Health

Steve Case and “the second Internet revolution”

March 18, 2012

Interviewing Steve Case at VERGE DC

Steve Case is having a pretty good second act.

Case, as you surely remember, led America Online to glory and riches during the Internet boom. The first Internet firm to go public, AOL was the best performing stock of the 1990s, with a 11,616% (!!) return. That put the upstart in a position to acquire media giant Time Warner, in the largest merger in business history, and one of the most ill-fated.

Case, who is 53, is back, and he’s busy, as the chairman and CEO of Revolution, a company that “invests in people and ideas that can change the world;” as chairman of the Case Foundation, which is mostly run by his wife Jean; as chairman of the Startup America Partnership, a nonprofit that supports startups in a variety of ways, and as a member of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, which has him advocating bipartisan legislation to make financing for startups easier.

What ties all those interests together is Case’s belief that entrepreneurs are the “secret sauce” that keeps the American economy humming, he told me last week at VERGE DC, a conference organized by GreenBiz about the convergence of energy, information, buildings and transportation..

“I really do believe that entrepreneurs change the world,” he says. “They’re willing to take risks, start companies around new products, ideas or services and in many cases new industries emerge. That’s why we’re the leading economy in the world. It didn’t happen by accident. FORTUNE 500 companies don’t instantly vault into being FORTUNE 500 companies. Walmart started as one little store in Bentonville, Ark.”

“I saw it first-hand with America Online. We started in 1985. Three percent of people were online. They were online for an average of one hour per week. We said, someday this is going to be a ubiquitous medium that’s going to change the world, that everybody would be connected all the time, with multiple devices. It took a quarter century to get there, but now we’re there.”

“We’re now ushering the second Internet revolution,” he went on. “Now that everyone’s connected through multiple devices, connecting more habitually and more mobile-ly, you’re now able to have a transformative impact not just on media and communications and financial services, but on other core foundational industries in our country — energy being a key one, health care being a key one, education being a key one.”

“They actually have not changed that much,” he said. “But I have no doubt over the next 25 years those industries will be fundamentally reshaped, transformed, disrupted by this second Internet revolution, and that provides a real opportunity for entrepreneurs who are challenging the status quo, playing an attacker role.” [click to continue…]

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Is investing in poor women good business?

February 29, 2012

A health educator at her work station in Bangladesh

One lesson of the Apple in China scandal is that factory monitoring is a necessary but insufficient way to improve the lives of workers in poor countries. Apple inspected its suppliers’ factories, but conditions remain harsh. While strengthening inspections and sanctions, smart brands and retailers are finding ways to help workers in their supply chains gain more control over their work and lives.

A program run by BSR (Business for Social Responsibility) called the HERproject, which gives women working in export factories access to health information, is an example of what could–and should–be done. Teaching young women about health, including reproductive health and family planning, is, by itself, a good thing. It also delivers a not-so-subtle message to factory owners that it might be good for their business to take better care of workers, instead of exploiting them until they are used up.

Many factory owners “see their workers as cogs in a machine” and act accordingly, says Racheal Yeager, who leads the HERproject for BSR. “That’s why there are high rates of turnover and high rates of absenteeism.”

“What we’re trying to do is change the mindset of the factory management,” she says. [click to continue…]

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Elizabeth Grossman: Chronic polluters also put workers at risk

November 25, 2011

Elizabeth Grossman

Today’s guest post comes from Elizabeth Grossman, a gifted environmental journalist who is the author of Chasing Molecules: Poisonous Products, Human Health, and the Promise of Green Chemistry, High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health, and other books. Her work has appeared in Scientific American, YaleEnvironment360, The Washington Post, The Nation and Grist. I met Lizzie this past fall at the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) conference; she’s been writing about science and the environment for more than a decade.

She reported this story by taking EPA data uncovered by the Center for Public Integrity, and checking it against publicly-available information from OSHA. Her story got my attention because it suggests (based on admittedly limited evidence) that companies that are careless or irresponsible about air pollution also have workplace-safety issues. I wasn’t surprised to see BP among them–my FORTUNE colleagues David Whitford and Peter Elkind did a great job dissecting its culture in BP: “An Accident Waiting to Happen.’  Seeing DuPont on the list did surprise me, since the company is known for its safety culture. This story first appeared at The Pump Handle, a website about public health and the environment.

