Happy New Year 2014

I know that it's only a day. A day like all others. This year, it's a Wednesday -- that ignominious middle of the week, no-mans-land hump day -- to start the year. Why does New Years Day hold us collectively in such thrall? It's not as if each year we celebrate a sort of Jubilee where all debts are forgiven and we are released from contractual obligations. No, January 1st will find us just as indentured and indebted as today. Strangers will stay strangers, family will be family and friends will remain friends (assuming a modicum of restraint tonight). But somehow we collectively breath a sigh of relief that the past 365 are behind us and then joyfully look forward to the possibilities of another year. We dress up, drink up and take up the challenges that lie ahead with optimism and good cheer. Tarnish behind, luster ahead. Tonight at midnight the world will take a collective cleansing breath and turn its back on the frustrations, failures and foibles of 2013. We will look ahead with glee to the promise of a better 2014. And that is what makes this day special. It is the one day of the year that we give ourselves full permission to forgive the past and anticipate the future (perhaps we would each be better off if we practiced this pseudo-amnesia more often). We are eager and able, energized and optimistic; ready to make the world - our own worlds at least - a better place. So lift your glasses, watch the ball drop (or potato, tangerine, sardine, peach, watermelon or whatever) and Happy New Year! May your days ahead be filled with all the blessings of Health, Peace, Love and Family.

There ought to be a law.......

If you've spent any time in a public space - airport, ballpark, subway station or Starbucks, to name a few - you've heard someone bloviating in an inappropriately loud voice: "There ought to be a law.........." followed by a description of a behavior they find personally offensive that should be regulated or legislated out of existence.

"There should be a law against bi-lingual education in public schools"

"There should be a law against selling guns in America."

"There should be a law that forces US Corporations to hire Americans."

The corollaries of course are:

"I have right to ......"

"There should be a tax on ....."

"They shouldn't let........"

The fact that our children are being (and have long been) subject to this blather-as-pedagogy in our public and now private school systems is likely the cause for the low quality of public discourse in the Republic today.

We should teach our children to be suspicious of anyone who wants to force us to act for our own good.

They should know that liberty and legislation are a zero-sum game. One cannot be increased without the exact and equal decline of the other.

They should know that compulsion is the root of all law and that while some level of freedom is always sacrificed to the commonweal, despotism lurks in the shadows of every pillar of a well-ordered society.

If only there were a national organization that would represent this point of view.

I would send them money so that they could hire lobbyists to go plead my case on Capitol Hill.

I miss you Dad

Ten years ago today, my father passed from this world into the next.

With him went the last vestige of my childhood.

Until that day there was always someone who could call me their child. Someone who I could rely on for parental advice.

If not a GPS, then my father was at least a map that I could consult with for guidance regarding the pitfalls facing me on the road ahead.

As many sons do, I was too stubborn and close-minded to learn by listening to my father's advice. I insisted on making my own mistakes; only later acknowledging that I should have heeded his good word.

Growing up, I was never without a question, and my father, was never without an answer.

Some times, he would answer: "look it up in the dictionary, encyclopedia or text book." Other times he would answer: "what do you think the answer is?" or "how do you think you could figure that out?"

But most of the time, he answered: "how would you find out the answer if I wasn't here?"

I know now he was trying to prepare me to be an adult and stand on my own and be ready for the day when he literally wouldn't be there any more.

After ten years, I'm as ready as I'll ever be to live without him - which is to say still not ready at all.

If you want a friend in Washington........

If you're a chef, the saying is "if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen." The political equivalent of that maxim is "in Washington, if you want a friend, get a dog."

In Washington, I was one of the fortunate few. I had a couple of true friends AND I had a dog. Mollie was her name and she was a beautiful Golden Retriever.

On a crisp cool Shenandoah day we visited the breeder to choose a dog to bring home as a holiday surprise. Mollie was romping around the pen with her her fur-ball siblings under her mother's watchful eye.

Mollie broke off abruptly from the others the second I leaned over the rail. In an instant she turned her not inconsiderable charm on me and lobbied for the job of house puppy. I was immediately smitten and although she was putatively a gift for our four children, she and I bonded immediately.

