Becoming Extinct

My blood type is O-Negative.  I’m a universal donor which I was told means anyone can use my blood for a transfusion but if ever needed, I’ll need this specific blood type.  It is a actually a little more complicated than that but it is true in life-threatening situations.

In the USA, O is the most common blood type.  O-Negative isn’t the most rare but it is found in only 8% of US Caucasians, 4% of African Americans and Hispanics and 1% of Asians.  On weighted basis, that means O-Negative is found in 4.3% of the population worldwide.

My blood type is also becoming extinct.  The negative is for RH which means I don’t have a Rhesus monkey in my background, as apparently  85% of the population does.  Many think o-negative is the purest blood group. It can’t be cloned. My diet is closest to the cave man.  On one genealogical site I can trace ancestors back to Adam.  Others theorize this blood type may mean I am linked to ancient astronauts.

Okay, now I’m getting spooked!  Studies have shown however, that donating blood as little as twice at four-week intervals is linked to a drop in blood pressure, heart rate and blood sugar levels.  The subjects in these studies were obese and I don’t have those conditions but maybe it will work for those pesky triglycerides? 

Scientists determined blood types in the early 1900s.  Nazis adulterated the science to rationalize genocide.  According to author Charlotte Libov – “In World War II, Japan segregated some of its fighting units by blood type because its commanders believed that soldiers with the same blood group would work together better.”

In his mid-1990s book entitled Eat Right 4 Your Type, Dr. Peter D’Adamo devised diets and exercise for each of the major blood types and an encyclopedia linking blood types to various health conditions.

Last year Harvard University’s Dr. Lu Qi and a team of researchers published a study linking various blood types and the risk of heart disease.  Blood types, according to Libov “are determined by the differing antigens and antibodies that the blood contains.”

For example, some blood types are more susceptible to bacterial infection and others to viral.

There are actually 32 blood group systems used to identify blood type.  Last year scientists at the University of Vermont identified two new attributes that will make transfusions even more accurate.

I think all of this is to say that I need to get my butt the three miles down to the Durham Red Cross blood donation center once a month, another good excuse to clean out the pipes on the ole’ Cross Bones.  Or I could exercise.  Or eat red meat less often but that wouldn’t be very cave-man-like.

I read an article last month about “microlives” or increments of 30 minutes of life expectancy.  Statisticians at the University of Cambridge have computed the risks inherent in various habits.

Apparently, eating an extra portion of red meat a day will cut a man’s life expectancy down by about one year and is apparently much riskier by some measures at my age than riding a motorcycle.  I wonder what it is for those of us with an O-Negative blood type?

In an article this month by Frank Bures entitled The Rewards of Risk in The Rotarian magazine, he writes in part about the studies of risk-taking by Dr. Frank Farley at Temple University and their role in our lives.

Farley divides personalities into categories of “T” for thrill.  “Big T” people, whether “T-mental” or “T-physical,” seek challenges and enjoy the thrill of seeing what they can do.  A few, unfortunately, veer into “T-negative” things such as gambling and crime.

“Then,” Bures notes, “there are what Farley calls “small-t” types – people who are risk-adverse, who let their lives be circumscribed by what they fear: failure, loss, humiliation, pain.”  He notes that 18% of the US population is affected by anxiety or the fear of possible future misfortune, a rate five times that of a third world country.

I guess, for some, I may be considered a “Big T” person, even though I’ve been retired now for three years.

I’ve spent a lot of time on a Harley, learned enough to fly an airplane, researched and written more than 860 essays such as this (Big-T mental, at least for me,) taken four-6,000-mile east-west cross-country trips with my Mugs, my English bulldog and four north-south trips with a friend.

I’ve also spent as much time as I can with family, especially my daughter and grandsons.  I treasure speaking with her several times a week as she drives to her work as a healthcare attorney or waits for the boys during an activity.

I haven’t even touched a number of other passions and interests yet, but life in so-called retirement has been rich and rewarding, so I am very blessed.

There are some things I need to do less, like eating red meat, and some things I need to do more, such as exercise.  Regarding the later, I am either a “small-t” or just lazy.