We have learned from Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) documents obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request and released by the Center for Public Integrity earlier this month that there are currently about 465 United States industrial facilities on what the EPA calls its “watch list.” The list is made up of businesses EPA considers chronic violators of the Clean Air Act – but against which the agency has taken no formal enforcement action. An examination of these same companies’ occupational health and safety records reveals them also to be chronic violators of Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) standards.

These “watch list” facilities are located all over the country, but many are clustered in historical manufacturing hubs in the Midwest, Southeast, and along the Gulf Coast. Nearly all can be described as heavy industry. They include petroleum refineries and facilities making chemicals, cement, paper, paint, pharmaceuticals, and metal products, along with waste treatment (landfills, recycling, and incinerators) facilities, meat processing plants, mines, pipelines, a shipyard, and automotive plants. OSHA typically inspects about one percent of the United States’ 8 to 9 million workplaces annually, but more than 70 percent of the “watch list” companies have received OSHA inspections over the past ten years. Those without inspection records included US military facilities and mines that OSHA is not authorized to inspect, as well as a number of public facilities and utilities: municipal landfills, water treatment plants, and generating stations.

Overall, the OSHA inspection reports for the EPA “watch list” companies reveal what for many of these companies appears to be a history of chronic OSHA violations. Some of these companies had dozens of violations over the past ten years; a few had more than 100. (To round out the picture of these companies’ operations, I included both the specific “watch list” facilities and the individual companies’ comparable operations in other locations.) Among the companies with the most recorded OSHA violations at their various facilities around the country was BP Products, with more than 400 at facilities nationwide – violations that included 314 in one inspection record following the 2005 explosion at BP’s Texas City refinery that killed 15 workers. (The Deepwater Horizon incident does not yet appear in BP’s OSHA inspection records.) International Paper was cited for more than 295 violations, while Republic Engineered Products (part of Republic Steel) had more than 170 violations, various divisions of DuPont nationwide received more than 130 citations for OSHA violations, and the Greif company, manufacturer of packaging materials, was cited for about 100 violations nationwide in the past decade. Wheeling Pittsburgh Steel exceeded 100 violations since 2001, and Weyerhaueser‘s various divisions around the country were cited for more than 300. [click to continue…]

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Unilever CEO: “Don’t stay on the sidelines”

November 22, 2011

As a global consumer products giant, with $44 billion euros [nearly $60 billion] in 2010 revenues, Unilever has a big impact on how and what people buy. Two billion consumers use a Unilever product on any given day. If you use Lipton Tea, eat Hellman’s mayonnaise or Ben & Jerry’s ice cream or use Dove or Lifebuoy soaps or  Suave hair products, you’re among them.

Paul Polman, Unilever’s CEO, embraces the idea that his company can make the world more just and sustainable. Unilever buys about 4-5% of the world’s palm oil, so it has promised to purchase all its palm oil from certified sustainable sources by 2015. It buys about 7% of the world’s tea, making it the world’s largest buyer, so Unilever aims to have all the tea in all Lipton tea bags sourced from Rainforest Alliance Certified™ estates by 2015, and 100% of its tea sustainably sourced by 2020.

“We have to take that responsibility,” Polman said today (Nov. 22) during a webcast called Sustainable Living: Mainstream or pipe dream?  The webcast, organized by the Guardian Sustainable Business, was held a year after Unilever released its sweeping Sustainable Living Plan, in which it promised to cut the environmental footprint of its products in half, help more than 1 billion people take action to improve their health and well-being, and source 100% of its agricultural raw materials sustainably. [See my 2010 blogpost, Unilever's big, broad, bold sustainability plan.]

But there are limits to what even a big company can do, so Unilever has begun thinking seriously about how to change consumer behavior around sustainability. Today, it released a new report called Inspiring Sustainable Living [available for download] which identifies five levers for change: Make it understood, make it easy, make it desirable, make it rewarding, make it a habit. [click to continue…]

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Two Degrees: The business of fighting hunger

September 18, 2011

Buy a nutrition bar.

Feed a starving child.

That’s the simple idea behind a startup company called Two Degrees. For every bar the company sells, Two Degrees will through its nonprofit partners give a nutrition pack to a hungry child in Africa or Haiti.

Fighting malnutrition is “why we started the company,” Lauren Walters, the CEO and  co-founder of Two Degrees, told me during a recent visit to Washington. Lauren, who is 60, is a former lawyer, U.S. Senate staff member, consultant and real estate developer. His co-founder Will Hauser, who is 25, is a Harvard grad who spent a year at Goldman Sachs before choosing to go into business for himself. They knew one another  because Will’s father is one of Lauren’s friends.

