The Dealer Network

I recently read an article by Charles Lane from The Washington Post. He tells us that one of the big problems on why cars cost so much is the whole dealer network. Dealers you see, have so much political clout, that most of them are protected by state laws that give them exclusive sales territories, and bar manufacturers from selling direct. This is insane, using a dealer network in the age of the Internet. It adds about 30% to the retail cost of a car, and what are the benefits? Increasingly very little. In fact, buying or leasing a car is consistently listed by consumers as one of the most unpleasant tasks they do. It’s not that choosing a car is hard, it’s dealing with the superficial smiles of hungry sales people, and their manipulation. It is extremely distasteful. We also never know if we are getting the best deal, because everybody seems to be making his or her own individual deal. Government regulation that protects special interest in business, that has no strategic value to consumers, is simply not a good thing. Almost all regulations served a purpose when they were instituted, but they must be consistently reviewed and expire old regulations that get in the way of progress.

Synthetic Energy Addiction

I read an article by William Neuman from the New York Times titled, “Energy Shots Stimulate Power Drink Sales.” It is about the amazing popularity in terrible tasting energy shot drinks in which 5 Hour Energy is the leader. These are super concentrated doses of caffeine and other stimulants that people are getting addicted to, especially college students. Professionals that work endless hours like in the fields of accounting, law, and medicine are also getting very addicted. Somehow becoming dependant on synthetic energy instead of producing our own to proper diet, exercise, and rest seems like a bad idea!

A Simpler Life is a More Satisfying Life

I was reading an article by Wendy Koch from USA Today titled For Many, A Simpler Life Is Better. It’s about this new movement to limit the number of things you own. In fact, someone in San Diego, a man named Dave Bruno has launched a blog called the 100 Thing Challenge. His whole concept is to try to get people to limit the things they own down to 100 items. That is not that many things, but people that do it seem to feel free and less stressed than deprived. One of the trends in the article is that only half of all consumers say they already have what they need, meaning they don’t need to buy anything. In the American Dream Project I’ve often talked about where you commit for a month not to buy anything other than food or the current necessities that you use every month. Try it for a month, try it for 2 months, try it for 6 months and just see what happens. This is a whole movement called Voluntary Simplicity. Its got a lot of traction because people are finding a simpler, less cluttered life is actually a better more satisfying life. That is a civil lining. If it really takes hold however, our recession will undoubtedly last a little longer, there will be fewer stores and less consumption, but on balance that’s the only thing that’s sustainable.

A Healthy Employee is a Productive Employee

I am off to one of the large computer companies in Silicon Valley to talk about the Human Performance Institute’s, Health and Performance Program. It seems remarkable that most people don’t equate that it is necessary to have healthy employees in order to have productive employees. Yet, when people get the connection that fit, healthy, high energy employees are much more likely to create things of value, take care of their customers, and be productive they get excited that there is a business reason along with a health reason, to give people the information and motivation to lead their lives in a healthy way.

We are the World

In some very important ways maybe all of us are more like Michael Jackson than we think. I know. He invented moon walking and was also a moon beam. He optimized the tragic weirdness of someone disconnected from others’ reality. That’s my point. Michael Jackson is just an extreme example of the mixed bag that all of us are. His talent was extreme. Even unique. But his gifts of singing, dancing, songwriting, and envisioning never-seen-before entertainment were developed through immense amounts of hard work and tireless practice.

As Malcolm Gladwell tells us in Outliers, extreme success is nearly always the result of extreme effort. Michael was extraordinary principally because he chose to work at it. So can we. Researcher Carol Dweck reports that nearly all people who are considered experts or masters at something have simply practiced much more than only competent people. I think Tiger Woods, Eli Manning, John Grisham, Steve Jobs and other over-the-top achievers would agree. They focus their talent on being great in a certain way, their way, and over-invest in themselves. The result is unique competence and often spectacular results. So one inspiring thing we can all take from Michael Jackson is that when humans are inspired to do things with enough drive, determination and relentless practice, greatness can result.