But I hope I can keep “letting go of life’s handrails” as Dr. Farley puts it because as Bures concludes in his article – “Not taking risks along the way is the biggest risk of all.”

Purchasing Influence of Advertising Mediums

After a billion dollars in presidential television ad spending alone, by 9 to 1 Americans felt strongly that campaign commercials were “not at all important” to the outcome of last November’s elections according to a Pew Research survey.

Even the ratio of those who were equivocal deemed that this element of marketing had little effect on the outcome.

In the most intense and sustained test yet of advertising’s effectiveness, the two Presidential candidates alone spent $696 million in advertising with hundreds of millions more spent by the two parties, various political action committees and a slew of “dark money” groups.

Even before this unprecedented barrage, experts estimate that the average American is now inundated with an average 10,000 ads each day.  In response, nearly everyone has tuned out, so why does anyone still advertise?

It may be due to equal parts inertia and ignorance I suppose or in the case of politics, fear of losing and the power of the advertising-industrial complex.  Marketing today is hard work but too often advertising still appeals to novices easily drawn to “shiny objects” or self-aggrandizement.

It also draws “bottom-feeders” who prey on the unsuspecting and contribute to advertising practitioners being rated among the three least trusted professions.

There is still a role for advertising in thoughtful marketing plans but it is severely marginalized by the fact that people have simply tuned out.  Studies show that even during the upcoming Super Bowl, ads will turn off three people for every one for which they are appealing.

But for some it may be that use of this inferior element of marketing continues because with the exception of outdoor billboards and other forms of advertising out-of-home, advertising often subsidizes the availability of news, sports and entertainment, although there is evidence that even that business model is phasing out.

On a recent road trip, I noticed that I-95, the front-door to Raleigh, North Carolina, is cluttered with huge roadside billboards, ruining the first impression of North Carolina’s capital city even though citizens there have made a valiant attempt to sequester billboards in commercial zones.

Further south, I-95 is nearly billboard-free and heavily forested where travelers pass by Fayetteville, North Carolina.  Of course, if they exit, they will be inundated with billboards.

In some ways, we North Carolinians are justified in feeling superior to South Carolina.  However, with the exception of where it passes through or near cities and towns or the infamous South of the Border, that state seems much more careful to keep I-95 clear of blight and tree-lined including long stretches of forested medians.

In the fall of 1969, four years to the month after the signing of the national Highway Beautification Act which introduced much less intrusive and far more effective logo signs at highway exits as an alternative to help guide travelers to roadside services for gas, food and lodging, the first Cracker Barrel country story and restaurant opened in Lebanon, Tennessee, about 30 or 40 miles east of Nashville as I-40 makes it way west from Knoxville.

In the tradition of old country stores, which were the convenience stores of their day, Cracker Barrels even had gas pumps until the mid to late 1970s.  They also earned a reputation for discrimination against gays and blacks.

During the 24 years I’ve lived in Durham, North Carolina, the Cracker Barrel chain has grown from 50 or 60 restaurants to 620 in 42 states including one in my native state of Idaho.  The chain has also worked hard to shed the discrimination of its roots, climbing from last place on the Corporate Equality Index to a rating of 55 out of 100 in 2011.

Cracker Barrel, which at the average location serves 6,700 people each week, hasn’t done so well on any such index of roadside desecration.  It is one of the businesses keeping the outdoor billboard industry on life-support, using more than 1,500 prior to the recession and ranking 11th in revenue generated for billboard companies nationwide.

Even though the company tries to be socially responsible including concern for animal welfare, it has been slow to migrate from billboards that blight roadsides and the scenic character of the communities in which they are located to the far more effective logo signs preceding highway exits.  But I see evidence as I travel that the company may be slowly catching on.

A periodic survey of advertising mediums documents that only 0.2% of Americans see outdoor billboards as influential for purchase decisions and the percentage in much of Cracker Barrel’s target audience is 0.0%.  Still, it may be difficult for its now younger and more progressive management to wean the organization.

