Eaton or its diversified industrial counterparts actually contribute to solving a problem like reducing gasoline consumption in passenger cars. By way of an example of a single Eaton product, the Eaton Supercharger is a technology that enables smaller automobile engines to have the power and acceleration of larger engines. Thus, a Supercharger in a 4-cylinder engine, which uses less gasoline than a 6-cylinder engine, enables the engine to perform like a 6-cylinder engine, but with the lower gasoline consumption of a 4-cylinder engine.

I counsel our three children to follow their passions, because I believe those who do so have the greatest long-term employability.  They are very smart, highly driven people who will find a way to succeed in any marketplace, because, beyond a minimum level of competence and intelligence in a field, success comes to those who have the most passion to succeed.

At the same time, I tell them to follow the principle implicit in the comment of the greatest ice hockey player of all time, Wayne Gretzky, who attributed his success to skating where the puck was going, not to where it was.  Anyone who wants to plan for future success should be focusing on marketplace problems or opportunities that will be with us for a long time and that will continue to yield new solution needs.  Getting the credential of a four-year college degree is useless unless someone securing that degree has learned what he or she is able to do, wants to do, and can make a long term difference doing.

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:

Self-driving cars enable elderly people, people with disabilities, and young people without drivers’ licenses to have more mobility.

How many of us have had to deal with the wrenching problem of getting our elderly parents to give up driving regularly, either because their diminished physical or mental capacity?  We make the loving, but painful, decision to get them into assisted living residences to give them the ability to fulfill their needs without having to drive, since, in most cases, neither they, nor we, can afford to have someone drive them around.

Imagine a future time in which they can get everywhere, including traveling long distances by car, with a self-driving automobile.  This is a technological advance that has to improve and be broadly deployed as the Baby Boomer generation reaches the age at which its ability to continue driving is seriously challenged.  Elderly people with diminished capacity might very well remain in their independent residences far longer, especially if they routinely use assistive technologies that help them perform daily chores and help caregivers monitor their progress.

Similarly, people with disabilities that prevent them from driving, such as people with sight impairments, people with paralysis below the waist, or people with an amputated right leg, can now have the ability that they have lacked with these disabilities.  They will have the ability to leave home and not be dependent on other people for transportation.

Young people who are old enough to run errands, but not old enough to drive, can be a passenger in a self-driving car, although the car would need to be remotely controlled to prevent a young person from unlawfully driving the car.

Self-driving cars will reduce the incidence of accidents from a wide range of causes.

With self-driving automobiles, people who insist on driving under the influence of alcohol will have no excuse for accidents.  They will be able to get home after having the impairment associated with excessive alcohol consumption.

Similarly, people who are very tired do not have to worry about fatigue causing accidents.  They can leave the driving to technological systems that never get fatigued.

Roads will get safer for everyone, in addition to those who will no longer be operating automobiles if self-driving cars get broadly deployed.

Self-driving cars will significantly increase societal productivity.

I would welcome the day when I can read, write, carry on a telephone conversation, or perform other tasks while in transit by myself.  Public transportation is never going to be available everywhere or at all times as an alternative to the single-occupant vehicle.  The self-driving car is a solution that fits the demographics and infrastructure of American society far better than building out expensive public transportation systems.

Along with the electronics needed for cars to be self-driven would come broadband Internet access that would be used for multiple additional purposes. The source of activity on web-based networks would change from fixed locations to automobiles, with very different levels of stress on cellular towers and a significantly expanded need for Wi-Fi service.

Self-driving cars will significantly reduce the need for parking spaces.

The biggest waste of real estate is the use of valuable land next to commercial and retail facilities and other public places for parking, especially surface parking.  What if we could have our self-driving automobile drop us off at work, be programmed to go to our home and then be summoned to pick us up at the end of the workday?  Zoning laws could be changed to reduce the number of spaces allocated for parking, and we would also see a significant reduction in the amount of traffic cruising around for parking spaces.

By reducing the need for parking spaces, self-driving cars would specifically increase the number of people taking the train, where commuter train service is constrained by the unavailability of parking adjacent to train stations.  Having the ability to program your vehicle to go back home after dropping you off and to return when you arrive back at your home town train station would eliminate that problem.

Self-driving cars should reduce gasoline consumption.

We use additional gasoline when we drive because we do not drive ours most efficiently.  A self-driving car could presumably be programmed to drive in the most fuel-efficient manner possible.

Self-driving cars will increase the carrying capacity of our roads.

Because vehicles will be driven intelligently, with reduced numbers of accidents and with optimal reaction times, more cars can operate in the same space for two reasons:

• Cars can be spaced more closely together when most are self-driving cars.
• The self-driving car will not make decisions to change lanes frequently, which, when it happens, creates unnecessary congestion.

OBSTACLES TO SELF-DRIVING CARS

• No one trusts a self-driving car today.

Today, we do not feel comfortable completely giving up control of the operation of our car.  Technology fails, particularly at its earliest implementation stages. I believe that the path to self-driving cars will be evolutionary.  Initially, it will be aided by technology that guides our driving and reduces the number of decisions or actions we have to take.  For example, cars will be programmed to detect potential sources of collision, such as crossing a lane into the path of oncoming traffic, and will automatically adjust themselves to avoid a collision.  The driver may not even be conscious of this adjustment, but it will be a wonderful, if undetectable, assistive technology.

We may also see individuals operating in a dual situation for a number of years.  In other words, they may be able to control the car’s operation, or to program the car to drive itself.  There is precedent for this, with the way car manufacturers have incorporated cruise control into car design. Over time, as individuals gain confidence, they will surrender control, especially on highways on which they have to drive long distances.

• Insurance companies provide no economic benefit to individuals who travel in self-driving cars.

State insurance regulators do a very poor job in staying abreast of opportunities to help insurance companies reduce their risks and match their underwriting better with the risks they cannot reduce.  Insurance should be as inexpensive as possible to enable more people to do more things affordably.

To achieve the goal of risk reduction and risk management, insurance companies need to be able to price their insurance products based on real behavioral risks, and to induce policyholders to change behaviors that increase risks.  For example, automobile insurance should be adjusted for individuals who not only drive less and drive more safely, but put themselves into situations that are inherently less risky, in terms of when they drive, what kind of vehicle they use, where they drive, and how they use their vehicle.  Someone who uses a self-driving car should get lower rates than someone who maintains complete control over the vehicle and subjects it to human error potential.

Differential insurance rates would accelerate the adoption of self-driving cars.  I do not believe most Americans feel a need to drive.  They want mobility, privacy, and control over their transportation.  The self-driving car gives them all of that, without the hassles of driving and parking the car.

Self-driving cars would require far more carrying capacity for a car’s electrical systems and would consume more fuel than a traditional automobile.

