A story in the WSJ got me trying to excel tonight at the Traveler IQ online game. Well, there went the evening. God, I thought I was so much better at geography. Depressing.
I recently spoke at Yahoo! about the book, and, for this presentation, I adapted the Agenda Detection and Meeting Creatures chapters into a piece about how I assess agendas and people in the first 10 minutes of any meeting.
Early on in the presentation, I asked the audience, "What are the things you are supposed to do to make a successful meeting?" First hand: "Make sure everyone closes their laptop." Yes. Full agreement from me. If you're sitting in my meeting and your laptop is open, I promise, I swear -- you are giving me half of your attention. Maybe less.
The Yahoos couldn't drop the topic. In Q&A, the laptop question came up. In the post-presentation mingle it came up again. Everyone wanted to know if there was a situation where it was OK to whip out the laptop.
My answer, over and over again, is "No."
Now, this is religion and not reality because it's likely I'll bring my laptop to a couple of meetings this week, but I am ultimately fucking up by doing this. Here's why.
Laptop Tolerance
There were three different angles the Yahoos tried on me, and I have an answer for each:
"What if I'm taking notes on my laptop?"
This is how laptops got invited to the party. Pre-wireless-everywhere folks were using their laptops as note-paper. This is fine, but nowadays, are you really just taking notes? Really? It takes one lull in the conversation to get bored and starting glancing over at CNN, and in that moment I might say something you need to know and you missed it because you stopped listening. So, what are you doing in this meeting? If you're going to ignore me, you can just as easily do it sitting in your office.
One solution to this problem is to leave the laptop in your office and bring a nice, bright sheet of white paper to the meeting. Try it. When forced, you might even find something interesting in the dull parts of the meeting.
"I'm required to go to this meeting and I have no role, so I bring my laptop to get work done."
I have two answers to this. First, why the hell are going to this meeting if you have no role? Second, even if you don't have a role, how do you know you don't have a role? If you're sitting there ignoring whatever is being said while you're scrubbing the bug database, you have nary a clue what is being talked about.
When I'm forced to go to a meeting where I have no obvious role or responsibility, I give the meeting the benefit of the doubt and listen hard. What is going on here? Do I care? How can I help? With all the wonders of the Internet sitting on my MacBook Pro, this can be tricky, but what I'm trying to figure out is if I can add any value in the time that I'm required to sit there. If, after a few meetings, I'm certain I'm a) not going to learn anything, and b) can't add any value, I stop going to the meeting. Consequences are forthcoming, but more on that in a moment.
"I run the meeting and they're not respecting my laptop policy."
Some meetings involve piles of people, and this creates a comfortable anonymity where attendees ignore the no-laptop policy and type away. My advice here is to politely remind everyone of your policy. Still a problem? Remind them again. More typing? It's time to remove these people from the meeting.
Being a meeting jerk has consequences, but it's those consequences you want to face because you've got a bigger problem than people ignoring your meeting.
The Herring
All this focus on laptops as the problem is a red herring. Whether you're running a meeting with a rampant laptop problem or sitting in a meeting where you have no role, the actual problem is that someone doesn't understand the value of the meeting.
No, it's actually worse.
The problem is that everyone attending this laptop-laden clusterfuck is subconsciously hearing "Hey, in this meeting, it's A-OK to waste people's time."
My question is: "When is it ever ok to waste people's time?"
You're on the defensive now and you're thinking "But Rands, while I'm not actively contributing to this meeting, I am getting work done on my laptop." No, you're not. You're giving the same partial attention to your laptop task that you're giving to the meeting. You are doing two things poorly rather than one thing well.
The solution here is simple. If you're in a meeting where you have no role such that you're tempted to stare at your laptop: stop going. If you're running a meeting infested with laptops and, after repeated gentle reminders about your no-laptop policy, there are still laptops: remove the laptop offenders from the meeting.
