I don't normally read the Supply Chain Management Review. But after hearing about Walmart's policies towards the environment I needed to know more about what they have actually done. Here is the article I found that outlines their approach to greening their business The Greening of Wal-Mart's Supply Chain. What is amazing is that a company as influential would be so comitted to environmental stewardship to take the steps normally used to increase profits to increase accomplishment of goals like Walmart's "To be supplied 100 percent by renewable energy; to create zero waste; and to sell products that sustain our resources and the environment." With their approach they can drive 60,000 suppliers behavior by setting requirements on how the suppliers operate in order to be able to sell through the Wal-Mart retail distribution channel. So this is what is so amazing and unexpected to me.

Corporations have been portrayed correctly as inhuman and often acted inhuman in content like the movie "The Corporation" establishing that corporations were created as entities that may employ people and have many of the rights and responsibilities but aren't people. So they have done things that a human wouldn't actually do like ignore human rights issues (think pre-unions), pollute the environment to their own advantage, place unreasonable expectations on suppliers to push for price, force customers into modes where they had no choice of supplier (monopolies), push countries/regimes towards military actions for their own profits (debeers diamonds), exploit third world populations for labor, treat livestock/lab animals in a cruel way (factory farming), etc.

From the imdb site on The Corporation:

"Since the late 18th century American legal decision that the business corporation organizational model is legally a person, it has become a dominant economic, political and social force around the globe. This film takes an in-depth psychological examination of the organization model through various case studies. What the study illustrates is that in the its behaviour, this type of "person" typically acts like a dangerously destructive psychopath without conscience. Furthermore, we see the profound threat this psychopath has for our world and our future, but also how the people with courage, intelligence and determination can do to stop it." Written by Kenneth Chisholm (kchishol@rogers.com)

They needed to do these things to compete and in the Darwinian sense of evolution of corporations if they were non-competitive they wouldn't exist and persist. But unlike evolution of humans going back some 100 million years - corporations have only existed for a few hundred years.

The corporation is evolving. The environment around them is radically different than it was even 15 years ago. Customers always wanted scale to reduce the costs of their goods but they also wanted "Good" practices to be behind them. The big dinosaur of the Wal-Mart's of the world can't hide from the millions of potential critics in the world waiting to expose a flaw in their social ethics. They need to create web sites like Wal-Mart facts to educate themselves and critics about their business ethics. So in order to maintain competitive they need to lead their own organization ahead of the critics. In Wal-Mart's case they partnered with NGOs, big environmentalist organizations, and consulting teams knowledgable about how to do transformation to move in 2 years from being perceived as the big monster destroying American small town jobs into the most powerful instrument on the planet driving change.

The big cool enlighening part of the Wal-Mart effort and what fascinates me is that when Wal-Mart looked at their entire impact as a retailer the tentacles reached farthest and widest when they considered their impact through their influence on the suppliers. So Supply Chain Management designed for changing how you purchase stuff cheaper and reduce inventory, one of the key drivers of Wal-Mart's and many other companies' success, has had an unexpected impact - the supply chain can be managed to achieve ANY objective set by a consumer of the supply chain. So a retailer with pressure from customers to be environmentally responsible can drive back that requirement backwards and it can cascade down to the lowest levels of suppliers of raw materials over the course of each link.

So while the corporation is a legal entity that may not be human it is fully responsible to the demands and needs of humans that ultimately consume it's output. After all corporations must produce some product or service of value to a human sooner or later in order to get that money that the economy operates on. So the new co-evolution of the corporation and the human is leading towards sustainability, the "symbiotic" relationship necessary for the corporation to survive under the scrutiny of us highly judgemental and humans.

Even Deloitte is in the game. They wrote a white paper called Creating the Wholly Sustainable Enterprise. In it they wrote some broad reaching requirements for transformation:

"In evaluating a company’s evolution to WSE status, there are some organizational constructs that may limit or
reduce the effectiveness of an enterprise-wide sustainability strategy.

• ‘Green’ Is Not A Corporate Function: Companies that limit sustainability efforts on to a specific department or
function (e.g. EH&S) may fail to advance in the journey towards overall sustainability. Ownership of
sustainability by a single function suggests that responsibility resides with a specific, limited number of
individuals rather than responsibility residing with everyone as an inherent element of the overall culture.

• ‘Green’ Is Not An Executive Position: Companies are experimenting with a ‘Chief Sustainability Officer’ and
other such titles, perhaps a positive step but insufficient on its own to drive consistent value. While executive
ownership and accountability for ‘green’ is an essential element of an overall approach, it is not, in itself,
sufficient to drive the enterprise-wide activities required to succeed.

• ‘Green’ Is Not a Fad: Like business trends of recent decades, sustainability as ‘the next big thing’ may be
advancing as a means to driving competitive advantage. Yet ‘greening the company’ is more than a fad. Many
business improvement methods of recent years—MRP, reengineering, lean manufacturing, Six Sigma, and
others—can be considered specific application of sustainability principles applied to business activity. It would
be appropriate to begin to think of sustainability as an organizing principle within which business improvement
methods are developed, applied, and evolved. And over time it is reasonable to presume that the next waves of
business improvement frameworks will be based at least in part on principles of value-driven sustainability.