Mollie was not a good puppy. She ate my wife's nylons and my daughter's hair scrunchies. She chewed a hole in our carpet and ripped the back off of our brand new couch. She loved paper of all color and textures - toilet paper if it was all that was available, but preferably something with ink on it - like my expense reports and receipts.

Through this period and afterward as she grew into a more well-behaved pet, her affection and devotion to our family grew stronger each day.

Mollie took our four children on long walks through the woods and streams near our house and would swim in the lake with them at their grandparent's house. True to her retriever lineage, she would play fetch until your arm hurt and was the only dog I ever saw put her face fully under water to retrieve rocks from the bottom of a pond.

When I walked in the front door, she never missed an opportunity to bound up the hallway with an enthusiastic greeting - regardless of whether I was returning from a two-week excursion overseas or a 15 minute errand to the grocery store. Once she had established that I was properly welcomed, she proceeded to follow me around the house. When I sat down, she sat down; when I went to the kitchen to eat, she followed. If I was outside she sat sentry at the door. Since she was not allowed upstairs in our house, she slept at the foot of the stairs and waited for one of us to wake.

After 11 years as the guardian of my family's happiness, Mollie died this week of a ruptured tumor on her spleen.

I write this at my desk - alone for the first time in over a decade. Under my desk, at the spot where my friend would lie quietly at my feet while I worked, the carpet is still depressed.

So am I.

The Power of Value

Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema's excellent book "The Discipline of Market Leaders" argues that businesses must focus on one of the following areas to be successful: operational excellence, product leadership or customer service excellence. They used as an example of each Wal-Mart, Intel and Nordstrom's respectively. The authors' thesis is that a company must choose one of these three foci to the virtual exclusion of the others in order to be effective and make an impact in their market.

In presenting various different products to customers over the years and having been a discerning customer myself, I've traditionally used criteria that somewhat resemble the above. Instead of operational excellence, product leadership and customer service, I've used cheaper, faster, better. (by cheaper I mean less expensive, not lower quality).

We often are presented with a product that is cheaper, but not faster or better. Oft times, this is acceptable. How many times have you been out of town and forgotten an essential toiletry item or a belt or a tie? Or when you're throwing a birthday party for toddlers. Cheap will trump performance or quality manufacture.

Conversely we will at times throw care to the wind and pay a premium for a name product that is not the performance leader in its category. For years, Cadillac's name outshone the product. It is arguable whether the food at the Russian Tea Room in Central Park is worth the tariff; but saying you dine there regularly is, as the Visa commercial so aptly puts it, "priceless."

Finally, those at the bleeding edge of technology - the "early adopters" - are renowned for paying the moon and sacrificing reliability to get faster and faster devices.

What a find, then, when we can find a new product that gives us improvement in not one but two of these areas and we only have to sacrifice in one!

Cheaper and faster; or faster and better; or cheaper and better!

In today's economy, customers - in both the consumer and b2b market - are as stingy as ever. Each dollar spent is generally the result of some long and hard consideration. This habit, once inculcated in the generation raised on easy money will be a long time in leaving.

The winner in the long run will be the company or product that can deliver consistently on the promise of cheaper, faster AND better.

How then does one resist the death spiral of discounting and selling only on price? The answer is to be found in the concept of value.

Ben Graham taught in the '20s that not all cheap stocks were cheap and not all expensive stocks were expensive. The trick, he said, was to find stocks that were priced well relative to their underlying value.

This concept understood from the product side is that even though your product may have a higher price tag, it can still be "cheaper" if the value it presents to the customer's enterprise is high relative to the value of a competing product with a lower price tag. Operating costs, labor inputs, repair and replacement costs are all variables to be considered when one makes the value argument.

Of late, I have changed my tune from price to value -- not searching for products that are only cheaper, faster and better, but rather products that are faster and better and as a result -- cheaper.

This is the power of vaule.

My Uncle's Gambling Addiction

I got a notice from my bank the other day.

It seems that my uncle (who has always had trouble living within his means) is in financial trouble again.

What with the economy being tough and businesses suffering, he decided he could help us out by taking $12,000 of money out of our account (without asking, of course), visiting the roulette table and betting it all on one spin of the wheel.

