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Long-term thinking: Water shortage may bring business opportunity

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I was just reading an article on the impending water shortage. Most of us are totally in the dark about it, but for years, people who track such things have been warning that our water usage is coming close to surpassing the world’s available fresh water supply. MIT’s Technology Review magazine was writing about it a decade ago.

If you’re a forward-looking entrepreneur, there’s tremendous potential here, and still some time to do something about it.

You can try to be part of the solution:

  • Develop new desalinization technology.
  • Create distribution systems to help water most quickly move to where it is needed most.
  • Reduce the cost of waste treatment.
  • Breed less water-intensive crops.

If you’d rather be part of the problem:

  • Buy up water rights and start jacking up the prices.
  • Heck, buy up water itself and store it away where you can later sell it for high prices.

This is a long-term strategy, but since we don’t seem to be looking ahead as a race to solve this problem, we’ll have to do it as individuals and businesses.

Insurance is just community for a profit

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Insurance is a weird beast. Basically, we all band together and put in money so if any of us hits misfortune, the pooled money can be used to help out. It works because typically, most of us do fine, and we can cover the misfortunates.

This is basically what communities do. We take care of each other. We all pitch in, with the expectation that we’ll all be able to fall back on each other should misfortune strike.

The weird part is that when you’re talking insurance, it’s not emotional commitment, it’s financial. And since the insurance companies are for-profit enterprises whose first duty is to their shareholders, not their policyholders, the have incentive to refuse participation to anyone they think might collect, they want to charge premiums as high as possible, and pay out as little as possible. In short, the profit motive directly acts to make them oppose the slightest movement in the direction that insurance was designed to provide: a safety net provided by a mutually interdependent community.

Bizarre stuff. Gotta run. Five more pages of paperwork to fill out…

Fantasy football costs business $1.1 billion/year. NOT!

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Reading Fortune Magazine’s “Leading Indicators” in the September 4, 2006 edition, I ran across this tidbit:

$1.1 billion. Projected value of work hours used for playing fantasy football this season. The player (there are 36.8 million of ’em in the U.S.) earn on average about $36 an hour and will spend about 50 minutes playing each workweek.

This kind of projections are sneaky, because the next step is to claim that Fantasy Football is “costing” business $1.1 billion/year. But that “cost” assumes that if they weren’t playing fantasy football, the people playing would be happily producing, producing, producing.

This is bull pucky, for two reasons:

First off, it assumes that if people weren’t playing fantasy football, they’d be making money for the business. Why do we believe that? It may be that people spend 50 minutes each workweek relaxing, and at the moment, that relaxation happens to take the form of Fantasy Football.

Second, people can’t work continuously. We need breaks. The Power of Full Engagement documented that thoroughly. Insisting people work during the time they currently play Fantasy Football would likely not increase productivity, because they wouldn’t be getting the breaks they need.

Second and a half, unless you work on an assembly line, productivity isn’t tied to time. Though that attitude pervades our collective psyche, it’s idiotic. White collar work depends on creativity, insight, and thought. Sometimes those happen in sudden flashes of inspiration. Other times, they require long dry spells. In no event are they proportional to hours.

Third, and most deeply, it simply isn’t the case that everyone should be working all the time. In an efficient business, the only person or system working continuously should be the bottleneck. Everyone else should experience times of calm and no needed work. In that case, working when the business doesn’t need you to actually reduces efficiency by creating excess inventory or worse, scattering energy into irrelevant projects that take on a life of their own. (See The Goal for a detailed discussion of this point.)

(For a sample article on the topic, see here. If employers really want to help employees recapture 10 minutes a day, I’ll bet simply requiring meetings to have an agenda and firm end time would have far more effect than eliminating Fantasy Football.)

Thinking ahead. How far? And how certain?

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At a recent physical exam, my weight was a tad above what I want it to be (probably all muscle, but you can never be too sure). So I went web surfing a bit about weight gain trends and found an article proclaiming that obesity is becoming a world-wide problem. It seems the availability of cheap processed foods combined with less physical work is part of the problem.