Research in North Carolina suggests that outdoor billboards have an 8 to 1 turn-off to turn-on ratio.  That means for ever person to which the messages appeal, they turn off eight others.  Not a good number if you’re using advertising to appeal.  Unfortunately, far too many marketers still focus only on gross vs. net appeal, let along net-negative.

My favorite meal has always been breakfast although other than weekends, it is the meal I have always been most likely to skip in adulthood. Durham, NC, where I live, is fortunate to have a wide variety of indigenous and chain restaurants from which to choose for that meal.

For those who like country or comfort food, Cracker Barrel off I-85 is on that list, although breakfast is the meal served to only 1 out of 4 of its patrons company-wide.  It generates about $2 billion in restaurant revenue and more than $500 million in retail store revenue annually.

To its credit, the company is committed to community relations in its 620 locations but unfortunately that commitment does not yet include reducing visual blight and preserving scenic character.  I suspect it is only a matter of time before it does.  It is just good business and good marketing.

Just ask Chevron.

The Optimum Size for Governance

When I was recruited to Durham, North Carolina twenty-three years ago to jumpstart the community’s first official marketing organization, I was impressed that the governing board numbered only seven directors, a best practice at the time.

Until recently, two other economic development-related non-profit organizations in Durham had boards of directors that numbered more than thirty and forty respectively, which was common in the 1960s.

In their book Race for Relevance, Harrison Coerver and Mary Byers peg the optimum number of members now for non-profit boards of directors at five.  A corollary among profit and non-profit organizations has always been, “the larger the board, the poorer the governance.”

Large boards are typically less effective at governing because they are inefficient, divert a lot of organizational resources and don’t optimize the potential of individual directors, in part because the larger the board, the more many members are simply disengaged.

One of many other gems in this 152-page book is that in addition to limiting the size of governing boards to five members, organizations are well-advised to hire a search consultant to identify and qualify potential board members based on competency.

Just a few of the criteria the authors suggest are:

• Do candidates have basic leadership skills? (not to manage but to lead)
• Do they have at least a three-to-five-year horizon in their thinking? (strategic and visionary vs. tactical)
• Do they know what it means to govern? (which is different and much more difficult than managing or executing)
• Do they grasp the concepts of conflict of interest and resisting special interests?

In other words, a good board of directors is comprised of members with specific board-level competencies.

The larger the board, the more likely members will show up late or leave early, get up to take calls, spend time texting or emailing and fail to read preparation materials or hold information and context approved in policies and plans.

In my experience and as noted in the book, there are several reasons beyond inertia or out-dated thinking that many organizations still retain huge boards of directors:

• Large boards are often used to create an audience for management to pontificate or as a means to preach to potential converts.
• Some organizations are adverse to debate or candor or conflict resolution.  The larger the board, the more issues go unquestioned.
• Some organizations eschew data-based decision-making and attempt instead to insinuate credibility or support for actions by parlaying the reputations of those on the board.
• Large boards are often used to mask a superiority complex on the part of some individuals or even organization-wide which is manifest in a type of attention-deficit or mission-creep.

Al Parrish, a friend and retired hospitality and healthcare executive in Anchorage, Alaska smilingly advised me once after an individual had carbon copied forty people on a memo meant to corner me, that “the merit of an idea is always inversely related to the number of people one feels compelled to carbon copy.”

His advice became even more cogent when business communication moved to external email in the early 1990s, shortly after I arrived in Durham.  People who “cc” scores of people are often adept at lobbying, and they utilize their large boards and public officials as a form of coercion.

In a somewhat related topic, the book The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty uses humor and plain language to overview a number of experiments and studies that reveal why and how people rationalize crossing the line when it comes to ethics.  Written by Dr. Dan Ariely, a behavioral economics researcher at Duke University and a Durham resident, the book was released in mid-2012.

In this book, Airely discusses how people use the human propensity for reciprocity “trying to engender a feeling of obligation in others.”  An executive from another organization with whom I worked during my career was a master at this both with his board and with elected officials.