Think about what adds to our electricity usage today that was not a source of electricity usage 40 years ago: computers, high definition TVs, other digital displays that never turn off in a home, and many electronically-controlled appliances that our parents never had.

Our electric power grids are being strained today because of the transition from mechanical power to electric power. Similar, the self-driving car will see a much bigger increase in electric power consumption than the increase which accompanied the routine installation of air conditioning in automobiles over the last few decades.

Yesterday, I met with the police chief in our town, who told me that the biggest issue with his fleet of police cars is the huge drain on car batteries from all the electronic devices in his cars: the portable computers and display screens, the radar devices, the detectors of Lo-Jack vehicles, and the special lighting required for both the top and sides of police cars (the latter for helping other drivers see a police car parked sideways on a road to block passage at the scene of an accident), to name a few.  As a result of all these electronic systems, police cars wear out batteries every few months, instead of every few years.  All self-driving cars will have these problems to a lesser degree, so they will have to be addressed.

Self-driving cars will increase car usage and create more fuel consumption.

Because people who are not driving today, such as elderly people, people with disabilities, and younger people will now be on the road, as a result of the enhanced capabilities of self-driving cars, there will be additional fuel consumed.  Similarly, if self-driving cars return home, instead of being parked, more cars will be on the road, instead of being parked near where they have dropped someone off.  The fuel consumption will increase.  We must find alternatives to the traditional internal consumption engine.  The biggest self-limiting factor for more self-driving car usage will be the cost of gasoline.

Final observations

The self-driving car will come, because there are many benefits to it, and it will profoundly change our society when it does come.  I believe that it will address enough of the issues people have with driving today that it will displace public and group transportation as the alternative of choice for people who cannot or will not drive.

However, like any change that alters how people think about the world, there will be unpredictable consequences, just as there were when automobiles came into broader usage.

However, I have become increasingly convinced that we need to redefine the goal from “reading comprehension” to “optimal learning.”  The technologies with which we interact with the world about which we want to learn must drive us to think differently about the learning process.  Additionally, we need to understand what works in engaging people, whether that engagement is designed to focus on learning, healthy behaviors, or responsible financial management.  Thus, the two relevant questions are:

• What causes people to learn most optimally?
• What causes people to be engaged in the optimal learning processes?

Phrased another way: what works best, and what motivates people to engage with what works best?

What causes people to learn most optimally?

Optimal learning occurs when all senses are engaged.

The optimal learning process has to involve a combination of what we see, hear, speak, and touch.  Sometimes, we even learn from a sense of smell in a document, when a fragrance is included in material we read, something that cosmetics companies and luxury goods providers do when they infuse a paper letter we receive in the mail with a particular fragrance..  Digital reading not only provides the value of text comprehension, but photos and videos.

I also note that I often recite what I am reading, as I am reading it, because it helps it stick in my memory more easily.  In the process of taking notes, I also will draw my own diagram to illustrate a structure of the idea to make it easier to recall.  Structure improves memory considerably, and it is my obsession with structuring information that gives me high quality recall, not an inherently photographic memory.

Think about how we might all read in the future, because some of us are starting to read this way today. I have downloaded Kindle software on to my MacBook Air.  If I see a word I do not understand in the text of a book, I click on it and get it defined on the same page.  I can take notes along side the margin of the page, and search those notes later with ease.  If I see a reference of particular interest in the book, I can click on my Safari browser icon and get right to a web page to do more research on that reference.  Eventually, the links will be right in the text of the book, rather than requiring me to find them on my own.

The links can be more text, a photo or a video, or some combination of the above.  I can even envision a reference to a location in a book that links to a Google Map, which then links to a photo or video from that location, which then can be stored as a note to the book.

Make reading active and even interactive.

Reading should not just be a static observation of words on a page, but the beginning of an active exploration and interaction process.  If someone drills down to a deeper understanding of what he or she reads, that additional process step significantly increases comprehension, later recall, and an emotional engagement with the content on the page.

Last June, I attended a conference at which Professor Charles Ogletree of the Harvard Law School spoke.  He said that he not only did not fight the idea of students using their laptops, I-Pads and I-Phones in the classroom, but he encouraged them to do so.  He encouraged them to have a web-enabled device in the classroom, and directed them to go online and learn more about a case or a legal principle while he was discussing it in class.  They were no longer passive recipients of knowledge they obtained from a page of casebook materials, but active co-explorers of knowledge with him.

As readers become more active seekers of knowledge and insight, the process becomes more fun, they “own” it more, and they find that they recall it better at a later time.

Make reading into a social activity.

Well-educated individuals have participated in book clubs for centuries, and that participation has given every participant a deeper insight into the books discussed at the book club.  The online world has created an even more interactive process, especially as individuals read a book or other materials simultaneously, even in different locations.

Today, individuals can be reading or absorbing written or even spoken material interactively.  I have attended webinars in which participants forward written questions to the meeting host while someone is speaking.  They also can comment in a way that enables them to communicate with other participants, and can send written comments to the presenter.

This real-time feedback is actually a process with which sportscasters are quite familiar, since they receive oral and written cues from their producers as they are speaking.  They have to engage in multi-tasking far more than we, as a viewing or listening audience, can possibly imagine, since many of these cues are communicated to them through a set of headphones, or, probably now, through commands on a computer screen.

However, just as Charles Ogletree embraced technology that could have been seen as a distraction, we should harness the multi-tasking and social orientations of people whom we are trying to teach to read and use it to improve comprehension.

Make reading relevant and fun.

For most people, reading is something they need to master, in order to perform day-to-day tasks.  When we teach reading in a classroom, we forget that and try to teach reading by using standardized reading materials that are not terribly relevant to most of the students.

What if we were to tailor reading assignments to the passions of those we are teaching to read?  Steven Johnson, in his great 2005 book, Everything Bad is Good for You, takes issue with those who say that modern entertainment media and culture do not educate or engage with young people.  He argues that modern TV shows, video games, and films are far more complex and engaging than the same content would have been decades ago.  He suggests that they could learn reading, math, and even more complex subjects like the sciences by incorporating these subjects into engaging either real life situations or the entertainment content they most like.

This is somewhat challenging for teachers tasked to grade people according to standard material.  However, there is a middle ground between complete customization and complete standardization.  The online learning process, in particular, can make it far easier to teach people how to read through highly relevant material.

Final thoughts

Reading is not an end in itself, but a tool for enriching the lives of those who do it, and, also a tool for enabling individuals to be equipped to participate in an increasingly complex, globally competitive economy.  We should start with the practical benefits of reading, and, over time, work back to the quality of life enhancements it creates.

It should also be clear that I am strongly in favor of getting people to read online materials, in addition to reading content on tangible media, such as paper and plastic.  After all, street signs, labels, and billboards will continue to be in non-digital formats for a very long time.