This brute force approach strikes me as being a violation of the Rands "Don't be a prick" policy, but frequent readers know that not being a prick is always trumped by the even more important policy of "Don't waste my time". Besides, being a prick is going to have some interesting side effects.
Standing Meeting Momentum
Meetings become part of organizational culture. Just like any organization has a healthy layer of baffling acronyms, they also have a set of core standing meetings. Some of these meetings have been around forever and have a life of their own.
Thing is, in the five years that you've been working at that company, the company has (hopefully) changed. More importantly, so have the employees. So why in the world do we still have that useless product status review for everyone on Tuesdays at 4pm? I can get all the information from the wiki Frank set up.
If you have no role in a meeting and stop going, or if you remove someone from a meeting, you're going to create a conflict with whoever believes that you (or the other someone) should be in that meeting. This is great. This is the discussion you want to have: "Frank, I've been to this meeting 12 times and I've no clue what I'm doing here. Please advise."
Maybe Frank has some insight for you. Maybe he can explain some strategic shenanigans that will adjust your perspective so that your first reaction in this meeting isn't to surf the popular videos on YouTube. If Frank can't clearly explain why you need to be there -- guess what -- I've just saved you 30 minutes to an hour each week. Please consider this an early Christmas present.
A bunch of people sitting in a meeting, staring at their laptops, is a fat meeting. The people sitting at their laptops have no incentive to change a thing because they're lost in whatever has captured their interest on their laptops. This is a lazy meeting full of people who are ignoring the most important question: "How do we figure out how to never have this meeting again?" Even worse, an organization that lets this meeting exist is a rotting organization. It's a company where it's slowly becoming acceptable to sit there and do nothing.
A meeting must fight to exist. It must defend its existence to its attendees who should constantly be asking "Why are we here?"
Now you understand the other thing I do in the first 10 minutes of any standing meeting: I think about how I can kill it.
Here's an email I received late yesterday from a friend, "R," who was in the CDO business from way back when to right through the past few years.
"R" writes:
"I've been paying attention to your macro economic call lately and you're right on. Three anecdotal stories for you that you can use on Kudlow. (PLEASE don't mention my name).
1. XXXXXX and I were talking in 2003 about how shaky these low FICO, high LTV, 2/28 ARM's that were being created were. People in the know knew then those loan products were going to be a problem in the future. Way back in 2003, it didn't make sense.
2. In early '05, XXXXXX tried to hook me up with a HF he knew that wanted to play the CDO issuer game. I talked to the guy and told him that at the risk of talking them out of hiring me, I wouldn't do it. I thought that game was topped-out even back then. A bit early, but perhaps the right call.
3. I was talking to CDO managers in mid-'05 that were saying how rich sub-prime MBS was and how wrong everyone was for buying that stuff at the spreads they were. To a man, they all agreed they were paying too much for the risk, they all believed that HPA [ED: home price appreciation] was going negative soon. But, sadly, they had to buy the stuff because they needed to accumulate collateral for their CDO issuance. Fuck, we all knew we were overpaying, even back in 2005. We knew it was essentially a bet that home price appreciation was going to continue at levels that couldn't be sustained. No way that could keep going on.Everyone was saying the same thing: Home pricing cannot continue appreciating at the same rate, and the second this thing turns, we are FUCKED.
Is it really any surprise to anyone that the mortgage business got too far ahead of itself? To me, the only surprise has been it took so long for all of this to happen."
So what was the prime motivating factor?:
"The answer is quite simple: DEAL FEES. I gotta keep buying collateral, in order to keep issuing these transactions as a CDO manager. Its my job: I gotta keep accumulating collateral, and I gotta issue the liability against that collateral.
In 2005, we all said "I hate the real estate market, I hate the credit spread, but my job is to keep doing this: Buying Collateral and issuing CDOs. Everyone was the buying this shit to do any deal. The greed went thru the whole chain, from the home owner buying a property they couldn't afford right up to the CDO manager buying subprime paper."