But even with extraordinary greatest, all of us are flawed. And no matter how hard we may discipline ourselves, those flaws dog us or new ones appear. To be human is to be flawed. Our flaws are widely seen and yes even talked about. Perhaps the greatest flaw is the arrogance of thinking our own shortcomings don’t matter. I think most of us would rather be judged by our sincere intentions than our uneven behavior. Which brings me back to Michael Jackson. People who knew him best and people who worked with him (I happened to know one of his producers in the 1980s) said he brimmed with positive intention and gentle kindness. Yes, he was afflicted by inner demons (The Man in the Mirror), and who knows how all those demons played out, but all of us have at some time in our lives battled our own darkness. It’s then we need affirming friends who call us on our crap and lift us to higher ground. Authentic friendship is both tough and loyal. I am not sure Michael had many real friends. Friends who didn’t need or want anything from him. All of us need such friends and need to be such friends. All of us. As the singer wrote, “We are the world.” It’s up to us to “make it a better place.”

What’s the best thing we can do? Be a great friend to someone today. A friend that encourages persistence, effort and practice towards worthwhile goals and a friend who also holds up a mirror and says, “You’re better than that!” when our friends give in to their weakness. That’s a friend.

Environmental and Social Responsibility

There was a great article in the Wall Street Journal called, “Luxury-Good Makers, Brandish Green Credentials.” In this article it talks about how consumers are insistent that companies become more environmentally responsible.

According to the Cone Consumer Environmental Report conducted early in 2009, 34% of adults are more interested in buying environmentally responsible products during this recession than when it started. There is a growing concern that business in general has been irresponsible not just our bankers but the people who make and sell us the things we wear, eat, watch, listen to, or otherwise consume. This is most prominent in young consumers.  Milton Pedraza, who is the CEO of the Luxury Institute says,

“Young consumers believe that caring about the environment is how you create a meaningful life.”

In fact luxury brands are really jumping on the environment bandwagon. Brands like Louis Vuitton have been conducting a carbon inventory since 2004, trying to reduce the negative environmental impact on their green house emissions. Their parent company has even created a film which was released in over 100 companies highlighting man’s abuse of the environment. It seems that even in luxury goods, being green is essential to help consumers feel good about spending money. Environmental and social responsibility is now a positive driver of brand value; in fact, it’s a turbo charger. Many companies are being accused of green washing and this is well deserved. For example, building sneakers out of recycled water bottles and calling them vegan is cute, but most of the other processes used in their production are hardly what would be considered green. Applying the word organic to clothing is a stretch; nevertheless people are trying hard. Wal Mart has spent considerable money and time with the founder of Patagonia trying to come up with supplies of truly organic cotton and recyclable materials, because the growing demand for responsibly-made clothing and organic food is growing through the roof. Yes, at Wal Mart.

The global recession has hit the luxury goods and all consumer goods really hard.  Consumers have very high expectations to become even more choosy with their dollars. Going green is just not the right thing to do it’s the strategic thing to do. We’ve crossed a tipping point with environmentally responsible consumer goods. This is a tidal wave that is not going to recede but flood the Earth, and soon its going to be required just to be a player in a consumer game and it must be. Everything else is not sustainable. The people/companies who don’t get this are dinosaurs, who don’t know they’re nearly dead.

Independence Day and Our American Dream

I’ve been giving speeches and writing about the American Dream for the past 5 years my quest has been to discover what our dream is for the 21st century. Today I have a powerful conviction that deep down we know we have the solutions to our own confusion. Answers seem to be on the tips of our tongues, like a memory that has just slipped our mind. The answers we seek are already embedded in our spiritual wiring; we are merely fumbling in the dark for the switch to turn the lights on.

Amidst the darkness of the evening news, the never-ending war in the Middle East, the decline of the middle class, the tidal wave of national debt, and the corruption of our institutions, there is another voice calling out. A voice calling for a rebirth of vision. A vision in which the greatest good for each and all is once again the ideal. It’s a new model of governing without the corruption of special interest and financial favors. A new model of sustainable enterprise that aims for the Greatest Total Value for all. A new model of personal action based on understanding our own unique design and our most noble human desires.

This is all more than a dream. It is The Dream. The Dream envisioned by the most inspiring human phrase, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” It is time to dream again. Will you?

A recent survey reported in the Harvard Business Review reveals that Baby Boomers and Generation Y have a lot in common (July/August 2009, p. 71). This is the first time parents (Boomers age 50+) and their children (Gen Y age 22 to 32) have been in the same work place in large numbers. Both generations are about the same total size, 70-75 million. Generally these are two generations that like each other. About 1/3 of Gen Y children talk to their parents everyday! So now Gen Y and many Boomers battered by the world we created have found common ground.