However, online reading enables individuals to explore content on multiple levels.  Yesterday, as I was reading an advertisement of a new Carole King biography, there was a two-dimensional bar code, which, once I scanned it from my I-Phone, had some excerpts from the book that were not contained in the full-page ad.  The excerpts also included a photo from the book that was not in the ad.  I would expect that this multi-layered engagement with paper content that is triggered by a link to a web site will become increasingly common.

The main final message I want to convey is that we should not treat people as being deficient because they do not enjoy or voluntarily engage in reading.  We should figure out what will engage them, and then design interfaces that work to achieve that engagement.  People with deficient literacy skills are a new market opportunity, not solely an indication of societal failure.

On Tuesday, March 28, 2012, on a National Public Radio program, there was a lengthy set of interviews with different U.S. soccer experts.  The general conclusion all of them reached is that the U.S. lags behind other countries because it does not have a sufficiently robust program for identifying great future soccer players early enough and for developing their skills in the most intensive training and competition environment.

This story was most interesting because it compares and contrasts with stories from other sports that grabbed my attention when we decided to develop and film From the Rough.  Those countries that decide to focus on a sport or competitive activity to excel in international competition tend to do far better than those which simply use the talented participants that decide they are interested in competing and make the effort to excel on their own.

This plays out in many sports and games.  The Dominican Republic has a disproportionate number of professional baseball players on Major League teams because it has some of the best baseball academies in the world and it identifies the top talent very early.  Canada has done the same with respect to ice hockey for decades.  Russia has always excelled in chess because it decided decades ago to identify great talent and nurture that talent.

The United States has not made a decision that its government should get involved in early talent identification, but the commercial and business opportunities are so lucrative in football and men’s basketball that major corporate sponsors are willing to pay for the early talent development teams and leagues that give the U.S. the ability to excel in global competition.  It is no coincidence that football and basketball are the only consistently profitable sports for high school and college school athletic programs and that scholastic athletes are often exploited for the commercial benefit of the colleges and universities.  The great athletes who compete in the Final Four in basketball or in the BCS championship bowl games in football generate huge revenues for their school athletic programs, but are not allowed to share in any of that revenue.

The U.S. makes no effort to create training and development opportunities for other sports. In golf, other countries create government sponsored or funded academies to develop talent.  In other sports, the U.S. relies heavily on volunteers who develop locally strong programs, on wealthy patrons for talented athletes, or on families with high incomes or wealth.  Not surprisingly, only a small portion of the athletic talent that could be developed for sports that are unprofitable at the collegiate and professional ranks gets developed.  We make potentially great athletes and their families work very hard to raise the money to develop their gifts.

The U.S. lives with the fiction that particularly gifted athletes should get the same education and be part of the same athletic programs as other less gifted students.  We make the assumption that they will better educated and more socially adjusted adults because we have not pulled them out of the school systems and school sports programs.  The unintended consequence of our implicit philosophy is that we get the worst of both worlds: they are often indifferent students who spend a lot of time competing at an inferior level and not developing their special talents.

We need to devise systems in which people who are gifted in sports, games, music, drama, or some other activity can have that gift recognized and nurtured.  We should then build special education programs around the intensive training that gift or talent requires.  My younger son was an exceptionally good chess player, but he was disadvantaged against competitors who attended private schools in New York City.  Those schools provided private tutors and were very flexible in giving the chess players the opportunity to participate in the long international tournaments that took over 10 days at a time during the school year.

My son ultimately decided not to continue to pursue chess after his junior year of high school.  That was a great decision for him because he made it voluntarily for the right reasons: he was not prepared to pay the price required to excel in chess.  We learned recently that a player against whom James frequently competed, Fabiano Caruana, now 19 years old, (whom James was able to beat once and tie once in five matches) is now the sixth ranked chess player in the world.  Why?  It was because his parents moved him to Europe in his early teens and structured his life to enable him to excel in the sport in which he had both passion and skill.  It would not have been the right decision for James, but it was the right decision for Fabiano, because he could develop his gift.

These special early development programs have to be created and managed with great care to avoid situations in which they exist for the economic benefit of sponsors, major league teams, coaches, scouts and agents at the expense of the athletes and their families.  The Dominican Republic has been criticized by many for exploiting children and their families, as was well described in the article in the Americas Quarterly, http://americasquarterly.org/node/2745  which outlined the often fraudulent and exploitative tactics of what Dominicans call buscones, who operate as go-betweens to find boys for various baseball academies.

Canada has done a far better job creating structured and properly regulated programs for gifted ice hockey players, as the development handbook published by Hockey Canada, the governing body for youth amateur hockey development programs indicates, http://www.hockeypei.com/pdf/resources/CDM%20Handbook.pdf.

Why is this an important enough topic for which I should devote a blog?  I remember a profile of Peggy Fleming, one of the greatest Olympic gold medal figure skating gold medalists in history on ESPN.  When Ms. Fleming was interviewed about why she was so successful, she said that everyone has some special skill or gift that can be developed.  She said that she was fortunate enough to recognize her gift at age 3 and that her family and everyone around her helped her nurture and develop that gift from that time forward.

Clearly, not everyone has a set of basic skills that enable them to aspire to be a future Olympic gold medalist or a professional athlete, but everyone has a set of skills and passions that can be discovered and developed.  Contrary to what some may believe, someone who is pursuing his or her passion can also be a better student and can be positioned to succeed in pursuits other than the area of their passion.

My son James became a better student, a better athlete, and a more confident person because of his excellence in chess.  He applied lessons from chess to other parts of his life.  James, my wife and I met with Josh Waitzkin, the boy whose chess life was profiled in the film Searching for Bobby Fischer when James was in high school.  Waitzkin, like James, walked away from chess toward the end of high school. He went on to excel in the martial arts, in software development for chess instruction, but he also wrote a wonderful book called The Art of Learning, in which he discussed how his chess success taught him how to tackle other pursuits.

Some athletes succeed when they complete their athletic careers, but many do not.  Too many successful athletes are exploited while they are earning money and discarded by the parasites who exploit them when their prime earning years are over.  To some degree, this is a result of the fact that these athletes are drafted into professional sports at a young age before they have developed other life skills.  This is why the debate about eligibility for professional sports for high school graduates and for collegiate freshman athletes is such a complex subject.  Clearly, there is greater vulnerability the younger and poorer the athletes are.

However, the real problem is not the age of the athlete, but the robustness of the support system around him or her when he or she starts to earn significant money.  The goal should not be to delay or deny opportunity, but to create a support system for those who cannot afford such a system for themselves.  Professional sports teams have well-developed support resources, as I learned from touring the Tennessee Titans practice facilities years ago, with financial counselors, physicians, and other expert resources made available to athletes.  These same resources should be available to much younger gifted athletes, especially if they cannot afford to acquire them directly.