Why did these managers keep buying this bad junk?:
"Well, nothing is "bad junk" -- it's just priced wrong. No one believed the under-performance of these MBS loan pools would ever be so severe. Everyone knew in the back of their minds that the possibility existed, as did the possibility that residential real estate prices would move LOWER someday.
But no one wanted to be the first to acknowledge it fearing that they'd miss the opportunity to participate in big fees, big alpha, etc. . . ."
Thanks, R. Great insight from inside the belly of the beast.
>
UPDATE: August 24, 2007 3:49pm
R asked me to add the following:
"I hate the fact that I'm getting pulled into this, but I'm seeing the need to clear a few things up.
1. To Fred or MS, I "had a spine" by walking away from an opportunity to start up a CDO management business at an established hedge fund company in '05. Everyone was going the same way on that trade, the collateral sucked, and HPA was maxing out. What I told Barry about were my observations from daily interactions with buyers of sub-pime HEL's as collateral for their CDO transactions. My role then was on the sell-side. Minds far smarter than mine were eager to accumulate this collateral. Fraud? Nothing fraudulent at this stage of the proccess. If there was fraud, reading an offering memorandum and monthly remittance reports cover to cover or spending hours of cash flow modelling on Intex wouldn't have shown it. Oh, and where was the fraud? My opinion; mortgage brokers possibly lying about and jamming loans into the wrong people to get fees from the lenders. My view on the relative value of sub-prime HEL's during this time period was not nearly as upbeat as others in a world where EVERYONE else was a buyer.
2. Eclectic, it's not quite as disgusting as you might think. Everyone knew the bet they were making; a combination of HPA and continued positive loan performance would continue sans interruption. It was a market call, similar in concept to the market calls most of you reading this make each day in your chosen financial markets and products. It was a bet that the collateral was going to continue doing what it was supposed to. It's a bit annoying when the "talking heads" claim that institutional investors and HF's buying these products don't know what they own. Bullshit. They know. They own a bet on Average Joe's house staying equal or going up in value and his continued ability to make his loan payments.
3. Stuart got it right, unfortunately. In a capitalist society, one sells what people want. And they wanted sub-prime HEL's with HUGE credit spreads such that the arbitrage was bigger. How is that huge credit spead possible? Lower quality loans; low FICO's, low LTV's.
Thanks Barry. I really want these folks to read this extra detail in an effort to clear up mis-understanding."
That question may be the key to the future actions of the Federal Reserve. One estimate of "How Low Will Housing Go?" comes from Jan Hatzius, Chief Economist of Goldman Sachs:
"Our working assumption has been that US home prices are about 15% overvalued. This relies on a simple "affordability" measure which essentially adjusts the home price/income ratio by the level of (nominal) mortgage rates. Depending on one's assumption about income growth, the likelihood of overshooting on the downside, and the length of the adjustment process, this suggests cumulative nominal home price declines of 5-15% in the next few years.
However, affordability is becoming an increasingly problematic concept because it ignores changes in credit availability and changes in nonconforming mortgage rates. Hence, it may be better to look at simpler price/income or price/rent ratios to get a sense of house price valuation. These paint a more dire picture.
Even if we assume that the long-term trend for price/income and price/rent is higher now than the average of the 1975-2000 period (because interest rates are likely to stay lower), cumulative nominal price declines of 15%-30% are possible."
That's not so different from what HSBC HomePulse wrote back in January 2006:
"We suggest that about half of the US housing market is frothy and that this 'bubble zone' may be overvalued by as much as 35-40%, after taking into account low interest rates and tax advantages.
Current valuations imply a large permanent reduction in the risk premium and/or a sizable step up in future capital gains, not all of which, we think, is justified. The 'bubble zone' accounts for 50% of US GDP, or over USD, nearly the size of the German, French, and UK economies put together. In other words, it's big. Therefore, when these housing bubbles begin to deflate, it is likely to have substantial macroeconomic consequences.