• ‘Green’ Is Not a Cost of Doing Business: Thinking about sustainability in this manner establishes a culture of
sustainability as an ‘add-on’ or incremental cost. Rather than being an integral part of every process,
sustainability is evaluated after ‘core’ decisions are made. This can be illustrated by describing the difference
between a traditional design project followed by a ‘value engineering’ phase, vs a design project initiated as a
A Practical Guide to Driving Shareholder Value Through Enterprise Sustainability 6
‘green’ project where sustainable materials, systems, etc. are a core part of the initial specification and
conceptual design amongst key participants in the design process.

• ‘Green’ Is Not a Political Statement: The history of conflict between ‘environment’ and ‘big business,’ combined
with the natural politicization of the issues creates a substantial amount of ‘baggage’ to the company
undertaking a broad Sustainable Enterprise effort. The successful organization will undertake this
transformation based on the principles of improving shareholder value and company performance, and the
environmental and social benefits will be positive, concurrent consequence."

The fun part of all of this is going to be watching the corporations scramble over the next 5 years to digest the shock of the wave of sustainability. I think we have the following to thank for it: Internet transparency, Supply Chain Management, Improved Movie/education distribution, Global communication networks, Real problems/risks to our planet, and most of all -- millions of people consuming beyond price to drive suppliers for something better. The impact of all of this leads me to believe that the structure can reduce the same drivers for war as we are finding for the environment so that we can conquer the problems raised in the worry around the military-industrial complex in each country hoping to participate in a global economy. Imagine if Wal-Mart, McDonalds decided to stop/prevent wars rather than drive sustainability? Wasn't Michael Moore complaining that Wal-Mart sells bullets and guns? So much seems possible.

So I am filled with something rare about the environment, human rights, animal rights and wars - HOPE!

Posted by Dan Housman at 05:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Today I went back to Brookline briefly. I was looking in the mailbox for a check. Afterwards I finally cancelled my BSC membership. Yesterday I cancelled the Verizon service. So other than forwarding the mail to Newton things are all getting wrapped-up in Brookline. Whenever I wrap something up I get the feeling of a new start which might have contributed to my stopping into TJ Max to purchase a new button-up shirt. It also could have been that I didn't want to deal with the parking people at the BSC Allston club. The experience of cancelling at BSC and their whole business model has left a bad impression on me about them. They seem to be the kind of business that works hard to acquire a new customer and then not only doesn't care about the customer's experience but actively works to prevent the customer from leaving to the detriment of the overall customer experience. When you try to cancel you can't do so online, you can't do it on the phone, and you can't do it via the mail unless it is through certified mail. Upon receipt of the cancellation it is considered cancelled 30 days later. This means that you can use their gym for the next 30 days but it is also another revenue cycle for them to charge despite an attempt to cancel before another billing cycle occurs. If a customer happens to be "in a contract" then they claim that you can't cancel at all without filling to the end of the contract. While I somewhat understand their point on the contract situation since they offer preferential pricing for longer time commitments than month to month BUT it isn't like they are giving me a big piece of hardware like a phone or DSL router that they need to sell off. The most similar thing is that they need to pay off the commissioned sales rep who pushes the high cost memberships.

All of this lead me to believe that they have determined that once someone cancels their membership they are never coming back. This is a self fulfilling prophecy on their part since my reaction to the hard-line you can't leave policy and the difficult scenario of my not using a service for 4 months at all that costs over $50 per month makes me not interested in recommending that anyone join or ever joining again.

This is in contrast to NetFlix which I cancelled a few years ago because the movies weren't coming fast enough. They rescued their relationship at first by offering a plan that was more attractive to me as I was cancelling. The new plan had fewer movies for a smaller price. I liked it for a while then cancelled anyways because the local video store allowed me to rent 3 movies at any given time and I could just grab them off the shelf. But now that I moved I don't have that same opportunity with a local video store. Instead I looked at Netflix and Blockbuster and found that Netflix had added a good video download service and had a reference from my parents that their delivery is now much faster. Blockbuster will have a video download service through an acquisition and offers in store exchanges which are nice but the downloads aren't a real offer now so I just signed-up with Netflix figuring that if the movies take too long in the mail that I could watch stuff through some crazy computer-tv hook-up. So I signed-up for Netflix this week and I already have three movies and tested the online downloads with my new super fast FIOS Internet connection. So they never permanently lost me as a customer. I can't say the same is true of the BSC folks. I eagerly await the better managed business model for a gym/fitness club to eat their lunch (probably salad).

Now my main issue is NESN. I don't mind that NESN owns the rights to broadcast the games but it is silly that I can't watch NESN broadcast games on my computer no matter what I might want to do. I don't want to buy a cable package so that I can watch the Red Sox lose to the Yankees in New York (well I'm cynical after the last two games) but in general I should be able to buy the game online somehow. MLB.com would let me do so IF I lived in Texas. But I live in Boston, which is why I am a RED SOX FAN.... so I am urging the folks at NESN to think about their business model and come-up with a way to service the younger generation, the folks who hate cable and love the Internet, to capture a younger audience in Boston and make some money off of serving them. I don't mind paying for baseball. I just don't want to pay for other crap that I don't want along with it and the folks at NESN's marketing department are free to quote me on it.

So I've closed the books on a long chapter in Brookline without a lot of tearful emotions despite feeling like I am losing city life but am giddy with the new start in Newton and doing things like watering the lawn.