In many respects, we need to move from mass education and training to more customized and personalized individual development across a wide range of fields.  Everyone needs certain core bodies of knowledge and skill, but how we deliver and imbed it in our young people needs to be more tailored than it is today.

Every day, I see or read about innovations that force us to think differently about some part of the world.

Electronic cigarettes

One recent example is the electronic cigarette, which has been invented by tobacco companies to separate the unquestionably negative attributes of tobacco ingestion, the exhaling of smoking, the ingestion of tar and other hazardous chemicals, and the creation of fire hazards from cigarette butts and ashes, from other attributes that are important to tobacco marketers, but are less obviously harmful, such as the addictive qualities of tobacco.  The March 2 issue of The Wall Street Journal highlights the battle between proponents and opponents of electronic cigarettes, but it has the most difficulty with a vocabulary that is poorly suited for this product.  A lot of the terms we associate with tobacco no longer make sense, such as “smoking” or “lighting up a cigarette.

E-books

The electronic book has changed how we think about reading material.  Bookstores become showrooms for content we download instantaneously (possibly from a vendor other than the owner of the bookstore) and can take with us anywhere we have a portable electronic device.  That device can provide us with enlarged print, the ability to convert text to speech, and, most importantly, can give us the ability to carry a library with us everywhere we go.

The traditional library, equipped with the ability to acquire and download e-books, now has the ability to download a book for a specific time period and to disable the book when that time period has expired.  The whole world of missing books and late fees disappears, as do return slots outside the library.

The other major paradigm change is the likely growth of self-published e-books.  Publishers were the “gatekeepers” of traditional hard cover and paperback books because of the cost of producing them.  Self-published books became more popular in the last decade because the cost of digital printing was sufficiently low, and the quality of digital printing had improved sufficiently, that individuals could pay for relatively short production runs of self-published books.

Today, there is no “production” cost of self-published e-books.  Amazon.com allows self-published books, articles, and white papers to be marketed on its web site in the same way as it allows individuals to sell their used copies of published hard-copy books online. I am considering availing myself of this option at some point when I have somewhat more time available.

“Driving” a car

One of the most exciting long-term trends in the technology of automobiles is the evolution from individuals controlling all aspects of driving an automobile to having more automatic, technology-controlled management of driving tasks.  Today, higher-end cars have audible warning noises to make a driver aware that he or she is close to making contact with another object, whether it is another car, a tree, a curb, or some other physical barrier. Some prototypes actually correct the car’s movement on a highway to keep it from crossing into another lane.

The ultimate goal of car manufacturers is to combine the benefits of the freedom that being in an individual provides with the benefits of having a completely safe automobile that drives itself under little or no control by the occupants.  We are probably 1-2 decades away from having a completely automated fleet of cars and trucks on the road, but there are several obvious advantages of moving in this direction:

• Fewer accidents and fatalities;
• The ability to have vehicles spaced closer together on roads, which would increase road capacity; and
• The ability of occupants to perform other tasks that require the use of both of their hands inside the vehicle.

Cars will evolve from being something in which we “drive” to something in which we “ride,” except that there will be no “driver.”  We could even envision a future in which there would be no limousine or car service drivers, since the car would drive itself, park itself, and even return home from where it dropped off someone, such as at an airport.

Going to “restaurants”

In the last few years, the line between traditional “grocery stores” and other non-home meal venues and “restaurants” has become blurred.  Because grocery stores now sell ready-to-eat foods and have created seating areas with microwave ovens, paper plates, plastic silverware and condiments, they can become destinations for a sit-down meal.

I regularly have meals at the Whole Foods in my town. However, I also discovered this as a dinner option in a recent visit to Columbus, Ohio, when I had a dinner consisting of grilled salmon and two healthy vegetables at the Whole Foods in Worthington, Ohio.  I avoided the heavy, less healthy meals available at my hotel or at the many fast food places near the hotel.  Increasingly, grocery stores, delicatessens, and even coffee bars have become places at which someone can order and eat a full, healthy meal on site, and take a computer and an I-pad and work while eating.

Libraries are also becoming places where people can eat a meal, especially since many people want to stay in a library during the lunch hour.  The Main Library in New York City at the edge of Bryant Park recently decided that it would create a place where people could eat meals provided by vending machines.

Wireless recharging

In the Sunday, March 11, 2012, New York Times Sunday Business section, reporter Anne Eisenberg described a new wireless battery recharging technology in an article entitled “Automatic Recharging From a Distance” The firm that invented this technology, WiTricity, is using well-established magnetic induction principles, but extending the capabilities of magnetic induction to several feet away from a recharging source.  The firm expects to have a product in the market within a year.  Imagine reducing the number of electrical outlets we need to have for recharging the devices on which we have come to depend.  Power strips expanded the number of plug-in opportunities decades ago.  This takes the power of electricity even further.

Summary comments

While the mass media, particularly national TV news channels, focus on what is going wrong and how we are a declining, stagnant society, major innovation is happening, and making a difference in our lives. As long as we draw upon the resourcefulness of all of our people, we will continue to make lives better.  These are just a few examples of some of the positive things I see every day, wherever I am in the United States.

Every day, I see or read about innovations that force us to think differently about some part of the world.

Electronic cigarettes

One recent example is the electronic cigarette, which has been invented by tobacco companies to separate the unquestionably negative attributes of tobacco ingestion, the exhaling of smoking, the ingestion of tar and other hazardous chemicals, and the creation of fire hazards from cigarette butts and ashes, from other attributes that are important to tobacco marketers, but are less obviously harmful, such as the addictive qualities of tobacco.  The March 2 issue of The Wall Street Journal highlights the battle between proponents and opponents of electronic cigarettes, but it has the most difficulty with a vocabulary that is poorly suited for this product.  A lot of the terms we associate with tobacco no longer make sense, such as “smoking” or “lighting up a cigarette.

E-books

The electronic book has changed how we think about reading material.  Bookstores become showrooms for content we download instantaneously (possibly from a vendor other than the owner of the bookstore) and can take with us anywhere we have a portable electronic device.  That device can provide us with enlarged print, the ability to convert text to speech, and, most importantly, can give us the ability to carry a library with us everywhere we go.

The traditional library, equipped with the ability to acquire and download e-books, now has the ability to download a book for a specific time period and to disable the book when that time period has expired.  The whole world of missing books and late fees disappears, as do return slots outside the library.

The other major paradigm change is the likely growth of self-published e-books.  Publishers were the “gatekeepers” of traditional hard cover and paperback books because of the cost of producing them.  Self-published books became more popular in the last decade because the cost of digital printing was sufficiently low, and the quality of digital printing had improved sufficiently, that individuals could pay for relatively short production runs of self-published books.