What's troubling is that even a perfect 'soft landing' in the form of flat national house prices would be consistent with a 35-40% collapse in existing home sales. The gush of liquidity from mortgage equity withdrawal would dry up, resulting in a growth drag worth over 3% of GDP. If this adjustment can be managed over many years (and hopefully it will), the economy can avoid recession and get away with soft growth.
If the process is squeezed into a shorter time frame instead, then recession is probable, forcing the Fed to once again consider unconventional policy options - a probability that would only rise if the money supply were to decline at the same time the 'bubble zone' deflates."
Whenever I hear anyone suggest that these events were totally unforeseeable, I know that person is full of $%#*.
>
Source:
A Froth-Finding Mission: Detecting US housing bubbles
HSBC Macro US Economics, January 2006
http://neweconomist.blogs.com/new_economist/files/HSBC_frothfindingmission.pdf
The International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) winners for 2007 have been posted on BusinessWeek's site. There are all of the usual slideshows and essays that you'd expect, but perhaps the coolest tool is the interactive table of winners from 2000 to 2007, sortable by client, school, or designer.
hi ashish,
From: Umesh [mailto:ukumar@gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, July 17, 2007 8:20 PM
To: ukumar.articles@blogger.com; Kumar, Umesh (REPO); Trivedi, Ashish
Subject: Bill Gates, Ambition, Legacy, and Obligation
how about lunching one day on baby carrots every week and collecting that money for donation ?...two weeks will translate to 1 child 1 year of food.
Sent to you by Umesh via Google Reader:
via Anil Dash by Anil on Jul 07, 2007
I've followed the history of Bill Gates and his career and work since I was a kid. Though he's not nearly charismatic enough to inspire an army of fawning fanboys, the complexity and eccentricity of a lot of his choices makes his character endlessly fascinating to me. And of course, it is an extra bonus that most people confuse such an interest for uncritical adoration, which ain't the case.
I'm not a Bill Gates fanboy, I just think he's more ambitious and more likely to permanently change the world for the better than anybody else in the history of the technology industry.
Part of understanding why is having the proper perspective. I remember Microsoft's mission from when I was a young kid -- a computer on every desk and in every home. That mission, of course, had an implicit suffix of "...running Microsoft software". About 25 years into that mission, before Bill Gates had even turned fifty years old, Microsoft had achieved that goal. Think about that -- you set a goal as ambitious as you can imagine, and before your kids are even in high school, it's happened. What do you do when you've accomplished your biggest goal?
It's not a problem most of us ever have to deal with. Honestly, most of us that would even take the time to set such a goal would make it so big or so fuzzy it would be impossible to ever achieve. But by being just slightly specific, Microsoft under Bill Gates' direction achieved a seemingly-extraordinarily ambitious goal.
So, what next? You have to go for an even bigger goal. What's bigger than computers everywhere? How about curing malaria? And AIDS? That seems big enough. And the true innovation seems to be approaching those problems in an entrepreneurial way, with a big focus on accountability.
And after years of seeing his awkwardness in articulating the benefits of technology, it's startling to see just how good Gates is at telling this far more important story. You might have seen a link to Bill Gates' Harvard commencement address and probably thought "eh, I'll read it later". Go read it now: it's the kind of leadership and accountability that's been sorely missing from those in a position of power in the technology industry. Hell, it's the kind of message that's been curiously absent from the lips of nearly all of our leaders.
Just one highlight:
I remember going to Davos some years back and sitting on a global health panel that was discussing ways to save millions of lives. Millions! Think of the thrill of saving just one person's life - then multiply that by millions. ... Yet this was the most boring panel I've ever been on - ever. So boring even I couldn't bear it.
What made that experience especially striking was that I had just come from an event where we were introducing version 13 of some piece of software, and we had people jumping and shouting with excitement. I love getting people excited about software - but why can't we generate even more excitement for saving lives?
You can't get people excited unless you can help them see and feel the impact. And how you do that - is a complex question.