Posted by Dan Housman at 03:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I had the opportunity to see a presentation from Design That Matters on Tuesday morning and what they are doing is very inspiring. They are having a benefit dinner listed on their web site that might interest people.

The group has taken a new approach to working with problems in developing countries where issues that may be solved here are still lagging and the impact would surprise people. Their solution is to work as a non-profit to design solutions to these problems in the form of new products that understand and address the complex issues and reality of the environment/local ecosystem themselves.

For example, in some countries 4 of 5 adults can't read. So Design That Matters team analyzed the problem in villages and with governments learning that classrooms only work at night since people have to work to support themselves. But classrooms don't have an easy way to share information. I would just get a digital projector and a laptop but that's an expensive solution readily available in my world. In those countries what turned out to be more helpful is a low cost and low power portable projector and microfilm with lots of content on it.

The presentation focused on a design challenge of infant mortality and I got an education on the need for incubators for low birth weight babies to regulate temperature and oxygen. Stevie Wonder, among many people, is blind because when he was an infant his incubator delivered too much oxygen. The modern $20,000 incubator that you see in a neo-natal intensive care unit (sounds very expensive) isn't what's out there in the world. There are hand me down incubators and make shift solutions like blankets and oxygen tubes feeding into plastic boxes put over the infant's head. The result is that within about 2 million infant deaths per year, 1 million would be preventable with a proper incubator. So they have been working to design a solution that deals with all of the environmental issues like the fact that nobody can repair an incubator in a remote village other than the car mechanic, moving the incubator from the delivery room to the ICU on stairs and across unpaved surfaces since there aren't nice elevators, etc.

It was a pleasure to learn about the organization and if someone has some interest and skills (like mechanical engineering) or a fund looking to be green they might be a useful source. I have noticed and I feel like I suddenly awoke in a new world in the past month the sudden GREEN revolution reaching the business world. Folks who were in the Internet boom and bust that I know are starting to build companies that are focused on environmental sustainability. I can't get into everyone's details but one example is Terry Swack who is doing green design and a green marketplace with her start-up Clean Culture, Business Objects put a big green page for using BI to reduce global warming Insight, folks have created One Percent For the Planet that directs corporate funds to environmental non-profits, NYU had a conference on the social entrepreneurship pipeline Dave Berry is creating green fuel from bacteria, and another contact of mine is in stealth mode doing an environmental sustainability project.

I'm not sure what is driving this shift of business to look at green issues but my hope is that it is the consumer. The big black box that is where we get our stuff from is getting more transparent because information flies fast and far quickly with internet publishing, social networks, email, ratings systems, and blogs. The planet is at risk and getting back in control of the black box is important for business in order to satisfy consumer demands from it and to sustain itself. I loved the quote on the One Percent site

"There is no business to be done on a dead planet"
- David Brower
Environmental Visionary
1912-2000

Posted by Dan Housman at 02:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We moved into our new house in Newton on Saturday. It was one of the hotter days of the summer but luckily we hired movers to handle the heavy lifting and had the air conditioning working in the nick of time on Friday to keep things a little cool at the destination house. The movers were drenched in sweat to the point where they changed t-shirts between the loading of the truck and when they arrived to unload. My parents and Nancy came by to lend a hand and were instrumental in the unloading of the kitchen contents. Sarah’s parents took Madeline and the cats from Friday night until Saturday afternoon that also was a big help to allow us to focus on moving rather than herding the family about the house.

We seem to have unpacked about half of our boxes and I haven’t found much in the other half of the boxes that I actually need so those items remain in their boxes. Most things that I own don’t need to see the light of day more than once every three years. Those things probably should be tossed. It’s that fear of loss that keeps them around allowing them to survive moving. Many items didn’t make the cut including socks that I have deemed to be un-wearable and clothing that bothers me when I wear it like a pair of comfortable but odd looking green corduroy pants.

I have discovered some of my new responsibilities in the house. Today while taking Madeline out to play on the swing set I noticed that we now have a yard that is in disrepair. It is littered with sticks that fell from trees, leaves that are getting a head start on fall, shrubs that were starving for water, and a lot of long yellow grass. The neighbor’s yard across the way is a verdant paradise that they were watering as I looked at my lawn so I grabbed the hose and started spraying things that looked like they were dying or dead.

The house also comes with a new concept for me. We now have specialized rooms for different functions. While before we had a living/dining/tv room, a bedroom/office, and a child/play room these functions are now distributed throughout the house. Our large 42” television is now in the basement out of sight and for now out of mind since it has been separated from it’s couch set so there is nowhere to sit and watch it even if I had set-up the wires. The living room is just a pair of couches but there isn’t a stereo or radio in it because that is in the basement with the TV. The dining room is a welcome change. It allows the kitchen to stay a food preparation area and gives us a real place to sit with the table extended and eat. We even have an empty room for the expected new baby planned for arrival in January.

The office was set-up through a half day’s toil by the Verizon FiOS installation guy and it now is a very nice set-up with the fastest net connection I have ever had at home. I tested using NetFlix download service on my laptop through the wireless and it was amply fast to take advantage of my ridiculously large laptop screen. Furthermore while I type in the office I don’t need to worry about the keystrokes pounding out noise that would keep Sarah up all night. Unfortunately we are still stuck with out of date computers like the Windows 2000 box currently running this machine that won’t show movies because it is incompatible and the old media box I created in 2003 has a hard drive that is whining out of control if I plug it in. That drive happens to contain the full set of all of my photos for the past few years so everything needs to get migrated to some new PC set-up.

