Enterprise Rent-A-Car is one of the nation's top family-owned
businesses, a $12 billion behemoth that dominates its industry. But CEO
Andy Taylor feared it all could vanish in a puff of CO2. It was time to get greener. And quick.
Here's my story on Enterprises' newest initiative, which will attempt to make most of its car rentals carbon neutral.
In this story for women's magazine All You, I profile three women who work in homeland security.
The senior managers of Timbuk2, a San Francisco-based manufacturer of messenger bags, gathered on a gently sloping granite ledge at an altitude of 12,000 feet, overlooking the blue-gray shimmer of one of the dozen or so Ice Lakes, slopes of stubby pine trees, and beyond onto ragged peaks. It was the middle of June, but snow still mounded on the ground. A thunderstorm had just skirted the campsite and the wind screamed constantly, cold and fierce.
These four men and two women lead a growing company of 70 employees back at sea level, where they'd typically be worrying about things like financing, brand management, e-commerce, and retail sales. But for the past four days they'd been in the backcountry, and their concerns had been somewhat more basic: Would that small blister turn into a festering sore? Would those dark clouds bring rain? Does that bear paw print in the mud mean there's an actual bear nearby?
The group was halfway through a seven-day backpacking trip organized by the National Outdoor Leadership School, or NOLS. Accompanying them were two NOLS instructors and me; I'd tagged along to see what would happen. It had been nearly 100 hours since any of us had had a shower, or used a flushing toilet, cradled a cell phone to our ear, or run our fingers across a keyboard. As the sun started to set, the temperature, which had hit the high 80s when we'd set out from the town of Lander, Wyoming, just four days before, was hovering just above freezing.
To read the story, click here.
Here's a story that I wrote for Yoga Journal about green living and how it comports with yoga philosophy. Yoga Journal - Yoga Habitat - Get Your Green On.
Whenever anyone asks me who I write for, or what I write about, I usually draw a blank. I'm sure I write for someone, I'll say, as I stall for time. So, it was fascinating to watch these Elevator Speech guys --consultants who specialize in getting people past the tongue-tied confused jargon when confronted with the question "what do you do?" --in action down in Austin, Texas, a few months ago. Learn how one company distilled its essence into a pithy phrase, in this story which was written in the form of a screenplay.
My third article in the July issue is on one of my favorite subjects: creativity. Here, I look at how entrepreneurs can both run a company and take the time to have ideas. I've tackled this subject a few times before: I look at the science of brainstorming in The Perfect Brainstorm, and I look at the ins an outs of having an idea when you're an employee in this rather vintage piece, Hey, Great Idea! Now the Company Owns It.
For this story, I came across my lead example, KidRobot, at the Cooper Hewitt's Design Triennial, which presents the best of emerging ideas and experimental design from 2003-2006. The Cooper Hewitt is one of my favorite museums in the city, and I think it's a tragically overlooked source of inspiration for entrepreneurs, since the most successful designers are those that can make their ideas connect with their intended audience.
In a squat brown office park in
Fairfield, New Jersey—the headquarters of the Telebrands
empire—five men and one woman are gathered around a long conference
table, trying to figure out what’s wrong in your life.
This story looks at how one company, responsible for many of the short infomercials you see on TV, finds the products that it puts on the air.
Leadership and innovation are the glam aspects of entrepreneurship. But
the job description of many founders also includes a whole lot of
selling. Perpetual pitching is dandy for happy extroverts who
salivate at the scent of each new lead. Others, though, rate the
process somewhere between distasteful and ulcer inducing.
Private equity investors are making billions of dollars of investments in hundreds of deals each year. Names you know, such as the Four Seasons (NYSE:FS), Outback Steakhouse (NYSE:OSI), Hertz (NYSE:HTZ), Neiman Marcus, and Dunkin' Donuts, have recently closed major private equity deals, as have hundreds of smaller companies that don't grab the spotlight. It surely is an exciting--maybe even an exuberant--time to be an entrepreneur.
And that should make you sit back, take a deep breath, and raise at least one skeptical eyebrow. For while it seems that there could be no downside to this, the road to your private equity deal is not without perils.