Still, I'm optimistic. Yes, inequity has been with us forever, but the new tools we have to cut through complexity have not been with us forever. They are new - they can help us make the most of our caring - and that's why the future can be different from the past.
The defining and ongoing innovations of this age - biotechnology, the computer, the Internet - give us a chance we've never had before to end extreme poverty and end death from preventable disease.
I'm sure those who make their decisions based on fashion and popularity contests won't want to give Gates the benefit of the doubt. But I'm okay with someone uncool doing the right thing on an unimaginably ambitious scale.
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I'm back! This entry comes from temporary quarters in Cambridge, which will be my home for about another six weeks. The second half of that period will find the rest of my family in here with me, but for now it's just me, an internet connection, and some take-out souvlaki.
Going to work tomorrow will be a novel experience, after a solid five-month break. But this isn't the first time I've changed jobs, and like everyone else in the industry, I've seen a lot of turnover around me. Both vantage points have suggested some avoidable mistakes when starting a new position.
First off is badmouthing your old company. It's tempting - I mean, after all, you left the place for a reason, right? And isn't the new place so much better, and shouldn't you make everyone happy by telling them so? Actually, no, you probably shouldn't. There's a real risk of coming across as someone who does nothing but moan, and most labs have enough of those folks around already. Keep in mind that you just started, and that people haven't heard you talk much. You don't want your co-workers to realize that half the things you've said so far are complaints. Hold your fire.
You can screw up in the opposite direction, too, of course. (You always can, a general principle I try never to forget). Talking about how things were so much better back at the old gig won't win you any friends either, obviously. Sure, maybe it was easier to order supplies, or get instrument time, or whatever. But no one cares, and you shouldn't either.
This it-was-better stuff turns, very quickly, into another method of complaining, and we're back to the same place as with the first mistake. My view is that grousing about work conditions is something that should be done only among peers that you've worked with for a good while, people who know you and have seen that you can get the job done. At a new job, you don't have anyone in that category yet, so it's better to keep quiet. And anyway, how silly does it look to start in on how things are done when you haven't done anything yet?
Other mistakes: coming on as if you're the answer to everyone's prayers (because that, of course, makes the inference that everyone was doing it wrong until you showed up - if you really are the answer to said prayers, that'll become apparent on its own pretty soon, wouldn't you think)? And its opposite - starting off so quietly that people start to wonder why you were hired in the first place. It's normal (and a good idea) to shut up and listen for a while at first, but that can be taken too far. Eventually, you'll need to speak up.
Well, I won't be making these particular mistakes, I hope, but that just reserves me the right to make some others. At any rate, it's good to get back to research, and no mistake about that.
Steve from Richmond, VA, wrote in to ask a couple of questions:
"With software development, is it better to get something out there with customers and then continually improve or build the best wiz-bang software and then start marketing?"
That depends. You want to avoid the Marimba Phenomenon, where you get so much publicity in the early days that everybody checks out your underwhelming offering and decides that you're never going to have something worth looking at. (I should rename this the live.com phenomenon, in honor of Microsoft's horrible launch of live.com. Or the Zune phenomenon.) On the other hand, small startups are unlikely to have the problem of too much attention, so most companies with a 1.0 product can certainly get real customers with their earliest usable versions and build from there.
Steve is starting a company with a software developer.
"Assuming the software developer is getting paid at a reduced rate, but concurrently with his development. If you were giving also giving him some equity in your company, would you make that equity contingent on phases of the software getting done, the entire software getting done or vesting over time."
The standard solution is to vest over time -- anywhere from four to seven years -- with unvested shares being forfeited if he leaves for any reason. If the software doesn't get done, you fire him and he loses the unvested shares -- it's not necessary to make the vesting contingent specifically on finishing the software (besides, "finishing" software would be too hard to define in a contract).