You can think of Two Degrees as inspired, in part, by TOM’s Shoes, Newman’s Own and Clif Bar. TOM’s is the company that gives away a pair of shoes for every pair it sells. Newman’s sales of salad dressings, popcorn and the like have generated $300 million for charities since 1982. And Clif, of course, made nutrition bars into popular (and guilt free, sort of) snacks. [click to continue…]

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Maria Rodale: Organic food is the answer

September 13, 2011

Maria Rodale

“If you do just one thing–make one conscious choice–that can change the world, go organic….No other single choice you can make to improve the health of your family and the planet will have greater positive repercussions for our future.”

That’s a bold statement. Is eating organic more important than avoiding meat, stopping coal plants, biking instead of driving or donating to worthy causes?

Yes, declares Maria Rodale, the CEO of the Rodale Inc. publishing empire (Mens Health, Prevention, Runners World) and author of the aptly-named Organic Manifesto: How Organic Food Can Heal Our Planet, Feed the World and Keep Us Safe (Rodale Books), from which the quote is drawn.

“There’s so many benefits that come from that one choice,” Maria explains. “You’ve removed a bejillion pounds of dangerous, synthetic, disease-causing environment-destroying chemicals from the soil, the water our bodies. We would all immediately be healthier. Our children would be healthier.”

Farmers and their families and farm workers would be better off, too, she goes on: “And our kids would be smarter. There are actually studies that show that a lot of these chemicals do reduce intelligence.”

I arranged a phone interview with Maria after meeting her last spring during Cooking for Solutions, a great conference and food fest on sustainable agriculture and fishing organized by the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I’d read her book and wanted to delve deeper into the issues surrounding organics. Tomorrow, I’ll offer a dissenting view from Steve Savage, an agricultural consultant who is dubious about many of Maria’s claims. [click to continue…]

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How you can help end malaria

September 7, 2011

I’m a lover of books and I’m guessing you are, too.

So you know that books can lead you to think differently about life, perhaps improve your life, maybe even change your life.

Today, I’m writing about a book that will quite literally save lives. Indeed, that’s why it was created.

The book is called End Malaria: Bold Innovation, Limitless Generosity, and the Opportunity to Save a Life. It’s the brainchild of a writer and editor named Michael Bungay Stanier, and you can buy it here. End Malaria is published by The Domino Project, a Seth Godin book publishing venture with which I am loosely affiliated.*

End Malaria  is a collection of 62 essays–some inspirational, others practical–from a wide range of business thinkers and doers. They include personal-finance guru Dave Ramsey, productivity guru David Allen, Premal Shah of Kiva [See my blogpost, Kiva: pushing the envelope on green),  wine guy and social-media maven Gary Vaynerchuk, Wired magazine founder and author Kevin Kelly, pursuer of excellence Tom Peters, and authors Patrick Lencioni, Dan Pink and Tony Schwartz. An impressive group, to be sure.

Like most compilations, this one is a mixed bag. There's a bit too much breahtless inspiration for me, but I'm someone for whom a little inspiration goes a long way. Dream big dreams! Pursue your passion! Believe in yourself! Speak out! Just do it! (Some of the contributors might want to think about switching to decaf.) Having said that, even as someone who's not a bigtime reader of self-help writing or business advice, I found lots to value here--ideas that were worth well more than the $20 price tag of the Kindle edition or $25 cost of the paperback.

A few of my favorite nuggets:

To tackle something most productively, you must begin in clear space. Physically, you need all your tools in order, plus an open table for spreading your raw elements and assembling structures. Psychically, you meed an empty head, clear of distractions and unfinished business, holding your attention hostage. - David Allen, The Strategic Value of Clear Space

Researchers have found a surprising link between daydreaming and creativity--people who daydream more are also better at generating new ideas. - Jonah Lehrer, Don't Pay Attention

There are countless hours scheduled for operations, sales, reporting, finance, efficiency gains and human resources--yet very few people actually schedule time to think, create and invent. -- Josh Linkner, What's Your Idea Schedule?