Here’s what we want! The genuine American Dream. The exhausted refugees of Boomer World and their meaning-hungry children find themselves longing for the same five things.

We want enduring relationships and families that work.

Love, loyalty and intimacy are our greatest needs because that’s what has been missing. It’s time for a re-commitment to commitment. For our children and us.

We want a lifestyle we both value and enjoy.

We want to live in a safe, attractive place we can afford. We want to do things that feed our soul and engage our emotions. We want community, meaning and sanity. For our children and us.

We want a career that embodies our Dream.

Neither a job nor a profession alone is a career. Our whole Dream Life is our career. We want real work with real meaning and real rewards. Over 85 percent of us want our work to make an important contribution to society. We want flexibility, autonomy and to be rewarded for results. We want to make a meaningful contribution, express our talents and follow our interests. For our children and us.

We want growth.

We want the tools to reinvent ourselves as often as we choose to in this constantly changing world. We want to learn whatever we need in order to excel at our priorities. We want affordable, efficient, stimulating education and access to enriching experiences. We want spiritual growth. For our children and us.

We want real leadership.

We demand truth, not spin or hype. We’re bombarded daily by a barrage of exaggeration and outright lies. People we should be trusting shamelessly offer denial, blame and rationalizations to worm out of their own failures. We have become a nation of skeptics because our leaders are less than we need them to be. We want leadership of vision, substance and honesty. In our homes, factories, stores, schools, banks and churches…everywhere.

We are that X factor. Our common values are powerful. Imagine how good our world will be when we live according to these aspirations. This is an exciting time in human history. How you and I act, right here and right now, is crucially important. The counterfeit American Dream invented by mass marketers that reduced our vision to a McMansion, a new car and a platinum credit card is up in flames. Many more of us are focusing on improving more than our material standard of living. It is time to create a standard of life that we are willing to pass on to our children. It is time to stop arguing over trivia and stand for our ideals that will inspire future generations.

In the best possible society, everyone can enjoy their Life and their Liberty and pursue real Happiness. We can literally save the future if we act on our beliefs and change our behavior right now. As we change, our institutions change. When we lead, our leaders will follow. We must take the lead. If we hope to change the world, we must change our world first.

It matters. The American Dream will only be reclaimed one dream at a time. Only when enough of us stand up for our real dreams of a sustainable future will the entire energy of our culture rise up to transform the world. Only our noble vision will save our future. All we have to do is start right where we are. Today.

Grameen Bank – Good People Doing Great Things

This afternoon I was speaking to the Grameen Foundation. The Grameen Foundation who is helping spread microcredit throughout the world. As you know micro credit has raised more people out of poverty than any other program in history. Over 133 million people are now living in self-alliance because of the work the Grameen bank has done. They have launched a program called, Bankers without Borders, which is a very well developed strategic volunteering concept. The problem with most volunteering opportunities is that it makes use of our hands and our backs, not our heads or our skills. Strategic volunteering is using people that have specific skills to really make an impact, and to really make a difference. Bankers without Borders is not just for bankers, although anybody with a banking or finance background would do well to sign up because right from your own office or home you can help people who are running micro finance institutions, which are small banks come up with risk assessments, make loans, collect loans, and basically help raise their level of sophistication and change the lives of thousands of people without changing your life. It’s the ultimate, Save The World and Still Be Home for Dinner strategy. There are also opportunities for volunteers to go into the field in exciting places in Asia, Africa, and India to actually work with micro finance institutions. Bankers without Borders takes people with all kinds of skills, from marketing, to human resources, to information technology. What always impresses me about the Grameen Foundation is their understanding of how to scale up real solutions to help real people. This is not a charity that is interested in enabling people to wallow in their suffering, rather it is all about creating world wide self alliance. They have unquenchable ambition to absolutely eradicate through poverty. It’s a clear vision, and they have a clear path to achieve it. Now they have created a way for all of us to help, in any way that we can, right where we are. You can find Bankers without Borders on the Grameen Foundation Website. They are soon going to be creating a series of webinars to deal with specific topics, so that people know exactly how they might put their skills and energy to work. It always blows my mind to see good people do great things!