You can set it up either as normal vesting (where he gets, say, 20% of the shares every year) or reverse vesting (where he gets the shares up front, but you have the right to repurchase them for a penny, and this right evaporates by 20% every year). Reverse vesting is preferable for tax reasons, because at the time you give him the shares, they're worth a lot less, so there's less income and more capital gains, which are taxed at a lower rate.
Not loving your job? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
The Business of Software conference coming up at the end of October is new this year, but it's got a pretty phenomenal line-up of speakers:
Hugh MacLeod does those great cartoons, which is reason enough to listen to him, but he's also the marketing strategist for the only Web 2.0 wine company.Also speaking: Dan Nunan, Jennifer Aaker, Jeffrey Pfeffer, Bill Buxton, and me. Register here.
Not loving your job? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
Toyota calls it "lowering the water level."
Imagine a value stream or a production process as a river. Reducing the inventory in the process - "lowering the water level" - exposes the "rocks" that represent all of the hidden costs and waste in production. Only by revealing those rocks can you improve the process and reduce the waste.
This metaphor works for knowledge workers, too. In this case, however, their key inventory item is time. Having too much time to do one's work hides the waste and inefficiencies in the process.
Now, most people would deny they have too much time to do their work. Not too many people are taking three-martini lunches anymore, or leaving the office right at 5:00pm. Hell, on average Americans only take about 79% of their vacation time, and 20% of people work on their vacations. And with our cellphone- and Crackberry-addled days, nights, and weekends, it seems as though there's an infinite torrent of work. Ironically, these same vacation-skipping, Blackberry-beholden employees complain vociferously about a lack of time for their personal lives.
But here's the thing: your cellphone, Blackberry, and general willingness to work late and on weekends are part of the problem, not the solution. Counterintuitive, but true.
Yeah, yeah. I can hear you now: "If I didn't have my Blackberry, if I didn't put in a few hours on the weekend, I'd never get on top of everything I need to do. I'd be buried. I'd get fired. I'd end up on the street with two Dixie cups and a string instead of an iPhone."
Let me ask you this (in the words of Dr. Phil): How's that working for you so far?
Has it helped? Are you on top of your work? Do you spend enough time with your friends and family? How's your fitness level?
The fact is, if you had less time for your work, you'd get it done more quickly. Parkinson's Law - work expands to fill the time available for its completion - recognizes this painful aspect of human nature. And if you don't believe it applies to you, think about what I call the Vacation Paradox: even though you never seem to be able to get all your work done on a regular day, the day(s) right before you go on vacation, you somehow manage to crank through all your daily work plus the backlog of stuff that's been moldering on your desk for the past month.
What's going on? Well, when you're short on time, you work more efficiently. You reduce the waste in your work process so that you can get stuff done. There's no choice, because you're on the plane to Maui or St. Moritz tomorrow.
But (to go back to the analogy I started with) when the water level - your inventory of time - is high, there's less urgency to reduce inefficiency. Why bother removing the waste in your work habits when you can just stay at the office an hour later, or get it done over the weekend? This is just another manifestation of the normalcy of waste.
And that's the nefarious aspect of living on your Blackberry 24/7, and your willingness to work on weekends and give up your holidays: you effectively raise the water level by increasing the amount of time you have to accomplish your work.
Lower your inventory of time available for work, and then you can reveal and address the inefficiencies in your work habits. In the spirit of kaizen, commit to leaving the office 15 minutes earlier one day this week. Then make it two days next week, and three days the week after. (Applying 5S principles to the information you manage will help. Read about how to do it here.) Carve out time for the non-work activities that you regret missing. Schedule time with your family; go for a run; read a book. Fill your calendar with these important commitments, decrease your inventory of work time, and you'll find ways to become more efficient.
Not only will you expose the rocks, you just might enjoy the trip down the river.
Several blogs are discussing the article in Friday's Wall Street Journal on how basically the entire world, with the notable exception of the United States, is reducing corporate income tax rates.