There's a major cultural shift happening. Because people are more connected than ever on the Web, we're going back in time and living under small-town rules....This is a monumental shift--we're now in a marketplace where every whisper about your business gets heard. - Gary Vaynerchuk, The Best Marketing Strategy Ever

These are just my own favorites; you'll discover others. The real genius of this book is the generosity behind it, and a business model that delivers the overwhelming majority of the revenues--that's revenues, not profits-- to charity.

Michael Bungay Stanier

Michael Bungay Stanier, the editor, says $20 from every sale will go to Malaria No More. ** That’s 100% of the Kindle price, and 80% of the print copy. (The remaining $5 covers production costs.) All the writers wrote for free, to their credit. The Domino Project isn’t taking any money from sales, either. Michael isn’t taking any money, and Amazon is a supporter, too, which is one reason why End Malaria is only available through Amazon.

“It’s an amazing business model,” Michael said, on a call yesterday, one that couldn’t have been arranged with a conventional publisher. He took on the job without pay, he explained, in order to live up to the message of his last book, which was called Do More Great Work.

Michael has also raised about $100,000 from corporate sponsors, including Ashley Sleep and HubSpot, all of which goes directly to Malaria No More. Media sponsors ranging from Huffington Post to The Onion have agreed to promote the book. So have the authors.

Very cool.

 

 

 

* I don’t get paid to be park of what The Domino Project calls its “street team.” The publisher sends me a free book, and when I am so inclined, as I was here, I help spread the word about the books.

** Another member of The Domino Project “street team” checked out Malaria No More on www.givewell.org, a website that assesses charities, and they are not rated. I emailed them and they told me that 84.7% of the money they raise actually goes to fighting malaria. That satisfies me.

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We need to fix the food system. But how?

July 24, 2011

“Today’s food system is unfair, ineffective and operates beyond ecological limits,” Mark Lee says, via email.

“Unfair in that some 925 million are malnourished…

“Ineffective in that there are enough calories out there to feed everyone, but we fail to do so (and if we fail to do so for 7 billion, how will we cope with 9-10 by mid-century?)…

“Beyond ecological limits in too many ways too count – freshwater use, soil degradation, climate impacts, you name it.”

Mark is not an environmental activist. He’s the executive director of SustainAbility, a think tank and strategy consultancy that has worked with such food industry clients as Chiquita, Coca-Cola Kellogg’s, Mars and McDonald’s, Nestle, Starbucks and Unilever. He approached me because Sustainability recently released a report called Appetite for Change, about the food industry and how to fix it.

I’ve been writing a lot about food lately because it interests me, because food and agriculture matter a great deal if you care about climate or global poverty or health, and because there’s so much debate about what the path forward should be. Organics? Farmers markets? Genetically engineered crops? Vegetarianism? Local? [click to continue…]

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Dengue fever: coming to a neighborhood near you?

June 9, 2011

Meet the Aedes aegypti mosquito.

Actually, you don’t want to meet this little lady, who bites for blood that she needs to mature her eggs.

The Aedes aegypti spreads dengue fever, which affects about 100 million people a year. Most are in tropical and subtropical regions–South and Central America, southeast Asia and Africa. Dengue fever is rare in the U.S. except along the border with Mexico.

That’s changing–in part because of climate change. [click to continue…]

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In Kenya, saving lives with carbon credits

May 5, 2011

Mikkel Vestgaard Frandsen

The Skype connection to Kenya crackles. Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen, the 38-year-old CEO of a Swiss company that bears his family name, tried to make himself heard. His excitement is palpable.

“Watching this unfold is crazy,” he tells me. “There are so many things we’re trying out here, things we’ve never done before, things that no one has ever done before.”

Vestargaard Frandsen is a Swiss for-profit company that’s in business to save lives in the global south. Its products include LifeStraw, a water filter and PermaNet, a long-lasting bednet to protect people from malaria.

Ordinarily, it sells these products to aid organizations and governments. Then they’re given to people in need. This time, Vestergaard is trying something different: It’s directly giving away about 1 million LifeStraws, at a cost of nearly $30 million, mobilizing thousands of local people to do so, tracking results carefully and expecting to be paid back in the form of carbon credits. Mikkel’s right–this has never been done before.

How this came to pass is interesting. Founded in 1957, family-owned Vestergaard Frandsen originally produced material for work clothes. About 20 years ago, it started a line of relief products like blankets and tents. By 1997, when Mikkel became CEO, the company had phased out conventional textiles to concentrate on relief aid products.
[click to continue…]

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