Increase Our Energy – Solve Health Care Costs

On Monday I was with some researchers from Johnson & Johnson talking about our heath care crisis. Much of our crisis is invisible. For instance, this number really blew my mind…

The current estimate for the annual productivity lost due to preventable illness is $1 trillion dollars a year.

That’s about the same as any health care cost of any new plan or that is being discussed for ten years. The cost of our lifestyle has reached unbelievable proportions. I’m here at the Human Performance Institute looking at health care’s ultimate answer.

80% of chronic illnesses are preventable and most of the causes of the chronic illnesses are simply bad lifestyle choices.

We know how to live, we just don’t. How we eat, how we don’t exercise, and how we don’t sleep makes us very vulnerable to our bodies breaking down. We also don’t do a very good job recovering from stress. HPI’s secret is that they know how to change that behavior permanently. Their evidence is pretty overwhelming. The underlying premise is that most people don’t change their behavior because they don’t have the energy to. We’re simply too tired to exercise, too tired to think positive thoughts, and too tired to interact with each other in positive ways. We’re just too tired to do anything that isn’t really easy, and it’s in that choice of doing something easy that we make ourselves sick.

So it all begins with how to increase your energy. HPI seems to have found a way. If we can simply get more of us taking better care of ourselves because we have the energy to do it, things might change. The best way to solve the cost prices in health care is to get a whole lot healthier!

Will Marre’s Radical Solution to Health Care

How does paying $25,000 a year for health care sound?  According to the Consumers Union that’s what the average family will be paying in 15 years if we don’t do something now (See Myths on Health Care in USA Today).

Some issues that impact our lives and our children’s future are so big that it takes an extended article to say what needs to be said.  Health care is one of these issues.  I worked in the health industry for eight years consulting with two multibillion-dollar hospital groups with sterling reputations.  I worked with many great people who wanted to do the right thing in the right way.  But our health care system is so goofed up and so internally competitive with doctors, hospitals, drug companies and insurance companies all hammering each other for a piece of the hurricane of money blowing through health care.  I use the term ‘hurricane’ because the money we spend is a storm of waste.

According to the Consumers Union, $500 billion/year is wasted in ways that frequently hurts our health instead of helps us.

I present my idea as an idea-starter rather than a complete plan. One thing for sure, tweaking the status quo will not work.  We need something far more radical….

Yes, according to our Congressional Budget Office, the biggest threat to American’s quality of life is…you guessed it…our bizarre health care system.  We all know by now that the U.S. has the most expensive, least effective health care system among all developed nations.  In the richest country in the world, we all too frequently see canisters in grocery stores asking for hand-outs to pay for cancer treatments for a child whose working parents’ insurance doesn’t cover treatments.

With 47 million uninsured and at least 100 million more of us increasingly under-insured, no fair-minded person can claim our current system works.  The cost of inadequate coverage has reached the ridiculous.

My own family’s policy, which is a high-deductible monstrosity full of coverage limitations, has increased in cost by 40 percent in the past 2 years.  And no we haven’t had any major illness or accidents.

Although there are many players in health care we could blame for contributing to our problems, the private health insurance industry is the one that is most problematic. That’s because our large health insurers are worried that their core business model is ill suited to help today’s consumers.

They have already spent $22 million trying to scare the public into thinking that socialized medicine is coming with its inevitable mediocre care.

Meanwhile Congress is coming up with some super-expensive half-baked compromise that is likely to make things more complicated, more expensive and subject to future corruption in ways currently unimaginable.  Either way, the middle class is likely to wither due to massive taxes or massive direct costs that may even be more than taxes.

What’s needed is something far more radical, daring innovation that revolutionizes health insurance as it reduces cost and complexity.