Last week lawmakers approved an 8.9 percentage point reduction in the corporate income tax rate. Too bad the tax cutters are Germans, not Americans. At least 25 developed nations have adopted Reaganite corporate income tax rate cuts since 2001. The U.S. is conspicuously not one of them. All of which means that the U.S. now has the unflattering distinction of having the developed world's highest corporate tax rate of 39.3%.
Not to mention the vast majority of the developing eastern Europe and Asian economies.
What do politicians in these countries understand that the U.S. Congress doesn't? Perhaps they've read "International Competitiveness for Dummies." In each of the countries that have cut corporate tax rates this year, the motivation has been the same -- to boost the nation's attractiveness as a location for international investment.
Basically they know about the dynamics of the Laffer Curve. Lower corporate tax rates lead to more, not less, tax revenue from business. As a very partial excuse for the short-sighted lovers of taxation,
As tax rates go up, the incentive to find and exploit loopholes goes up. If the tax rate gets high enough, companies shift more operations overseas. And if they continue to go up, such as the current Senate thinking about raising taxes on foreign-source income, those companies then move their corporate headquarters abroad. Already the number of major corporations relocating overseas has reached record levels, and even Microsoft occasionally threatens to move a few miles north to Canada.
But the impact doesn't end with high tax rates creating lower tax revenue and driving companies offshore.
For all the talk of "tax equity," this is also a recipe for further inequality by driving more capital offshore. Research has shown that high corporate tax rates reduce the rate of increase in manufacturing wages. For that matter, most economists understand that corporations don't ultimately pay any taxes. They merely serve as a collection agent, passing along the cost of those taxes in some combination of lower returns for shareholders, higher prices for customers, or lower compensation for employees. In other words, America's high corporate tax rates are an indirect, but still damaging, tax on average American workers.
And guess what... there's also an almost identical Laffer Curve for individual taxes. The more the government taxes, the more income is shifted, moved, hidden, and sometimes just not realized. So as we're fighting to remain competitive through the implementation of lean manufacturing and other methods, tax policy is making some companies ask "why bother?" and simply move overseas. As the WSJ concludes,
One immediate policy remedy would be to cut the 35% U.S. federal corporate tax rate to the industrial nation average of 29%. That's probably too sensible for a Congress gripped by a desire to soak the rich and punish business, but a Democrat who picked up the idea could turn the tax tables on Republicans in 2008. Meantime, as the U.S. fails to act, the rest of the world is looking more attractive all the time.
And that's today's edition of fun with statistics!
Bottled water in America is generally less healthy than tap water, extraordinarily more expensive, and far more destructive to the environment. It's something I started blogging about years ago, and thanks to an an exceptional package of stories in Fast Company, I had a reminder to revisit the issue.
From my old post:
In case you don't know, bottled water is an incredible scam. I used to help out with running a water company when I was a kid, so I got a good background in the stringent set of requirements that utilities must meet when providing drinking water to a community. Generally, bottled water doesn't have to meet standards that are anywhere near as tightly regulated in regards to contaminants, filtering, or purity. Not to mention the fact that waterwhich stagnates in plastic containers on supermarket shelves frequently has a higher bacteria count than water from public utilities.
Meanwhile, the Fast Company article adds an incredible amount of new specifics, particularly about the explosive growth in sales of bottled water. As Charles Fishman says,
Bottled water is often simply an indulgence, and despite the stories we tell ourselves, it is not a benign indulgence. We're moving 1 billion bottles of water around a week in ships, trains, and trucks in the United States alone. That's a weekly convoy equivalent to 37,800 18-wheelers delivering water. (Water weighs 81/3 pounds a gallon. It's so heavy you can't fill an 18-wheeler with bottled water--you have to leave empty space.) Meanwhile, one out of six people in the world has no dependable, safe drinking water. The global economy has contrived to deny the most fundamental element of life to 1 billion people, while delivering to us an array of water "varieties" from around the globe, not one of which we actually need. That tension is only complicated by the fact that if we suddenly decided not to purchase the lake of Poland Spring water in Hollis, Maine, none of that water would find its way to people who really are thirsty.