Today, there is no “production” cost of self-published e-books.  Amazon.com allows self-published books, articles, and white papers to be marketed on its web site in the same way as it allows individuals to sell their used copies of published hard-copy books online. I am considering availing myself of this option at some point when I have somewhat more time available.

“Driving” a car

One of the most exciting long-term trends in the technology of automobiles is the evolution from individuals controlling all aspects of driving an automobile to having more automatic, technology-controlled management of driving tasks.  Today, higher-end cars have audible warning noises to make a driver aware that he or she is close to making contact with another object, whether it is another car, a tree, a curb, or some other physical barrier. Some prototypes actually correct the car’s movement on a highway to keep it from crossing into another lane.

The ultimate goal of car manufacturers is to combine the benefits of the freedom that being in an individual provides with the benefits of having a completely safe automobile that drives itself under little or no control by the occupants.  We are probably 1-2 decades away from having a completely automated fleet of cars and trucks on the road, but there are several obvious advantages of moving in this direction:

• Fewer accidents and fatalities;
• The ability to have vehicles spaced closer together on roads, which would increase road capacity; and
• The ability of occupants to perform other tasks that require the use of both of their hands inside the vehicle.

Cars will evolve from being something in which we “drive” to something in which we “ride,” except that there will be no “driver.”  We could even envision a future in which there would be no limousine or car service drivers, since the car would drive itself, park itself, and even return home from where it dropped off someone, such as at an airport.

Going to “restaurants”

In the last few years, the line between traditional “grocery stores” and other non-home meal venues and “restaurants” has become blurred.  Because grocery stores now sell ready-to-eat foods and have created seating areas with microwave ovens, paper plates, plastic silverware and condiments, they can become destinations for a sit-down meal.

I regularly have meals at the Whole Foods in my town. However, I also discovered this as a dinner option in a recent visit to Columbus, Ohio, when I had a dinner consisting of grilled salmon and two healthy vegetables at the Whole Foods in Worthington, Ohio.  I avoided the heavy, less healthy meals available at my hotel or at the many fast food places near the hotel.  Increasingly, grocery stores, delicatessens, and even coffee bars have become places at which someone can order and eat a full, healthy meal on site, and take a computer and an I-pad and work while eating.

Libraries are also becoming places where people can eat a meal, especially since many people want to stay in a library during the lunch hour.  The Main Library in New York City at the edge of Bryant Park recently decided that it would create a place where people could eat meals provided by vending machines.

Wireless recharging

In the Sunday, March 11, 2012, New York Times Sunday Business section, reporter Anne Eisenberg described a new wireless battery recharging technology in an article entitled “Automatic Recharging From a Distance” The firm that invented this technology, WiTricity, is using well-established magnetic induction principles, but extending the capabilities of magnetic induction to several feet away from a recharging source.  The firm expects to have a product in the market within a year.  Imagine reducing the number of electrical outlets we need to have for recharging the devices on which we have come to depend.  Power strips expanded the number of plug-in opportunities decades ago.  This takes the power of electricity even further.

Summary comments

While the mass media, particularly national TV news channels, focus on what is going wrong and how we are a declining, stagnant society, major innovation is happening, and making a difference in our lives. As long as we draw upon the resourcefulness of all of our people, we will continue to make lives better.  These are just a few examples of some of the positive things I see every day, wherever I am in the United States.

What is inclusion?

“Inclusion” means three things:

• building a diverse organization;
• respecting everyone in it; and
• welcoming and act upon their input.

Excelling at inclusion requires qualities Jim Collins describes in a Level 5 leader in Good to Great, particularly, the combination of modesty and strong will, and the ability to seek out market feedback, which he calls “confronting the brutal facts.”  Inclusion requires more listening than talking, and more consultative and less traditional “selling.”

“Inclusion” eliminates traditional silos based on race, gender, ethnicity, religion, wealth, income, education, credentials, job status, and even expertise and track record. As Shafik Asante, the late head of the New African Voices Alliance, wrote, inclusion is a “responsibility as a society to remove all barriers which uphold exclusion.”  He described it as a “commitment not to behave in ways that demean others and an openness to notice and change.”  Inclusion works because the group’s collective wisdom surpasses the sum of the expertise of its members.

My parents: role models for inclusion

My parents practiced inclusion. My mother was a public health nurse’s aide at a run-down inner city school. She was comfortable working with poor black and Puerto Rican parents and children (her dialect Italian was close to Puerto Rican Spanish), to understand their daily challenges and to help them solve their own problems.

My dad was an inclusive listener. One cousin once marveled at how my dad, a high school dropout, could smile, smoke his pipe, and making every person with whom he was talking feel like the world’s most important person.

My Pitney Bowes experience: empowering customers by empowering them in inclusive decision processes

As Pitney Bowes’ CEO, I sought to empower those for whom postal and communications systems were designed, those who sent and received mail. Many postal services and their worldwide non-postal competitors fought to keep customers less than fully informed. UPS and FedEx would give away free computers to customers with only their rates and products to make sure customers never found out what the competitors were charging.

The U.S. Postal Service was much more customer-focused than many of its foreign counterparts. I proposed a customer advisory board to one foreign postal CEO, who said that he wanted no customers telling him how to run his business.

Inclusion also influenced how we created new products and services. We watched customers operate in their mail centers, got their immediate feedback, and gave them crude prototypes to try out before we finalized designs. Our award-winning Universal Access Copier, which enabled people with disabilities to access vital office equipment, required significant design input from people with disabilities.  Its voice recognition software and assistive processes were years ahead of the market.

Empowering employees individually and in teams

Pitney Bowes attracted me because of its decades-long leadership in welcoming diverse peoples to its workforce and actively seeking their insights.  It hired and promoted women and people of color back in the 1940’s. The company had employee meetings modeled on major stockholder meetings, and actually cared what employees thought, even when employees were vocally critical of company actions.  I did 150 one-hour meetings a year with lower-level managers to get more unfiltered feedback, so that I could “confront the brutal facts,” meetings they never would have had with another CEO.

We created an innovative workforce transition program to get first-generation immigrants to enhance their ability to work collaboratively with people from other cultures and countries of origin.  We invested significantly in getting people to change from working alone (with Walkman headphones on to avoid talking with co-workers), to working together in ethnically and racially diverse self-directed work teams. We also helped them become more employable and integrate into the broader community. I remember the Italian retiree who thanked me for forcing him to learn enough English and communications skills that he could start a successful landscaping business.

I fought many battles around the world to improve access for employees excluded from access to power in their home countries. In France, two Presidents with great educations and business and interpersonal skills who could never get traction with the French Post Office, because they were born in Russia and Algeria (the inspiration for a character I included in From the Rough).