He bet on red and the ball fell on black.

He's a resilient sort, so he was able to shake it off and is back again asking for more money. This time, he says, he's sure his bet is right. If I fork over another $20,000, he'll get me my original money back.

The problem is, I don't think Uncle Sam needs more of my money, I think he needs to go to Gambler's Anonymous.

Understanding Our Government

" The Professor brightened up again. 'The Emperor started the thing,' he said. 'He wanted to make everybody in Outland twice as rich as he was before — just to make the new Government popular. Only there wasn't nearly enough money in the Treasury to do it. So I suggested that he might do it by doubling the value of every coin and bank-note in Outland. It's the simplest thing possible. I wonder nobody ever thought of it before! And you never saw such universal joy. The shops are full from morning to night. Everybody's buying everything!"

– Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno

Posted in Science & Math, Society by Greg Ross on December 28th, 2008

The "C" Word

When I was growing up, if someone had to pass the bad news that a friend or relative had cancer, they would lower their voice to a whisper and draw the word out when saying cancer.

Saying "cancer" meant "he's going to die" since nobody lived very long once they were diagnosed with the disease. Heart attacks and strokes were deadly too, but cancer held a special place in most people's closet of fears.

The medical and pharmaceutical communities have, however, over the last 50 years have redefined the yardstick by which we measure survival rates. Where weeks and months were the norm in the 50's and 60's, we now measure survival rates in the percentage of survivors after 5 or 10 years.

Still, over 500,000 will die this year from cancer in the United States.

In the face of tens of billions of dollars spent each year in the public and private sectors, 1,500 people will die every day of some form of cancer.

Last week, in the aftermath of the announcement that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader-Ginsburg had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, Hollywood actor Patrick Swayze wrote an open letter to Congress urging action on $10 billion of cancer research funding.

Having survived thyroid cancer myself and after losing my father (lung), an uncle and my best friend (pancreatic) in succession, I am sympathetic to the desire by survivors and their families for a cure. In these days of increased reliance on government it is also natural to believe that increased research funding by Congress will bring these cures to us more quickly.

Unfortunately, because the government and pharmaceutical research communities have stubbornly clung to the goal of treating and curing late-stage cancer victims, the $10 billion Swayze asks Congress to dedicate will be money Quixotically wasted on a recalcitrant disease that has defied virtually every attempt at late-stage cures. Cure rates for late stage breast, pancreatic and ovarian cancer have barely budged in the last 30 years while cure rates for early stage victims of the same disease have increased substantially.

This is why, in addition to lobbying Congress to set aside funds for cancer research, it is critical that this money be earmarked for programs designed to catch cancer in its earliest stages. Patients diagnosed with Stage I or II ovarian cancer have a 10-year survival rate approaching 90%. That rate drops below 10% for cancer patients diagnosed in the later stages. Pancreatic Cancer - the type afflicting Justice Ginsburg - is highly deadly because only 3% of cases are detected in the early stages where survival rates are high. Justice Ginsburg's pancreatic cancer was detected incidentally during a recall appointment for her colon cancer.

Most Americans do not have the quality of health care afforded Supreme Court Justices or movie stars and as a result do not get scanned for cancer until they are symptomatic. In most cases - this is too late.

Cancer treatments is less expensive and highly effective in the early stages - dramatically more expensive and less effective in the lates stages. Deaths from breast cancer and ovarian cancer have dropped precipitously as the mammogram and pap smear have become a routine part of the American standard of health care. Deaths form lung and pancreatic cancer would experience a similar decline if Congress would redirect the billions of dollars currently being thrown into late-stage cancer cures towards a national effort to support early detection of all types of cancer.

Money could and should be spent on programs that lower the cost of cancer screening. Early detection can increase the quality of life for those stricken with these deadly diseases and ultimately lower the cost of American health care. The National Institutes of Health estimates that 140 million Americans will be diagnosed with some form of cancer during their lifetime.

At a time when every dollar of government spending is precious, let us ensure that whatever money Congress spends is spent effectively -- focused on catching those cancers at the earliest possible moment so that doctors can have the best possible chance to treat the cancer successfully and save lives.