It's worth reiterating that Aquafina and Dasani are just tap water. There's nothing wrong with that, since tap water is very good water -- it's just not worth paying 500 times as much for. I don't have any argument against the convenience factor, either, since it makes perfect sense to take water with you when you're on the go. You'll just get something that's got less bacteria and generally better quality if you fill your bottle from your tap. It's also worth checking out this story for the slideshows that are displayed alongside it; These usually just seem like blatant attempts for magazines to increase their page views online, but in this case they seem to have actually included original content and research.
Some of the other points made in the article:
I'd encourage everybody to take a look at the Fast Company article -- it makes it clear that the costs of bottled water, aside from its extraordinarily expensive price, are simply not worth it. And that's not even taking into account the fact that a lot of experts think the next resource that will spark a wide-scale international conflict isn't going to be oil, but fresh drinking water.
Thanks to Lisa for the article link and to Philippe for the photo.
I've followed the history of Bill Gates and his career and work since I was a kid. Though he's not nearly charismatic enough to inspire an army of fawning fanboys, the complexity and eccentricity of a lot of his choices makes his character endlessly fascinating to me. And of course, it is an extra bonus that most people confuse such an interest for uncritical adoration, which ain't the case.
I'm not a Bill Gates fanboy, I just think he's more ambitious and more likely to permanently change the world for the better than anybody else in the history of the technology industry.
Part of understanding why is having the proper perspective. I remember Microsoft's mission from when I was a young kid -- a computer on every desk and in every home. That mission, of course, had an implicit suffix of "...running Microsoft software". About 25 years into that mission, before Bill Gates had even turned fifty years old, Microsoft had achieved that goal. Think about that -- you set a goal as ambitious as you can imagine, and before your kids are even in high school, it's happened. What do you do when you've accomplished your biggest goal?
It's not a problem most of us ever have to deal with. Honestly, most of us that would even take the time to set such a goal would make it so big or so fuzzy it would be impossible to ever achieve. But by being just slightly specific, Microsoft under Bill Gates' direction achieved a seemingly-extraordinarily ambitious goal.
So, what next? You have to go for an even bigger goal. What's bigger than computers everywhere? How about curing malaria? And AIDS? That seems big enough. And the true innovation seems to be approaching those problems in an entrepreneurial way, with a big focus on accountability.
And after years of seeing his awkwardness in articulating the benefits of technology, it's startling to see just how good Gates is at telling this far more important story. You might have seen a link to Bill Gates' Harvard commencement address and probably thought "eh, I'll read it later". Go read it now: it's the kind of leadership and accountability that's been sorely missing from those in a position of power in the technology industry. Hell, it's the kind of message that's been curiously absent from the lips of nearly all of our leaders.
Just one highlight:
I remember going to Davos some years back and sitting on a global health panel that was discussing ways to save millions of lives. Millions! Think of the thrill of saving just one person's life - then multiply that by millions. ... Yet this was the most boring panel I've ever been on - ever. So boring even I couldn't bear it.
What made that experience especially striking was that I had just come from an event where we were introducing version 13 of some piece of software, and we had people jumping and shouting with excitement. I love getting people excited about software - but why can't we generate even more excitement for saving lives?
You can't get people excited unless you can help them see and feel the impact. And how you do that - is a complex question.
Still, I'm optimistic. Yes, inequity has been with us forever, but the new tools we have to cut through complexity have not been with us forever. They are new - they can help us make the most of our caring - and that's why the future can be different from the past.
The defining and ongoing innovations of this age - biotechnology, the computer, the Internet - give us a chance we've never had before to end extreme poverty and end death from preventable disease.
I'm sure those who make their decisions based on fashion and popularity contests won't want to give Gates the benefit of the doubt. But I'm okay with someone uncool doing the right thing on an unimaginably ambitious scale.