The Urban League: a governance model based on inclusion

I chose the National Urban League as the social services and civil rights organization in which I volunteered for 13 years, including five years as Board Chair, because of its inclusive bi-racial, nonpartisan, and multi-generational governance structure. Black and white, young and old, and male and female executives worked side by side on service delivery programs and policies, as well as civil rights advocacy. I loved working along side under-35 visionary black entrepreneurs and professionals like Melinda Emerson (now known as the “SmallBizLady”) to solve big problems.

My healthcare initiatives: empowering patients and consumers

Inclusion and empowerment also has driven my 22-year journey to transform health and healthcare.  When I became Pitney Bowes’ head of human resources in 1990, the medical plan was the same for all employees, regardless of their diverse needs, and we did not include employees as partners in managing their health. I changed that.

We gave employees money for successfully managing their health. Employees had access to walk-in, onsite clinic appointments with no waiting time, and we actually spent time in conversations with them to find out how we could make the work environment healthier. In my retirement tribute video, I was deeply touched when one woman credited my work with saving her life, since she received a timely breast cancer screening at one of our clinics. We introduced flexible benefits to give employees more choices on how to spend their dollars. We created more information sharing about best practices in health, health care, and health spending. The result was an innovative, highly acclaimed corporate health care program built on patient empowerment.

Dossia: a personal health management system to empower consumers

In 2010, I was asked to lead Dossia, a consumer-controlled personal health management system that draws on both clinical and non-clinical insights to enable consumers to manage health, health care and health spending. Today, a consumer on our system can shop for the lowest cost MRI, find out about medication interaction problems, and get online access to a physician in the middle of the night to avoid an emergency room visit. We also are unique in recognizing that mothers need to be included in the healthcare decision processes for their families and have convenient access to their family’s health records.

Similar to the battle I fought with foreign postal services, I see healthcare providers, insurers, and other vendors resistant to empowering patients with information that give them the ability to make vendor choices.  Inclusion and empowerment require vendors to risk losing customers in the short term, because vendors will ultimately benefit from better informed customers in the longer term.

Empowering students and parents in the educational system

My wife and I have strongly supported charter schools and other educational reforms built on achievement, parent and student empowerment, and the elimination of access barriers for highly qualified teachers. Although teacher evaluation tools and parental and student choice proposals are imperfect today, they are directionally correct.  We cannot have a good educational system if it is not designed by and for those it is supposed educate and serve.

From the Rough: Celebrating a role model for inclusion

The story of Dr. Catana Starks, the Tennessee State men’s golf coach, which I found and developed, attracted me, because she embodied my inclusion and empowerment values.  In fact, Coach Starks and my mother were very similar in being role models for inclusion and empowerment by being humble, soft spoken, tenacious, and deeply religious, while remaining highly confident.

Including and empowering young people and entrepreneurs

In my life endeavors, I have always drawn upon the disruptive insights of younger people.  Parents and senior leaders often are directive, even dictatorial, with younger people, especially their children, because they believe their success is transferable to their children, and especially in a town like Darien, Connecticut, in which many parents have been extremely successful in their chosen professions. While I have freely shared my insights with young people, especially as a town baseball coach of 14 and 15 year olds, I have always assumed that they had unique insights to share with me.

I have also enjoyed leading Dossia, because the younger people who work for me are less encumbered by the “truisms” that get in the way of fresh thinking.  They “just do it.”

Obstacles to inclusion and empowerment

At first glance, practicing inclusion and empowerment should be as noncontroversial as “motherhood and apple pie.” Why is it so hard to practice and sustain?

Inclusion requires the inner confidence to be continually insecure

Inclusion is uncomfortable to many people, because it requires people to be comfortable with committing themselves to continually reinventing and changing, and to accepting constructive feedback from less knowledgeable people. Inclusion also scares people because it means continually challenging a person’s beliefs about the world. Empowering others means placing control in the hands of others, which makes many people uncomfortable.  Inclusion also means that people will receive uncomfortable criticism from time to time.

People engage in exclusionary practices that disempower others in many ways.

Exclusionary credentials and vocabularies

Today, America is obsessed with regulatory credentials and licenses as job prerequisites, even when those entry barriers are arguably excessive.  Doctors and lawyers have lengthy post-undergraduate educational, testing, and apprenticeship requirements to practice their profession.  The security of a credential is very powerful, and those with that credential often fight every effort to eliminate it or even to weaken it.

People who grow up in exclusive professions develop vocabularies and jargon, which help them communicate more effectively with members of the profession, but exclude members. Think of this vocabulary as the “secret handshake.”  However, they trap themselves in inflexible ways of thinking, and miss disruptive challenges.

As Thomas Kuhn persuasively argued in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, most transformational innovation comes from people outside a profession, because those within the profession experience what an old boss of mine called “hardening of the categories” to describe inflexible thinkers.

The security of experience, seniority and job tenure

Older, more successful people are also threatened by disruptive thinking, because it diminishes the value of their experience and knowledge. This is not easy to solve, because it is not usually obvious when experience is useful, and when it is not.

The desire to create new centers of power that end up being exclusionary

Throughout history, people and societies have challenged institutional power concentrations, whether in government, business, or the educational establishment, and racial, gender and ethnic exclusion.

However, the greatest risk of challenge to old exclusionary systems is the substitution of new ones.  People who militantly challenge racial or ethnic exclusion have to avoid gravitating to redistributing power to new racial and ethnic groupings. People who challenge particular credentialing systems have to guard against establishing new systems that benefit them, but exclude others.

Strong cultures and subcultures are double-edged swords.  They give individuals a sense of belonging and being welcomed.  However, they often create barriers around productive interactions with other groups and cultures. The United States has continually reinvented itself because it has provided many legal, regulatory, economic, political, and cultural mechanisms for breaking down exclusionary barriers. Countries like Russia that destroy one exclusionary order and replace it with another lose out over the long run.

Final observations

Inclusion and empowerment liberate us, because they internalize the perspective that something new and better can always be just around the corner. Empowering others draws on collective power and wisdom, as opposed to forcing us to depend only on what we, or a small group like us, can make happen.

That is my creed and code for living, and I have become much more successful for aspiring to practice it.

I am not surprised by hearing that celebrities enter an expensive residential drug or alcohol treatment program, and then experience a relapse relatively soon after finishing the program. The first critical success factor in addressing an addiction is recognizing that the behavior occurs in a particular set of social settings.  Success means removing the addicted person from the social settings supporting the addiction.  Unfortunately, most celebrities return to the same world from which they came, and, even if they disengage from the particular relationships that spawned the addiction, they find other destructive relationships.