What amazes me is that both of those are fully and completely under our control. There’s no reason our food companies have to produce food that’s bad for us. But they do, because that’s what we want to buy. Why do we want to buy it? Because our bodies are programmed to love the processed stuff, since back when we evolved, it was really hard to find usable carbohydrates, etc. It worked great on the tundra, but now, it drives us to crave things that create a market that is bad for us.

We weren’t thinking ahead when we developed our food production industry or laying down the rules of the market. We didn’t know. We didn’t look very far into the future, and if we could have, we didn’t have the knowledge or even the suspicion that our food production would have bad dietary consequences. And now, we look increasingly like little round beach balls. I suppose it makes clothes easier to design; all we need is a big circle.

So the question is: when we make decisions, how far ahead do we look? How certain do we have to be of the answers to take action? And what action do we take?

“Scenario planning” was all the rage in the late-80s and early 90s. It seems Shell had use future projections to predict the fall of the Soviet Union and they were all ready to take smart business action when they saw it coming. Which scenarios should we be considering? How likely do we think they are? And when do we decide we should prepare, given that we generally don’t know which scenario we’re living in until it’s too late to take action?

The part of the article I wasn’t expecting was the last two paragraphs, which point out that global warming, overfishing, and climate change could severely disrupt the food supply, even with a “modest” temperature increase of 2 degrees Celsius (and that’s below the lowest-end projections of the MIT climate scientist I asked about it).

So this time, we have the chance to think ahead. Other than speculating in food companies, what can we as businesspeople do to help prepare for something like that? Right now, we stick our heads in the sand and ignore the problem. Last time we did that, we turned into beach balls. This time, let’s think ahead, and not turn into something worse.

How much privacy should businesses guarantee?

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Andy Wibbels reports that AOL has released data on hundreds of thousands of users’ queries. Reasonable? Of course, since they include no personally identifiable information.

But how reasonable is it? When you type in a search query, do you expect that search will be completely anonymous, not even matched up with other searches you do?

We’re in a world now where we leave electronic trails all over the place. Many aren’t even intentional. Toll booths, for example, use FastPass to provide the convenience of not stopping to pay cash. But the FastPass records who went where and when. Presumably, those records could be subpoena’d and used as evidence in a court case.

“So what?” you cry, “I’ve done nothing wrong.” Nope, you haven’t. Which is why you should be concerned that those FastPass records are unhackable, completely accurate, and unforgeable. But they aren’t. To the extent we even have legally enforced standards for data integrity, companies rarely even mention when they have security leaks, much less pay any kind of penalty for it.

My credit card number was one of the ones that got accidentally leaked last year. That could have resulted in identity theft. But the company wouldn’t be liable for the direct or indirect costs to me, despite it being their own negligent information protection that caused the problem.

So when someone trusts you with their information, be worthy of that trust. Either take the steps to keep their info private, and really use tight security so you know it’s private, or destroy it completely when you’re done with it. The issue isn’t whether people have done something wrong; it’s whether someone could be harmed by a misuse of their data.

Privacy isn’t just about hiding what you do. It’s about confidence that collected information can’t be falsified, forged, or misused.

Wisely using technology can free your productivity

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Hi, all.

As I write this, I’m about to leave for a 10-day vacation camping far from civilization. No cell phones. No laptops. No internet connection. Just a chances to be away and in another world for a while. If past experience is any guide, I’ll come back refreshed, full of great ideas, and just rarin’ to go to work.

The catch? I’m writing this the day before I leave, but you’re reading it while I’m staring into a bonfire over a roasting marshmellow somewhere. And guess what? I’m not even wearing a suit. I’m probably wearing shorts and a T-shirt. And sandals. I’m even more casual than “casual Fridays!”

This is using technology for freedom. Use it so you can do work in advance yet have it maintain customer relations while you do long-term, creative, strategic, and otherwise important-but-not-urgent stuff. Send emails scheduled to go out over the next few weeks, so you keep a presence in your absence.