Posted by Dan Housman at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It was bothering me today that I can go to the supermarket and put money into the changestar machine and it will credit me with 85% of the change that I dump into it for use in buying my groceries. BUT if I want to deposit change into my local Bank of America bank account I need to roll the change into these stupid change rolls. Why doesn't retail banking in ATM machines or within banks have a section where you dump your change into a container to deposit it. If banks want lifetime customers maybe they should start with folks like Madeline at age four or so. If I had a bank I'd put a change depositor machine into the mix and make a big deal of it in my advertisements to show that we care and we innovate.

Posted by Dan Housman at 03:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Since I was inspired by Dr. Berry to tackle a complex problem I was losing sleep last night about the question of obesity. In recent years Americans have been getting progressively fatter. This is nicely illustrated in the following map. The resulting complications of obesity are higher likelihood of diabetes, hypertension, coronary artery disease, and ultimately chronic heart failure – the big chronic diseases that people should be afraid of. The government pays for care of a lot of the obese with chronic conditions through Medicare and Medicaid so it strikes me that getting obesity under control in America would be a very good and strategic thing. Here are some thoughts on potential solutions that I could come-up with.

1. Exercise is not in the current American way of life, especially for men with slight to major obesity. These people aren’t really marketed exercise as either an activity or a product. Gyms currently target healthy fit people who want to improve performance or go the extra 10% because those people seem to be the folks who will sign-up for long-term gym memberships and keep paying for them over time. For the fatter people they need to show-up at the gym once in a blue moon and then are self-conscious and decide not to risk more embarrassment in sweat suits. The only marketing I can see really targeting obese men is Subway and that’s for eating sandwiches not exercise BUT was very successful. I am also thinking along the lines of the Netflix guys who basically started the company because the founder hated late fees on videos. It bugged him so he started Netflix. On my end I hate the fact that I pay for the gym even though I don’t show-up. So my concept is for a gym that was focused on weight loss and that charges members based on usage rather than membership periods. The system might even be able to provide pay for performance fees to pay for additional weight loss over a period of time for people with a BMI over a certain number. This would align the incentives of the trainers and the folks visiting the gym so that the trainers would need to work for the core hope that the people investing in the exercise would find. Secondarily I think the pay for performance gym could also be tied into insurer policies and workplace health initiatives better than the monthly memberships. In a measured membership system you could only get the benefits FREE if you meet your usage quota. This would reward use and discourage non-use. But it would still allow the individual to choose to pay if all they were going to use was a small amount of the service. It’s my contention that people who currently subscribe to big name gyms like BSC (Boston Sports Clubs) could be wooed away from these with a different and disruptive business model. The one above may not be right but the right one could be worked out by delivering a service and taking care to integrate feedback in terms of how people spend their dollars and what they are looking for in a new service. The investment into the market is a good timing. Look at the map. The obese are a growing market and they are huge.

2. There must be a pill that can safely suppress people’s appetites. The gastric bypass surgeries have been thought to limit hunger not necessarily by making the stomach smaller but by disrupting the primitive nervous system of the gut which is the predecessor to the more advanced nervous system of the brain. If marijuana can give you the munchies and folks on heroin don’t need to eat for days then there must be something in between that has a focused effect on just hunger/satiation. Let’s finally find this thing and give it to people so that they aren’t hungry all the time. It could make lots of money as a blockbuster drug too. Hopefully the drug isn’t nicotine.

3. Our culture is sick. One physician I met with at a conference of medical informatics executives let me know that we often confuse healthcare problems with health problems. A healthcare problem relates to how we care for diabetics. A health problem is that people despite it being bad for them continue to get obese and cause their risk for diabetes to get dangerously high. In other countries this isn’t happening. Folks in Europe despite having access to unlimited food like we do have been able to keep their weights in check because they culturally have a healthy lifestyle involving exercise and portion control (and some would say smoking). To fix our culture will take some overhauls somewhere but some ideas would be to bring health into the workplace as an issue just like we bring health insurance into the workplace. The two are connected. I went to a company a few years back that was founded by a man very into health and he had a large gym at the center of his building. It sounds stupid but having corporate sponsored gyms built into campuses and planned during working hours sporting events could be very helpful for employees. While productivity may go down the benefits would be to have lower long term health costs and better strength and conditioning in employees that could lead to better performance mentally and physically. Another option would be a national health initiative to build thousands of facilities for people to exercise more readily. Build more parks for kids. Have more little leagues sponsored by the Federal and local governments. I’d rather pay for sports than for dialysis, heart surgeries, and gastric bypasses.

4. Let’s figure out why people are obese in America rather than figure out that they are becoming more obese. Someone should pay for this research and figure out the answers to the top questions: Why are American’s becoming more obese? Which American’s are becoming more obese? Are any American population segments becoming less obese? Are there any factors in recovering from obesity to become non-obese? Can these factors be promoted? Is that guy from Freakanomics just going to tell us that we weren't measuring anything other than that the baby boomers are getting older so the whole population is getting fatter showing the whole obesity trend is a hoax? If we figured out some causes and scientific conclusions maybe something can be done that we haven’t thought about.