The second critical success factor is replacing the habits that made addictive behavior the easy choice with other habits.  For example, whether the addiction is smoking, alcohol abuse, or overeating, the addicted person has to create a new set of routines in which it is no longer easy to lapse into addiction, and it is far easier to do something else.  Relative to overeating, Brian Wansick of Cornell University, in his great book Mindless Eating, has compiled a great deal of research to support the argument that one great strategy for addressing overeating is to create an environment in which less food is available, and what is available is provided in much more controlled settings.  Someone trying to control an addiction has to be placed in environments in which he or she does not have to fight temptations and urges continually.

Third, people have to recognize that addiction alters the chemical composition of the brain.  The substance to which someone is addicted brings physical pleasure, and the withholding of that substance brings pain and agitation.  There is no easy way to address this problem, other than to provide various kinds of palliative measures.  To use a simple example, there have been times when I have had to give up caffeine completely for a period of time.  On the first day in which I withdrew from caffeine, I had headaches, which, over time, went away, but even a mild addiction to caffeine created physiological challenges for me.

Finally, it should be clear that addressing an addiction requires a highly tailored, hand-on management strategy.  While there are great standardized programs like AA for alcohol abusers, Weight Watchers for overweight people, or various kinds of drug treatment programs that have delivered success for millions of people over many generations, each individual has to find the right combination of strategies and tactics that work for him and her.

At Pitney Bowes, one of our nurse practitioners became certified in the Mayo Clinic Motivational Interviewing program to address people with tobacco and other addictions.  Her approach was to interview people with addiction programs in a non-judgmental way and treat the addiction as a problem to be solved.  The essence of the problem solving methodology was to analyze the daily routines of individuals to help them manage a problem in the context of the real-life challenges they faced, as opposed to a “cookie cutter” set of recommendations and guidelines.

For example, one of the common mistakes self-help dieting books and marketing materials make is that they assume that individuals have much more control over where, when and what they eat than is the case.  I am extremely careful about what, and how much, I eat when at home, but when I am traveling, I am at the mercy of what is available at airports, what is served at meetings and conferences, and what is conveniently available at hotels at which I am staying.

One of my most frustrating insights is that, as an executive in a health business, I attend many health and wellness conferences at hotels.  The food and beverages served at these conferences are extremely unhealthy, because the conference organizers want to offer the lowest cost conference fee possible.  I often compromise and overeat less healthy food, gain weight, and feel worse when I return home.

I also have to admit that I sometimes succumb to the temptation to eat a delicious, but decidedly unhealthy, meal when traveling. For example, I cannot resist eating a Five Guys hamburger, with fries, at the U.S. Airways Terminal at Reagan Airport in Washington, DC.  Ultimately, I reduce the damage by eating about half of the fries, but I know I have overeaten something I would never eat at home.

I mention this last point because it reminds me that we should never be judgmental about people who repeatedly fail to overcome an addiction.  It is exceptionally hard work and the obstacles to success are overwhelming and omnipresent.  We should provide support and advice, but, frankly, the person gripped by an addiction will not be turned around by being lectured or condemned.

Finally, whether we like to admit it or not, there are a few intervention points in the lives of people when they are receptive to help in overcoming an addiction.  People who commit crimes to support an addiction are sometimes best served by having to deal with the harshness of the criminal justice system.  Others are shocked into reality by losing a job, having loved ones turn away from them, confronting a life-threatening health problem, or otherwise having something happen that causes them to hit bottom.  Two things must happen:

• Someone must hit bottom in some very personal and profound way; and
• Others must be ready to intervene in the right way with the right kind of help at that optimal intervention time.

I wish that Whitney Houston’s death would shock millions of people into realizing that even the most successful people can be gripped by an addiction, but peoples’ memories are short, and the lessons are fleeting.  We need to help those we can help in little ways every day, and feel good about small, positive steps.

In desperate economic times, more people have learned about resume inflation, or about inflating their accomplishments in conversations and meetings.  This resume inflation is at its worst in the entertainment industry, but it exists everywhere.  What have we found?

• We were fooled twice within a relatively short time frame by individuals, who were “Emmy award winners.”  They were not lying, but they took advantage of our mistaken belief that the Emmy’s, like the Oscar’s or the Grammy Awards (for recording artists) are only awarded nationally with highly controlled award criteria.  The Emmy awards are not only awarded nationally to outstanding TV creative and production talent, but are franchised to 20 regional award-granting bodies.  Not surprisingly, the quality control on a group Emmy award in some regions is not as strong as it is at the national level.
• The second kind of resume inflation exists everywhere, especially within large organizations that have multiple people involved in a successful project.  Within any project team, some people make major contributions and others are just marginal players.  The entertainment industry also has this issue, because many people get “attached” to a project and secure a credit when they have contributed nothing.  Very often, the decision makers on the individual project hand out a credit, instead of paying money.  They do not suffer from having done so, but someone making a decision to hire someone in the future is victimized, because they mistakenly believe someone had a bigger role than they did.
• Another form of resume inflation comes from job titles that have vague or broad definitions.  The job title most subject to abuse in the business world is “general manager.”  At various times during my 30-year tenure at Pitney Bowes, individuals who did nothing more than sales and service management were given the “general manager” title.  This was designed to achieve parity with peers in a particular industry who also had title inflation.  It also helped give them stature with customers to secure business.  It did not harm us, because we knew what individuals could, and could not, do.  However, as these individuals moved on, they often had the ability to confuse a future employer as to what they had done at Pitney Bowes.  In the entertainment business, the “producer” title carries the same risk. Someone may legitimately be a “producer,” but the range of “producer” responsibilities varies significantly from project to project.
• Another challenge with any managerial title in a large organization is the degree to which work is done by someone underneath the individual.  I cannot tell you how many times I have discovered that an individual who gets the credit for results has really benefited from someone underneath him or her who did the work, or who was essential to the success the manager realized.  The most public example of this was the degree to which Michael Eisner, the Disney CEO, benefited from the work done by Frank Wells, his chief operating officer.  No one realized the extent of Wells’ contributions to Eisner’s successful run in his first decade at Disney until Wells died in the mid-1990’s.  In the opinion of many industry experts, Eisner’s performance suffered significantly after that point, even though he was a highly talented executive, because he needed Wells’ difficult-to-replace skills.
• Finally, by far the most difficult kind of resume inflation to detect is the success someone achieves under a certain set of conditions that cannot be duplicated in the next assignment.  The most common form of non-replicable success is the ability to transfer success achieved in a big organization, which provides significant financial and human resource support for an individual, to a small, entrepreneurial or resource-constrained environment.

At Pitney Bowes, this tended to manifest itself when we moved someone from a high level domestic leadership position to a comparably sized, but more resource-constrained international assignment.  In the U.S., a sales management executive had someone preparing all marketing materials for him or her.  Internationally, more of the work had to be done by the executive, because there just were not enough people to whom the work could be delegated.  The ability of managers to be more hands-on after having delegated work was always put to the test.