Some of my clients think that being productive is about bringing their Blackberry with them on vacation, so they can be constantly in touch with the office. Nonsense; that’s slavery, not productivity. Human beings need breaks. We need downtime. We need to relax. It might stimulate our creativity and help us with breakthroughs we otherwise wouldn’t have.

Have you noticed the error in my logic, yet? I’m trying to justify downtime by saying “it will be good for business.” It may. Or it may not. But there’s no need to justify downtime. Because downtime is life. There’s nothing “down” about it. It’s life-time.

So use technology to help you disconnect when you need it. Just because you’re human, and you want time doing something other than being a wage-slave.

Life is to be lived, people. Enlist technology to help.

Ernst and Young reveals 243,000 credit card numbers. And they call themselves auditors?

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Oops. Ernst & Young just let the personal data and credit card numbers of 243,000 HOTELS.COM subscribers get stolen, via that old standby: a stolen laptop. And these people call themselves auditors, supposedly qualified to judge the accounting integrity of American business? It’s no wonder that hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud have been coming to light over the last several years.

The very fact that the data was stored on a laptop in unencrypted format is criminal negligence.

For those of you who care if your laptop is compromised if stolen, here are a couple of things you can do. E&Y didn’t do them, and now 243,000 of us are paying the price.

The Microsoft solution I don’t trust (but better than nothing)

First, if you use Windows XP Professional, you can right-click a folder and click a little box “Encrypt.” This will encrypt the files so prying eyes can’t get at them. If you suspend your laptop without logging out, however, then a thief can access the files if they resume the stolen laptop, so always log out before suspending. (Or set your laptop to require a password after suspending.)

Personally, I don’t trust Microsoft’s security. They have a 25-year track record of designing highly insecure systems, and shipping those systems pre-configured to their least secure configuration. No matter how much they say that security is now a priority, I can’t imagine that their thousands of programmers suddenly acquired the ability to write secure code after spending their entire careers not knowing how. Furthermore, they’re now creating their own anti-virus products and firewalls. Any company that makes money selling me protection against vulnerabilities they built into their own software isn’t a company I want to trust with my sensitive business data.

The “virtual encrypted disk” solution I trust

I use PGP Desktop’s “Virtual Disk” product. I create a virtual encrypted disk that I must explicitly open and enter a passphrase whenever I boot the computer. It’s a bit more work than Microsoft’s solution, but PGP has a spotless record going back 20 years for having the strongest, most secure encryption available. Originally an open-source product, their algorithms are public knowledge, so the security community can make sure the product is solid.

Anything’s better than nothing

In any event, use something. If you deal with sensitive data, you should never, ever have it unencrypted on a computer that might be physically compromised. Even if you have a password-protected laptop, the disk drive can be removed and read by a thief, so keep the data encrypted on that drive.

E&Y should have done that. Heck, E&Y should never allow an employee to touch a computer that hasn’t been made as iron-clad as possible. (They probably let their employees connect to unencrypted wireless networks while traveling. Conveniently, that lets a thief simply sit in an airport boarding lounge and grab sensitive data out of the air.) You do better. Get secure. There’s no reason to do otherwise.

Busy, but boy… word gets around

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A friend just pointed me to this post on the Boston Globe where I’m being referenced. In this world of the Blogosphere, information moves fast! Shortly after posting my BLOG entry on oil and gas prices, I got a phone call from the PR agency for a major oil company asking about the entry. Cool stuff.

All that said, BLOGging takes time! And I’m already writing a column, recording podcasts, relaunching my web site, and, oh, yes, running a business. So my apologies. At least during client work and the like, BLOGging may not be as frequent as I’d like.

Next steps are to BLOG more and learn to start linking to other Blog posts I like. But meanwhile, I’m also going to be appearing on NBC Nightly News early next week, discussing overwhelm and coping with the information deluge.

So hang in there. I’ll find a way to write on a more regular basis.