1. First we must bury the idea that health insurance is an “industry” or a business. The profit motive works great for giving incentive to commercial genius to create iphones but it gives incentive to all the wrong behavior when we’re trying to create an all citizen access to health care.This isn’t hard to understand.  Profit arises from the difference between premium income and overhead costs and health claims.  Thus insurers are rewarded for only insuring the healthiest people and paying as few claims as possible.  So that’s exactly what we get.  Today our health is brutally rationed by the insurance industry.  Increasingly numbers of people simply can’t get health insurance ironically because they need it.  We also get claims denied and benefits arbitrarily limited after we’re ill by armies of insurance company employees who earn bonuses by keeping payouts limited.  It’s called mis-aligned incentives.  The companies selling insurance profit the most when they deny me the benefits I thought I was buying.  That is unfixable.  No amount of regulation will match the problems that mis-aligned incentives cause.
2. Government cannot effectively administrate an expanded Medicare-like bureaucracy to cover all American’s in an effective way. Government bureaucracies grow proportionately less efficient and effective with size.  Costs will soar and service decline.  Government bureaucracies are exceptionally poor at promoting high operating performance because individual workers are not systematically incented to excel. We all know this.  I am not suggesting all government workers are lazy, rather that all bureaucracies, public or private, are poor at rewarding merit.
3. The solution is something new.  Something called Civic Enterprise. A Civic Enterprise uses the efficient disciplines of business to achieve social goals at the highest possible quality at the lowest cost.  This is achieved through totally aligning incentives.  Here’s how.A Civic Enterprise for American health care would function as an all citizen non-profit co-op we all own.  It would operate the way large corporations self-insure.  Every citizen would be eligible for a universal level of humane benefits.  Every person would have a deductible equal to 3 percent of their income so they would seek the lowest cost provider for minor sicknesses and injuries.  This would motivate low-cost, high volume free market providers like Minute Clinics to thrive.  (This 3 percent is not a tax.  It wouldn’t be a cost to people who didn’t get sick or injured.)The co-ops insurance benefits would be administered by regional centers whose employees would be incented to get the most people enrolled and well served with the specific treatments that conform to best practice guidelines.  Six sigma measures for quality and efficiency would be embedded into the system so co-op employees could earn substantial bonuses for providing excellent and timely service.  Good performers would be rewarded and poor performers weeded out. The main business driver would be to provide the best coverage to the most people to increase citizen health.
4. All citizens would have the opportunity to take online or in-person health education classes. Doing so would result in lower deductibles.
5. Funding would come from dismantling our Medicare bureaucracy and new health taxes on all products that contribute to poor health. These include manufactured food and beverages whose primary ingredients make us fatter, clog our arteries or trick us into thinking we’re hungry.  Also taxing polluters who contribute to lung disease and cancer also puts the tax on the modern sources of environmentally caused illness.

Yes of course there will be screams from the businesses that profit and prosper from promoting risky behavior, make fake food or foul our air and water.  These taxes are not anti-business.  They simply reflect the real economic costs of producing certain products.  Government’s legitimate responsibility is to tax private companies for the social costs caused by their operations.

In a market economy everyone needs to take responsibility for their impact on the health of the total marketplace and that means the impact their product or their production process has on society’s health.  It’s only fair.  So go ahead and make your cigarettes, Twinkies and coal plants, but you and your consumers must pay for the health consequences you are creating.  That’s as pure a market-based economy as I can imagine.

The bottom line:

Let’s all get on the same page.  If we align our economy and our incentives toward promoting health, self-reliance and taking responsibility for all our actions, we can solve our health care crisis.  We need to focus on performance rather than profit.  If we let business-as-usual cut off real innovation that we need, we’re headed into a Grand Canyon of quick sand.

What’s the best thing we can do? Get in our Senator and Congressman’s face and demand real solutions that improve effective care, universal access and hold down costs. ( Write Your Representative or Contact Your Senator.) Engage with the White House and President Obama in today’s Town Hall on Health Care Reform.

Postscript:
Some Things that Make No Sense

1. That we get health insurance through our employment.  It’s a burden to our economy and few of us work for companies that provide insurance.  Get employers out of the health insurance system.  We need to get our insurance directly and everyone should be covered.
2. Don’t pass a law requiring we individually buy health insurance from a private, profit-motivated insurance company.  None of them put my interest first.  Comparing this to mandatory car insurance is absurd.  I choose not to have a car.  I can’t choose not to have a body.  Enroll me in an effective non-profit Citizen Enterprise plan.

So what do you think?  The more constructive ideas that bubble up, the better our solutions will be.  So let’s hear your ideas.

You can also read some of your ideas/comments on my previous post, “Who Will Pay for Healthcare.”  Thank you for your insightful thoughts.

Engage with us by posting your comments/ideas.  Engage with us on Facebook and Twitter

« Previous Page