Playing sports isn't just a game. For CEOs and CEOs-to-be, sports may be a more effective training ground
than any business school, according to both psychologists and
entrepreneur athletes themselves. (Click image at left to read.)
This month, Inc. selected 50 of the most intriguing "green" or eco-friendly privately own companies in the country. I quick-sketch profiled four of the so-selected, Clif Bar, Eden Foods, Stonyfield Farm, and Zoots.
These companies make an explicit appeal to green-minded consumers, and that's definitely a smart business strategy. After all, who doesn't like the feeling of doing good while they do what Americans do best, which is shop?
The proliferation of green marketing makes it easy to forget that shopping isn't quite the same thing as political activism. We won't be able to shop our way to a better environment, as Emily Figdor, clean air and energy advocate at USPIRG told me recently. While all of the “green living” eco-friendly steps that we take in our own lives are wonderful, they do little to solve the most pressing environmental problems, which, despite all appearances, really have very little to do with the type of light bulbs in your house, or even the kind of car you drive.
What will really keep the icecaps in their deep chill, if anything can, is broad-based, climate-protecting federal legislation that will limit industrial emissions. (Industrial emissions contribute far more to global warming than all of our individual actions or non-actions combined.) “I definitely understand and empathize with people’s desire to make an impact in their own lives, but it’s really important not to get lost in that,” says Figdor.
The simplest way to do that? Vote. And write to your elected officials, sign petitions, exercise your franchise, make some noise. Don't just look at the organic food in your cupboard and feel satisfied.
I understand this is a deeply unpopular and almost heretical sentiment in a can-do culture --to suggest that personal action isn't enough to solve a serious global problem, and furthermore to suggest that the choices we make in our personal lives matter a whole less than the actions we take in the ballot box. We have a deeply ingrained resistance to this fact, as NYU sociologist Micki McGee's points out in her fascinating book Self Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life. As she told me recently, “individual changes are lovely, but legislative and policy change is always more potent than anything an individual might do.”
The old phrase, "think globally, act locally", could probably stand some revision.
Here is the story of Curves, the 30-minute fitness franchise that has become part of the background almost every where you go in the United States. Gary Heavin, the CEO, plans to cure the nation's obesity epidemic...and here's an amazing statistic: For every two McDonald's in this country, there's now one Curves. This story took up much of my spring and early summer this year, and I'm pretty pleased with how it came out.
Saying sorry seems simple enough, but if you don't do it right, you'll do more harm than good. (Click image at left to read.) And, if you own a business, you could end up in legal hot water, as you'll find out in this sidebar that I wrote (although the site says it's by Inc. staff), The Sorry Laws.
I read this article about disappearing tattoo ink in the New Scientist, and it reminded me that I spent a lot of time a year or so being a little too interested in tattoos. I have no tattoos myself, and really have never wanted one --which on its own is enough to make me mildly curious about people who go for tattoos in a big way. My curiosity became acute after I wrote a story about a very interesting labor dispute that Costco had with a much-tattooed, much body-modified employee. The employee said that her bod mod-ing was in fact her religion..and the lawyers took it from there. (Here's a link to the story, you might have to register to read and if you're worried about leaving tracks for the NSA to follow, try BugMeNot.)
I still wonder whether disputes like the Costco conflagration are going to become more common as an increasing number of people have tattoos or other body modifications. I also wonder whether a tattoo that is a temporary is really a tattoo at all?
Here is the story on business valuation that I wrote for the current issue of Inc., in which I had two appraisers take a crack at three different companies. The idea was to see whether they'd come up with substantially the same numbers, and they didn't. I like the story because it shows how infinitely malleable numbers can be, how very subject to interpretation they are, how silly we are to depend on statistics alone without questioning the person that has gathered said statistics.
Behind the scenes, the making of this story was more like event planning than actual journalism. Or maybe more like casting a reality TV show. I wanted to pick appraisers that took different approaches to the craft of valuation (adding my own layer of interpretation and subjectivity to the story), and I wanted to pick companies that were doing substantially different things so it wouldn't be too boring. I think that I didn't quite succeed at this, because all of the companies were in the tech sector, but at least they were at different stages of development, which turned out to matter quite a bit.