Posted by Dan Housman at 07:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I went to the MIT web site today because I was thinking about recruiting some MIT folks for my company. We need some young blood to grow the software development team. Upon looking at the main page I saw an interesting video about the innovator of the year about using cells to produce petroleum like products. On the screen came Dave Berry one of Sarah's good friends from college. On closer review he was voted innovator of the year and was working on all sorts of interesting stuff. I must congratulate him the next time I see him in person. If you poke around the site or look at the MIT home page the video is easy enough to find.

Posted by Dan Housman at 02:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On Sunday morning we decided that we would have a little ceremony to inaugurate our new house in Newton. So Sarah and I invited our parents over for a tour of the empty home. We bought some orange juice without pulp so that we could make mimosas. Venkat had given me a basic picture of the ritual in an Indian household on Friday. They put milk onto a burner and cook it until it boils over spilling over the stove. Then you put rice into the milk and make rice pudding. Our plan seemed simpler but lacked the tradition of a milk worshipping culture. Venkat also mentioned that when coming to the US that people are given instructions on names that wouldn’t culturally work well despite being very popular in India. The one he pointed out in particular was Gopi.

Jeremy has been having nightmares lately. He told me one of his nightmares was that bugs were eating his feet. Maybe it’s the season but I had nightmares on Saturday night as well. The first nightmare I was in Vegas at a key conference for my business. While doing a printout through the computer I somehow accidentally requested that all of the money in my life savings accounts be liquidated as cash to be output in another room as $100 bills. I then was running around for the rest of the nightmare trying to get the money back where it belonged. I probably would never have remembered the dream but later in the dream I had Madeline in a backpack and she fell out of the backpack backwards onto the ground from the height of where I was standing onto a hard marble floor. In the dream she instantly died when she hit the floor. It was too much to sleep through so I woke-up. It’s not tough to analyze that with buying a home, having a start-up in the middle of lots of negotiations, and having a child under 2 years old – I have some natural anxiety about money and safety. The cats that keep me up at night don’t even have to work that hard.

Sarah and I arrived about a half hour early for the ceremony at the house on Sunday morning and I was still a bit freaked out from the nightmares. To keep Madeline occupied I went outside to swing her on the playground. She likes to order who goes on which color swing, with her on the red one and me on the yellow one swinging at the same time. I hadn’t thought she would be able to use the swings but we had lightly tested her on a set while returning from Bar Harbor and she was able to hold the chains. On Saturday night we had gone to the Park by Zaftigs, which now has a totally new mural, and she had swung on those. The child next to us was about a year older and kept asking her mother to swing her “super high” and Madeline was interested in going to such a height but I kept her at a reasonable safe height and counseled her that the “super high” height was for older kids. So I was swinging her on Sunday morning on a beautiful cool summer day and she wasn’t too high but for some reason she let go of the chains while on an upswing and fell backwards onto her back landing with her back flat on the hard backyard ground faster than I could think to catch her.

Madeline was shocked and hurt so she wanted Sarah for comfort. The fall looked innocuous since she fell with a uniform distribution on her back and only from the height of the smallest swing, about a foot. But she was upset for about an hour as both sets of parents arrived for the event. Sarah was rocking with her and we all were concerned that she might pass out with a concussion or head injury so when she got tired and started to close her eyes Sarah kept her awake. We gave up on the mimosas and as Madeline settled into more normal behavior we drove the half-mile to the Atrium for a Cheesecake Factory brunch.

After brunch we went up to the play space and we couldn’t help but note the very cushy foam floor that was installed there. It squashes under your feet like you are walking on a piece of hard memory foam bedding. The idea is that the mall doesn’t want any falls by the kids climbing around on their play equipment. I got a recommendation that I’ll be following-up on shortly to install rubber mulch under the swing-set both for Madeline’s safety and any other kids who might want to play on the swings. It cushions falls up to 9 feet. They sell it by the pallet for $500 per pallet at Home Depot. We may also buy a swing with a back to it for her and a baby swing for her sibling we are expecting in January. After reading the book on medical errors, Internal Bleeding, I and other parents need to take the fall by Madeline as a warning sign and fix things before it happens again. Other folks could also consider this event as a reason to put safety mulch under their backyard swings and take other precautions.

I’m looking forwards to an end to nightmares but I’ll need to be more vigilant when I am awake. The nightmares give me practice drills for things I need to be careful of. Life doesn’t come with an instruction manual about this stuff.

Posted by Dan Housman at 02:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Madeline's development marches forwards. She has become very attached to watching the Baby Shakespeare video which she calls "Purple moo cow farted on the TV". Her favorite scene is when the purple cow walks into a pasture with two normal looking cows then farts. Seth Godin would be proud to see that the purple cow is the most memorable and preferred, even in to a toddler. It does have to fart though. In the scene the normal cows are disgusted and walk away. A butterfly then flies down from above and is also disgusted and flys away. The scene is only about 30 seconds long but I think that Madeline could watch it a few thousand times and still find new meaning in it. The good thing is that it is at the end of the movie so she needs to watch the rest of the contents first before getting her treat. Oddly, the scene after the purple cow is a model train and the contrast and frustration that the scene she likes is over is so great that Madeline calls out "Don't like it - train".