He often chided me when frequently reminded that use of funds in my organization was restricted both by state legislation and governance policy, noting once that “no one will check.”  He viewed himself as very honorable but I guess to him violations of code were based only whether or not you were caught.

Large boards make malpractice such as this much easier.  They are also susceptible to the pressure of reciprocity.

Both of these books are well worth a read for anyone who is an executive or serving on a board of directors.

A Perspective on Dual Distribution

On a road trip last month, a friend and I decided to turn due west outside of Jacksonville, Florida and take a quicker and much more scenic route to our ultimate destination bypassing Orlando and Tampa.

The route carves through cattle and horse ranches past Gainesville to our ultimate destination on a 40-mile-long peninsula that spans the 4 to 10 miles between the Gulf of Mexico and Old Tampa Bay.

The last leg of the trip dissected several huge wellfields this peninsula began to lease and develop in other counties just prior to the outbreak of World War II.  This occurred after it had first been noticed in the late 1920s that the water quality in St. Petersburg on the very southern tip of this Pinellas County peninsula was in decline.

This tiny strip of land had a permanent population of less than 60,000 people when it turned to wellfields in other counties for water.  Today, the population is nearing 1 million and everywhere you go, there are glimpses of a dual water system, one for drinking water and the other filled with treated wastewater used for irrigation.

However, this dual system with color-coded hydrants -- the first ever in a metropolitan city -- wasn’t innovated by St. Petersburg and then adopted throughout the peninsula as a means of reducing water consumption, although that certainly has been one of the benefits.

It was spurred by stiffer state regulations in 1971 pursuant to the Clean Water Act. The cities and towns and villages surrounding 2,201-square-mile Tampa Bay including the port of Tampa to the east were told they must significantly improve treatment of wastewater before discharging it into what is actually a series of four distinct and connected bays.

St. Petersburg officials weighed the costs of upgrading its treatment facilities but elected not to discharge into the bay at all.  After determining that nutrients were the most stubborn and difficult ingredients to remove, the community elected to team with the federal government through grants to develop a dual system that would utilize reclaimed water.

In this system, wastewater is treated to a point where it is all but drinkable and then redistributed through the dual system of pipes back out to golf courses, businesses, schools and homes for landscape irrigation, where it turns out the nutrients in the water create a savings and added benefit

Today, in Florida alone, more than 650 million gallons of reclaimed water is redistributed each day and used by 525 golf courses, 875 parks, 320 schools and more than a quarter of a million residential irrigation customers.

In the United States, urban reuse of water began more than 100 years ago when it was first used to irrigate the 1,017- acre Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.  Broad utilization of reclaimed water for irrigation has been around since the 1960s.  It is now as clean or cleaner than drinking water in many places and was proven safe to use on crops a quarter of a century ago.

As James Salzman points out in his new book Drinking Water – A History, some communities are now getting around the “yuck factor” by reinjecting reclaimed water back into aquifers and then pumping it back up as drinking water, although it is safe and tasty enough for direct distribution.

Salzman, who teaches at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina where I live, is not the only water-related contribution to Durham’s reputation as a place “where great things happen.”  Another example is taking place over a hundred miles to the west of Durham.

For a little more than a year, Duke University has teamed with Duke Energy to develop and operate a pilot project as part of the Durham-based school’s commitment to become carbon neutral by 2024.

Aided by federal and state grants, the project teams up with a 9,000-head hog finishing operation near Boonville, NC to capture hog waste in a huge bladder and process it into energy used at the farm and using natural processes to cleanse wastewater so that it can be used to clean out the barns and when ready to water feed crops.  The award-winning project has drawn investment from Google which will share in the offsets.

In addition to showing the way to reducing air and water pollution including odors, the pilot project shows the way for other agricultural operations to adopt full-cost accounting, also known as the triple bottom line, as a means to improve the efficiency of free-market capitalism.

While it is ironic that some lawmakers seem bent on exempting the free market from full-cost accounting, also known as the triple bottom line, it is heartening nonetheless to see communities, corporations and institutions that are continuing to pursue a more sustainable capitalism.