The piece was something of a logistical headache. Two of the three companies that I approached originally to participate dropped out, one, because the process was too intrusive and onerous, the other because her company was about to merge with another, and it seemed the wrong time. (The second company was actually in New Orleans, pre-Katrina, so she probably would have dropped out anyway.) The story was originally supposed to run over the summer, so the changes obviously held things up a lot. The feeling of relief I had when the story shipped to the printer was profound. Only to be matched, I'm sure, by the feeling of relief I'll have when the next feature I'm working for for Inc., about executive coaching, is safely committed to the printer.
Not too long ago, I traveled down to Chattanooga to spend the day at a very unusual company: Habitat International. This is a manufacturing company, and most of its employees have either mental disabilities, physical disabilities, or both. At a time where the number of people with disabilities is on the rise, and employment for people with disabilities is on the decline, the fact that this company is almost alone in its hiring practices is both a shame and a waste. My story about the company is in Inc.'s October 2005 issue.
The few hours that I spent at the Habitat factory were fascinating for me. I am not often in the company of people with disabilities --not often around people with autism, schizophrenia, Down's Syndrome, for instance. I have to admit that I felt some trepidation before my visit --the thought of walking around a factory where schizophrenic people pilot fork-lifts gave me pause,and I worried that I would in some way give offense to the workers. My job, after all, is to stare and to ask impertinent questions.
My worries were unfounded. The factory was a bit overwhelming, because it is so different from every other workplace I've ever visited. The mood is in some ways lighter than you'd find in a typical office park-- the workers are obviously enjoying what they do, which is in itself remarkable. But there is also a feeling of additional tension that I couldn't completely put my finger on at the time. No doubt, part of this was the typical response to a journalist's presence --they weren't sure who I was, or what I thought of them, and how I'd portray them in print. But part of it, I think, is the feeling that anything could happen at any moment, a sense of unpredictability that the company operates under. After all, it's hard to know exactly how Habitat workers are going to respond to a new situation, or even to an old situation. The funny thing is, I think this is true in all companies --who the hell knows what's going to happen tomorrow. In most companies, the reassuring "normal" stamp on employees foreheads helps managers to think the chaos is kept at bay. At Habitat, they know that chaos can erupt, and they're prepared for it.
Is electronic communication hampering our ability to communicate face-to-face? That's the question I tackle in "Lost in Translation" , in the September 2005 issue of Inc.
The answer is a qualified yes. In this story, I make the point that in business, people are relying too heavily on email, sending text messages on sensitive matters that should really be handled face-to-face, or at least voice-to-voice. I've personally found that even people who are communication professionals--editors, writers --have a difficult time keeping control of their tone in email exchanges, especially when the subject is controversial. The more you cop out on having such conversations in person or over the phone, the rustier it seems you get at handling such interactions with aplomb. If you're prone to phone phobia, or confrontation anxiety, email and its ilk provide a neat way to never properly develop those skills.
This story could be read as a Luddite screed --down with email! --and I don't mean it that way at all. The issue here really isn't the medium, but the message: people who are lousy at communicating in person are probably not going to be any good at it electronically, and the chances of them getting better at it are small if they avoid real-time conversations. New technologies create new ways for people to communicate and build connections with each other, and that's truly exciting. But there's still the problem of the "wetware" --the person --whose fuzzy thinking, lack of diplomacy, and poor listening skills can still bring even the most sophisticated communication system to its knees.
When I interviewed Barry Wellman, director of NetLab at the University of Toronto for my story, he started his comments to me with this: "In the old days, which means seven years ago, we used to think that email and IM were very, very different than face-to-face communication, and that maybe they were even separate worlds. Now we know it's not true --they fit together in a seamless ecology." Yes. And the ecosystem can be healthy or unhealthy, depending on the skills of the people who inhabit it.