I developed some tests to determine the adaptability of the individual:

• Did the individual have the ability, even in the old job, to stay connected to the detail?  Some individuals delegated broadly in the old job, and received reports less frequently from direct reports. Those who stayed above the detail got disconnected from the front-line jobs relatively quickly.
• Did the individual break through the “chain of command” to understand what was going on in the front lines?  Those who religiously respected the “chain of command” and depended on what their direct reports told them tended to be unable to get good marketplace intelligence.
• Did the manager have informal, non-quantitative sources of data and insight?  Those who relied on formal reporting systems tended to have less ability to be attuned to front line conditions anywhere in the world when they had to have that ability.
• Did the manager leave time for open-ended questioning of direct reports?  Those who were overscheduled in their U.S. position tended to create highly scheduled reporting systems in the new job, which shut them off from the flexibility to learn about the new environment.

The financial resource constraints were also important.  The transition from an environment in which the individual could call upon more internal and external financial resources to attack a problem or have more forgiveness in terms of errors to a highly unforgiving environment is brutal.  The transition from a large organization in which earnings are calculated on the basis of accounting rules, to a smaller organization in which the manager has to focus on cash is also difficult for many people.

One of the strangest accounting-driven behaviors I observed at Pitney Bowes, which, because of changed accounting rules, could not happen today, was the behavior that treated “discontinued operations” as if they did not exist inside a company.  I remember a situation, which occurred when I was the company’s general counsel in which we received an inquiry from the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection.  There was some risk of fines and penalties, so I took the inquiry quite seriously.  One of the corporate finance executives with whom I spoke told me that I did not have to worry because the company about which the inquiry had been made was a “discontinued operation,” which meant only that its revenues and earnings were not included in the company’s reports on continuing operations.  I explained to this executive that the Department of Environmental Protection did not care about the reporting status of the business.  We owned it, and we would have corporate liability for whatever happened.  Fortunately, nothing happened, but I learned that individuals steeped in an accounting-driven culture have a great deal of difficulty adapting to a cash-driven one.

Perhaps the most important quality at which we must look, when someone presents themselves as a job candidate, is their ability to be brutally honest about what they have done and can do, and what they are not qualified to do.  We can always work with someone who acknowledges his or her limitations, because we know what those limitations might be.  We cannot help ourselves when someone does not level with us.

The stories reminded me that, for the last 21 years of my Pitney Bowes career, I dealt continuously with the encroachment of state capitalism in the postal sector.  In the late 1980’s and throughout the 1990’s, we successfully fought a series of battles with the U.S. Postal Service to keep it from becoming another entity with all the powers and privileges of the federal government, but with none of the regulatory constraints associated with federal government agencies.  Several senior postal officials aspired to create a power base similar to many government-owned entities, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority (which Marvin Runyon, the Postmaster General from 1992 to 1998, had led) or the New York-New Jersey Port Authority.

Fortunately, we defeated efforts by the Postal Service to regulate the mailing industry and compete unfairly with it at the same time.  The Postal Service leadership teams succeeding Runyon and members of his senior team generally tried to operate within the boundaries set by Congress. We had a very collaborative, and mutually respectful, relationship with the Postal Service during most of my tenure as CEO.

The story was very different outside the United States.  While we had similarly respectful and collaborative relationships with the postal officials in the UK, Canada, Spain, Denmark, and Norway, we had a variety of challenges with postal authorities in many other countries.

We saw three distinct challenges:

• Some postal operators, which had appeared to become privatized, acted in very anti-competitive ways in their own nations, and also secured rights and privileges from their national governments that stacked the deck against partners and competitors.  The most extreme example was Germany, during the leadership of Deutsche Post by Klaus Zumwinkel, who resigned in early 2008 for reasons unrelated to his work-related performance.  Throughout Zumwinkel’s 18-year tenure as CEO, Deutsche Post acquired companies all over the world, including a disastrous acquisition of Airborne, a major package shipper, and the worldwide operations of DHL.

In Germany, where Deutsche Post realized most of its profits, postal rates were exceptionally high (well above $.60 per piece), service was not exceptional, but competition was ruthlessly suppressed.  At the end of 2007, a few weeks before Germany had committed to open its market to full competition from within the EU, Zumwinkel successfully prevailed on German legislators to pass a law that created a minimum wage for postal sector employees only, a wage pegged at Deutsche Post’s minimum pay grade.  The immediate result was to destroy its two largest mailing competitors, since neither could secure labor cost advantages over Deutsche Post.

In Italy, Poste Italiane took advantage of complex and onerous labor laws to fend off competition, since these laws made part-time and temporary workers prohibitively expensive.

• In many countries, postal operators expanded into businesses in which the marketplace was amply served by the private sector, but in which the postal operators would immediately have a competitive advantage, because of the implicit protection from national governments.  Australia, Belgium, Ireland, China and New Zealand all started retail banks.  Japan had always had a sizable postal banking system which paid almost no interest to depositors, but which became a huge source of loans to projects favored by politicians.  Prime Minister Koizumi staked his political career on an initiative to privatize the Japan Post, not because there was ferocious opposition to privatizing the mail or package business, but because the heavy governmental control of the flow of bank loans would be jeopardized. He barely avoided receiving a vote of no confidence because his initiative upset the way government favors had been delivered for generations.

Postal operators have played heavily in the money transfer business (competing with Western Union), in retail government services, in the sale of greeting cards and stationery, and in the sale of gift items often transmitted through the mail.  Postal operators like Australia, China, Finland, and Sweden moved seamlessly into mail services businesses. In countries with a strong tradition of state capitalism, these postal operators were able to operate freely in more businesses in which they competed unfairly with the private sector.

• The postal operators often carried mandates and missions inconsistent with a business focused on cost-effective customer service.  France and Canada were prime examples of this problem, as were Japan, Spain, and Portugal. In these countries, postal operators were saddled with explicit and implicit requirements that they keep a minimum number of people employed, even if the demands of the business would not justify such employment.  For Pitney Bowes, the government employment mandates made many of our productivity enhancement tools unusable by these postal operators.  They could not improve their productivity, even if they wanted to, because they were fulfilling social mandates.  Postal ratepayers paid more, in the form of a disguised tax, to create a welfare system for workers who probably could not have secured employment at comparable wage and salary rates.

I was able to experience the ugly underside of state capitalism for over two decades.  It made me realize that the United States should think long and hard about migrating down the path these other countries have followed.  It also is a cautionary tale for large multinational corporations that aspire to compete fairly in major markets in which one or more of the competitors are state-owned or state-controlled enterprises, or in which the state considers a particular industry strategically important.