Assurance That Those Who Benefit Are Those Who Pay

I wasn’t just being snarky in a post on this blog, two and a half years ago, that called for Raleigh, North Carolina and a dozen other cities and towns in Wake County to pay the estimated $1.5 billion needed to clean up their drinking water source, located upstream in Durham, North Carolina, where I live.

Durham already made sacrifices to accommodate the creation of Falls Lake here in the late 1970s and to forgo or restrict development around the lake, making Durham County, the 17th smallest land area in the state, even smaller.

In 1905, six months after Republican President Theodore Roosevelt laid out, in his State of the Union speech, the regulatory role of government to ensure the common good, the New York State legislature passed a measure granting New York City the power to condemn land, build dams and reservoirs and regulate land use 120 miles north and west of the city in the seven counties and 70 towns and villages of the Catskill and Delaware watersheds.

Long before the release of his just published book entitled, Drinking Water – A History, I had heard Jim Salzman, a Boston area native who also lives in Durham, tell the story of how NYC came to pay for these privileges and the negative externalities created rather than just demand them through favored treatment from the state.

Jim teaches at Duke Law School, where my friend Ryke Longest runs the popular Environmental Law and Policy Clinic, but Salzman also teaches at the Nicholas School of the Environment.  In his book, he uses his background in history, engineering, law and policy to weave an excellent, fact-filled narrative in the tradition of such authors as John McPhee and Malcolm Gladwell.

In 1986, Congress passed an amendment to the Safe Drinking Water Act that meant that New York City would need to pre-treat the surface water it was accumulating and drawing from the Catskill and Delaware watersheds.  The EPA estimated the plant would cost $3 billion but NYC estimated it would cost $6 billion.

Instead, in the early 1990s, NYC tried to further tighten restrictions on development and farming in the seven counties including 70 or so towns and villages more than 100 miles upstream.

As you can imagine, “all hell broke loose.”  It might have been legal but it definitely wasn’t fair.  Like Raleigh and the dozen other cities and towns in Wake County, NYC was reaping all of the benefits but insisting that upstream cities and counties, such as Durham, shoulder the costs.

A Republican governor, George Pataki, stepped in and negotiated a memorandum of agreement between all of the parties.  NYC uses water bill assessments and bonds to pay for such things as conservation easements and to partner with improved sewage and storm water infrastructure in the upstream counties and communities.

NYC also uses the funds to incentivize ecosystem services at a cost much lower than a pre-treatment facility would have cost.

Unfortunately the free-market, unless prodded to do so, fails to incorporate the value of what are known as ecosystem services.  I first learned about the New York City watershed example in 2002, two years before Salzman moved to Durham to teach at Duke University, when I read a book called The New Economy of Nature co-written by Dr. Gretchen Daily at Stanford University.

Daily defines ecosystem services, which she had first coined as nature’s services in the late 1990s, as the natural systems that sustain human life.  Until recently, the free-market took for granted critical services such as pollination, water filtration, climate regulation, flood control, soil renewal etc.

Environmental economists have now computed the value of ecosystem services generated by trees and other natural elements.  However, many entities such as outdoor billboard companies seek instead to avoid incorporating these costs into the free market by manipulating government decisions, a tactic often identified as “legalized corruption.”

Another example of the failure to understand the free-market value of ecosystem services can be viewed by turning from the roadside desecration by outdoor billboards to the sandy mounds sprouting up every few feet along the medians dividing roadways such as the Durham Freeway.

The mounds are created by colonies of fire ants.  They could have been easily quarantined years ago and prevented from infesting the United States but companies hauling soil to construction sites lobbied to be exempt from rules about using only soil free of these costly invasive insects.

These companies didn’t want to shoulder the costs of using uninfested soil, persuading lawmakers to instead pass on the $5 billion in annual costs for medical treatment, damage and control as well as another billion dollars in annual crop and livestock loses to millions of unsuspecting property owners and businesses while cutting back on roadside maintenance along corridors the ants use to move. 

All of this is to say that the free-market is a miracle but only when it attributes full cost accounting and assurance that those who benefit are those who pay.