For the past couple of days we have been trying to transition her from only being willing to go to sleep with Sarah rocking her to letting me put her to bed. Somehow over the past month Madeline has become more fiesty and difficult about this process and Sarah had taken over all going to bed duties. But this is not optimal so we are trying to modify Madeline's behavior to be more adaptable which in turn gives everyone more flexibility. So Madeline threw a tantrum just when we talked about having me rock her to sleep. So Sarah left the room with a crying baby and my solution was to feed her an M&M. Madeline then proceeded to split the M&M into three pieces. She ate one piece. She gave one piece to me. The third piece she commanded was for mommy and let me know that we had to deliver it personally by leaving her bedroom. So the M&M wasn't successful but I went for my new secret weapon. Madeline can't NOT be entertained if I sing the "Two little monkees sitting on the bed one fell off and he bumped his head" song accompanied by abuse of a stuffed animal where I either throw the animal in the air and let it fall or just knock the animal onto it's head. We played that for about 30 minutes. Then I sang her the "I'm a little teacup" book. Then I gave her a synopsis of my day which promptly had her snoring.

Posted by Dan Housman at 03:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sarah and I did the final two steps in concluding our home purchase today. We did the final walk through and then had a closing. The walk through was simple enough as we wandered the house looking for some kind of horrible thing that might have appeared between the last time we saw the house and the walk through. We spent some time with me, Sarah, and the seller’s agent’s top boss trying to figure out how to open the child proof cabinets all failing until we realized the magnet needed to be turned facing towards the magnetic latch rather than away.

The only thing I could notice was that the door in the back of the house was scraping against the wood kitchen floor leaving a mark. I figured that they had taken the door off to facilitate the move and when it was re-attached to the hinges it was lower to the ground. But since the sellers had left a bottle of champagne in the fridge to congratulate me I decided to ask the crew we had hired to move a giant swing set from one of the seller’s broker’s other clients to plane down the bottom of the door. I spent a chunk of the closing chatting with my Redfin broker about the future of the real estate industry and how Redfin is rapidly growing to take over lots of the market in the Seattle area with a likely growth in places like Boston and San Francisco. Since they have a volume business model they can do things other firms can’t – like offer rates to a large institution like Microsoft for all their employees. Seems like a great idea so it’s good to see they are thinking of building new barriers beyond the rebate component.

During the walkthrough I stopped to check some things I never had checked before looking more carefully into the insides of the closets, seeing if the refrigerator had ice in the automatic ice maker, and shaking loose bolts like the railing on the back. We then were hanging out in the yard and met our new neighbor who let us know which of our trees were slowly leaning into our fence that would eventually break into her yard. But more importantly we bonded on some common topics like how Sarah is involved in early intervention and generally what life is like with kids. I think we’ll need to resolve the falling trees problem. I hadn’t thought of that so it may cause some loss of sleep.

Among our challenges in switching our services for gas and electric was that the house is like a criminal. It has an a.k.a. (also known as). Apparently the house is a subdivision of the great Leeson estate. The other neighbor who drove past us on her way out and said hi as we stacked many cars in a disruptive formation blocking the lane lives in what appears to be the original Leeson home. The rest of the houses on the block apparently grew as subdivisions of what might have been a horse farm with acres of land and a stable, probably a garage turned small brick rental apartment next to our new house. The lane was just the access road or driveway from the street on Glenn Ave. to the main house. But as the new houses appeared they got addresses that the city recognized like 80 Glenn Ave. which is the official address recognized by the city of Newton. Since the house faces out onto the old driveway rather than Glenn Avenue it seemed odd to have a street address of Glenn Avenue. But since the city of Newton doesn’t recognize this winding driveway that runs through the sub-divided former Leeson estate as Leeson Lane. It is just some thing that they don’t want to plow. So the postal service made some form of exception for the house to be called 80 Leeson Lane so that if you saw a sign for Leeson Lane you would know to turn and could find the house. So when calling for a service like electric or gas the right address is to call it 80 Glenn Ave. For mail or giving directions it is to be called 80 Leeson Lane. I haven’t figured out how to make headway of this but hopefully I can use the a.k.a. to my advantage to avoid the paparazzi when they finally figure out that I am someone who In Touch magazine needs to know more about.

I had envisioned the closing itself as being a room full of people with us and the sellers discussing something then all sitting together to sign, with sweaty brows, the final agreement where we pay lots of money and they relinquish their beloved house. That wasn’t the real scenario. Instead the sellers were represented by their attorney who had the power to sign for them and our attorney walked us through about 50 documents about the purchase, the mortgage, the title, the government, the revolution, whatever. We even had to sign our middle initials on one document. We were useful at one point when I noticed that the document which was to set-up notification from the mortgage company to the government of what payments had been received so that we could deduct them from our tax returns had some bizarre social security number that was definitely not mine. I gave my real one and we initialed the change in 20 places then proceeded. Among the annoying thing was that the only important document to keep, the one with all the real terms and hidden costs that could be removed from the final sale for tax purposes was not on 8.5 X 11 paper. So it’s some long thing that will never fit in any file cabinet. Why is all this stuff not electronic?? Our lawyer also mentioned how he found a problem in the title where someone had gone bankrupt who owned the place and there was no closure on the issue in the records and it looked like a headache for the selller's lawyer who was going to have to use the title insurance to pay for resolving the documentation to close out that hole in the records. I suppose I didn't need to know about it but it was odd that a previous transaction hadn't uncovered this information and it made me think that I had gotten a good lawyer as a recommendation from my dad.