In my story, Wellman also says that "the face-to-face world and the bit-to-bit world can fit together." There's an interesting article, Social Machines, in the August 2005 MIT Technology Review that reviews the various ways this is happening. "We don't want to talk with computers, we want to talk through them," writes author Wade Rousch. He talks about a Boston start-up called Proxpro, "that's testing a cellphone-based service whereby a traveling businessperson can register a change in location with an SMS message; if a potential contact who matches the travelers pre-specified areas of interest (say Oracle databases) is nearby, both parties are notified, and they can use SMS to arrange a meeting."
Now that's pretty nifty. But, if one or both people who sign up for this service stink at face-to-face communication, won't the service be fairly useless? Or, put another way, if they're going to invest in such a service, shouldn't they also invest in upgrading their interpersonal communication skills? Bits and bytes can bring people together--but they can only take you just so far.
Here are some stories I've written on business over the years:
The Morality Play. Inc. February 2005. Values are in vogue these days, with so-called moral values credited by many pollsters as having played a key role in the reelection of President Bush. Of course, moral values didn't first appear on the scene on Election Day, nor are they just about politics. Consumers have long said that they buy products and services with values in mind -- whether those values are religious, spiritual, environmental, or political. [...] If you're in business and you've got morals, then it would seem there's been no better time to flaunt them. But you've got to wonder: In our current polarized times, is there a downside to all of this talk about morals and values, whatever they happen to be? Will playing the morality card drive your business? Or does it run the risk of driving it away? To read, click image at left.
Playing Well with Others. Inc. January 2005. It's tempting to dismiss cliquishness as a relic from high school, along with midterms, lockers, and prom dates. But the fact is, adult workers often behave much more like teenagers than they care to admit. Put people together in any group and it won't be long before they coalesce into subgroups. [...] That's not a problem if groups remain reasonably inclusive. But [...] a benign subgroup can rapidly become a malignant clique. And the issue is much larger than simply wanting your employees to be nice to one another. To read, click image at left.
Are You Paying Yourself Enough? Inc. Magazine, cover story, November 2004. Finally the time had come for Smart Furniture's lowest-paid employee to get a raise. Stephen A. Culp, 35, founder and CEO, had launched his Chattanooga-based modular furniture company in 2001, and for three years he had made sure that every one of his employees was paid well and on time. Everyone, that is, except for himself. For all his efforts to make his company a success, through the long days and nights, Culp had been working for slave wages, literally. Every month, for going on 36 months, he took home the princely salary of precisely nothing. To read, click image at left.
A Perfect Brainstorm Inc. October 2003. What cutting-edge science tells us about mastering the art of the brainstorm. Plus: Why do the best ideas always seem to happen in the shower? To read, click image at left.
Look Who's Watching Continental, April 2003 One sunny day late last summer, Tracey Lovejoy boarded a plane in Europe for an international flight, settled into her business class aisle seat, and immediately got down to work. She turned to the man sitting next to her. When he set up his laptop, she carefully watched to see exactly how he arrange it on the tray table. As he clicked through his email, she peered discreetly over his shoulder to see what was on the screen. When he rifled through papers, she followed his eye movements and noted his facial expressions. Appearances to the contrary, Lovejoy isn't the world's biggest busybody--at least when she's off the clock. As an anthropologist and an employee of Microsoft, Lovejoy is a highly trained professional observer of people --an ethnographer.Download ContEthnoFinal.pdf
The Health Care Crisis BusinessWeek. It was almost like reading her own obituary. One morning last October, as Rochelle Balch, owner of a computer programming company in Glendale, Ariz., perused the front page of her local newspaper, she was shocked to learn that her health insurer was going bankrupt. To read, click image at left.
The Latest Trend at the Mall. The Christian Science Monitor.
Armani. Versace. Coach. Louis Vuitton. Hermes. Some of the toniest retailers in the world peddle their wares at the largest mall in the Northeast, in suburban King of Prussia, Penn.Not exactly where you'd expect to find free educational opportunities for inner-city Philadelphia residents. Yet the King of Prussia Mall is home to the first mall-based Retail Skills Center, which over the last two years has trained and placed prospective employees at retail stores throughout the mall. To read, click image at left.
Your Space is the Place. Fast Company. How will geographic trends influence business growth and employee management? To read, click image at left.