Anyways. My favorite document that I signed today was an affidavit that essentially said that I was who I said I was. Given that if I wasn’t I would still sign such a thing since I was already pretending to be someone else for trying to steal a house or set-up a mortgage falsely the document seemed entirely silly and useless. Our lawyer pointed out that he thought so before I could mention it and I decided that the purpose of such a document was to add humor to an otherwise tense situation.

As I was driving home I got a call to tell me that the registry of deeds had closed before the deed could be processed and that we couldn’t go into the house until tomorrow morning. So technically the deed isn’t done yet. But it will be done at about the same time the HVAC folks start tearing holes in closets to install our central air tomorrow morning.

This weekend we begin the fun stuff… figuring out a plan to fix everything and make everything work the way that we need it to.

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On the way home from work today Jeremy and I passed a new restaurant on Harvard Street that we hadn't noticed before. It was the B Good real fast food place. Thinking we could try something new I pulled a u-turn, got a nasty look from an elderly pedestrian who didn't seem to believe that I was turning around and not attempting to murder her, and pulled into a full lot at the store. I had been reading the Metro in the morning and among the information in it was an interview with William Gibson. The discussion in the interview centered around how he was able to successfully predict certain developments in his science fiction like cyberspace and robotic sex daemons. So as I reviewed the menu I realized that I had thought a similar idea a few years ago about how the world was ready to accept a more family friendly health conscious fast food. Folks who I talked to about it including Yuval and Peter can testify that I was thinking something similar although not identical to the B Good concept. I don't want credit since it's the environment that creates the trends. I just was interested in the concept. Another chain that seems to be benefitting from this trend is Panera Bread. After reading about the founder in Brookline magazine I am likely to buy some stock in the company.

What I discovered upon arrival at the B Good store was a sign that said "Our dream house will be opening tomorrow." It was interesting enough since Sarah and I are closing on our new home tomorrow as well. But having invested in a Brookline U-turn Jeremy and I weren't about to come up empty handed and not eat a freshly ground healthy burger with non-fried french fries. At B Good these are called real fries which still doesn't make sense given that the French part isn't the issue in describing the product using the word fries. BTW - Their web site is www.bgood.com. So we poked in the window and asked whether the busy crew inside was open or not. The answer that came back was that they were opening tonight at 7PM and giving away free burgers.

JACKPOT!

Since it was 6:40 we had somehow inadvertently stumbled upon a free burger scenario. So to kill time we parked in the TJ Max lot, wandered inside TJ Max to find they have great deals on dress shirts for men but didn't purchase one because the line was too long, and then returned to the growing scene building at the B Good dream house. Things were beginning to buzz with a band setting-up shop inside, roller derby people with matching shirts skating around, and a crowd building. We realized we needed to focus on being near the door for the 7PM opening and managed to be among the first 20 people to get our free burger and a seat. I vowed to blog about it as a return for the free burger.

The burger I got was a guapo and had a piece of bacon, onions, and some sauces in it. I was surprised that it came in a whole wheat bun since that never happens with burgers but it was quite agreeable. They offer some odd combos like removing your bun and replacing it with veggies for 25 cents extra that I thought were noble for those weight reduction times in my life. I'll need to make a run of such things after the business passes by. I rate the food as quite good and probably fast in a different situation where we wouldn't be in a mob queued for a free burger. I liked their "style" which includes some 50's styled logos, a car with fire painted on it, a clean internal look, and odd references to weird family members who probably don't exist. They suggest they don't need a fry cutter because there is some guy who does it and have his picture in it. The web site gives some evidence of the style as well. I'm not sure if they will succeed, have succeeded or what and Jeremy cited Boston Market as a failure in the healthy food fast market. But they are certainly a welcome tenant of Brookline and fit with the local culture well. But I won't be living in Brookline for long.

Today is the big day for the closing on the purchase of our house. It was easy enough to put the concept of moving into the future tense until recently but now things have moved into full gear. The money is ready for the down payment to be put into one big scary check, the arrangements have been made for executing the mortgage and purchase and sale including co-ordinating the lawyer, insurance company, mortgage broker, buyer's broker, and seller's broker. All of these people have been very nice and helpful but it is hard to have them all know what is going on. Mostly I feel like mixed messages get passed around between all of these folks and it would be better if there was a secure site where all of the information could be consolidated amongst the parties with utilties to co-ordinate the closing time, upload the insurance binder, post the P&S, etc. and different views depending on role. Maybe the Redfin's of the world can build such a thing. It likely isn't anyone's priority but as an example of collaboration it seems like there is a lack of simple tools.

Sarah worked with some local high school students to pack a lot of stuff in boxes. I cancelled the monthly subscription to Hollywood Video rentals. We got the gas and electric set to be assigned to our name when we arrive. We had Nick and his team move a swing set/play structure that the seller's agent offered us for free if we could move it from a more posh home near Brae Burn. I haven't even seen it but I heard from Nick that they need another day to move it because it is so big and complex. An HVAC company is coming on the 16th to install the central air conditioning. We are moving with a moving company on the 25th. Lisa and Dave are going to move into the condo in Brookline in October giving us time to move out. Things are happening all around. I'm thinking as I walk around the condo... I'm going to miss this place.

Posted by Dan Housman at 03:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I picked-up a copy of Internal Bleeding, a book about medical errors, in my quest to better understand the work I have in the healthcare business relating to quality and safety. It primarily lists a lot of cases where errors are a result of poor hand-offs where often everyone assumes someone else must have checked something critical because it was so critical that they generally never need to check it by the time it reaches them. Mistakes resulting from such things include wrong side surgeries like an amputation of the left leg when the right leg needed to be amputated or doing a heart, a lung transplant on a seventeen year old where the blood type doesn't match, and delivering a toxic dose of chemotherapy because the prescription was misunderstood There are systems in place for fixing such issues but they primarily don't get fixed through data warehousing. We could detect whether they happened and suggest that the system be enhanced before something bigger and worse than small errors occurred.

The book has in it a lot of other interesting information in it. For example - someone did a study where they looked at how people evaluate decisions based on risk. People would rather take on additional risk against a loss than risk on a gain. So if someone is given a choice where they will either get $40,000 in cash or take a coin flip for $100,000 or nothing most people would take the $40,000. If they were presented the opposite situation where they could either owe $40,000 or flip a coin and owe either $100,000 or nothing they would take the coin flip. In both cases they are wrong in their choice because the expected value in the first case from their decision would be to trade-off $40,000 for $50,000 and in the second case they would trade a debt of $40,000 for an expected debt of $50,000. This leads people predictably to gamble on long-shot horses more often at the end of the racing day than at the beginning. (One thought I had was to test this by checking on whether the "favored" horses pay better at the end of the day... and to see if there is a way to leverage this in capital markets).

Plenty of other great information in the book about how medicine is practiced, why the system is broken, and tips to fix it. It is very readable focusing on real examples so I recommend it highly even for people not interested in patient safety and quality healthcare initiatives.

Posted by Dan Housman at 05:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sarah and I have been keeping it quiet for a while now but in the past two weeks we have broken the news to most people who need to know. Sarah is pregnant again and is due in early January. If all goes well we’ll have a tax deduction for 2007. We already know the gender. The baby should be a boy. This helps us to plan room allocations for the new house we are moving into at the end of the month. The two children’s rooms are decorated today in boy and girl colors so we can place Madeline in the one with girl colors and the boy in the one with boy colors without having to paint the rooms. Somehow this is a great comfort to us to know that we don’t need to modify wall colors amidst a flurry of other issues we need to deal with to migrate from the condo into the house. The closing is next Wednesday. The HVAC will be installed starting on Thursday. Someone offered us a swing set that we’ll have moved by Thursday. Two weeks later, three weeks from now, the moving van will appear and take us to Newton.

Posted by Dan Housman at 11:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

While visiting Amy and Max the other day I noticed that they had posted a writ on the wall at the request of their 4 year old son that listed rules for eating at the dinner table. I don’t recall the exact rules but they had to do with not playing with your food and other eating related etiquette. I went off on a tangent about it and started thinking about how every family over time creates their own sets of rules and sometimes they are codified into laws like the piece of paper hanging from the dinner table and other times they are simply verbally agreed upon. I poked around and there are sites like Kids Contracts where people have spent time building some legal agreements for kids and parents. What I didn’t see was the idea of a household constitution where a family sets-up a small-scale democracy or other form of government with a base set of law that then guides the construction of additional laws for the family. While it might be nice to have a pre-built system it would lack in the fit for a given cultural style for a single family. Working through the process itself to gain consensus and buy-in from different parties (kids and parents) and likely multiple of each could lead to the formation of a set of family laws that would be respected. I’m interested in setting-up a government of sorts in my own household to sort through the rules as Madeline becomes old enough, probably another year, to appreciate how rules can help to define expectations and ultimately drive success based on incentives in the rules. I also am generally interested in anthropology so it gives me a chance to run a little experiment with my own family unit. If all went well I can imagine that we’d create a great little blue-print family constitution and laws in a wiki that could be copied and modified by other families who might find it interesting as a point of reference to save time. Ultimately we might end-up recreating a lot of what’s already in religions since they rightly took a lead in this type of framework a long time ago. But I’m not interested in the antiquated stuff and don’t subscribe to anyone else’s religion. Plus they involve praying which doesn’t seem to help much for most things I would worry about around the house.

Posted by Dan Housman at 11:47 PM | Permalink

“You’re afraid of your imagination. And even more afraid of dreams. Afraid of the responsibility that begins in dreams. But you have to sleep, and dreams are a part of sleep. When you’re awake you can suppress imagination. But you can’t suppress dreams.” From H. Murakami - Kafka on the Shore

I liked the idea that having a vision of something, a dream of what could be, carries with it a responsibility to work towards fulfilling the concept. It puts us as sometimes unwilling servants to the creation of our own ideas.

While I was on the plane I had the other idea. There was a passage about how the main character was reading a book that had been annotated by another character. It made me think of something that might be a cool concept. What if different people could collaboratively annotate a book analogous to when one person reads a book already underlined and written in by another. It wouldn’t be a very hard technology but basically everyone could be the equivalent of a Talmudic scholar writing in the margins around a book. Sure we have discussion forums on news articles but I was thinking of taking a political book like the one from Barack Obama and letting people add their thoughts. The reader can then choose to read thoughts or view underlined comments from other readers. Some could be in the same group like a class or a book group and others could be strangers like experts or just fans of the author/genre. The annotations could contain links potentially to other books when a book refers to content in another book. It might be especially interesting for something like Shakespear, the bible, or pop-fiction.

There is the barrier that people don’t yet read books in electronic form… but that could change any time now.

Posted by Dan Housman at 11:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)