Go for a hike

The education team is currently studying KIPP schools, specifically a middle school in Philadelphia.  KIPP is a very innovative charter school network that seeks to increase college matriculation and college graduation for low-income students in predominantly urban areas. As I wrote in a previous blog, their results have been impressive, with over 89% enrolling in college and 33% completing college in four years. Additionally, the organization truly embodies the Kaizen approach of continuous improvement, and aims for an eventual graduation rate of 75%.

Recently, one of our teammates, Cameron Miller, shared a blog of a Kipp teacher, that said that the typical teacher works about 70 hours a week. Similarly, teacher retention rates are 73%. My concern for KIPP is this: while I support the mission and the ends, I have to ask, is it truly sustainable to ask teachers to work 70 hours a week, even if it is for a laudable goal?  In our screencast on social sustainability, Marsha Willard highlighted some potential injustices of the modern age, one of which is that our workweek, though legally 40 hours, is often 50-60 hours. We accept this workload as a necessary requirement for getting ahead, and perhaps take secret pride in our work capacity.  Working BGI students can relate, and I suspect many of us take a measure of our personal worth from our regular 60-70 hour work weeks.

At the same time, do we ever ask whether this is healthy or even sustainable? 

We’ve been learning a lot about the Toyota Way, its perpetual quest for improvement, and its ability to engage, empower and value employees on an individual level.  As we observed in the NUMMI plant case, people are foundational to the success of the program. 

My hope for KIPP, BGI and all organizations, is that our worthy ends can be coupled with sustainable model that honors, uses, but does not exhaust its human resources.

It is necessary to empower low-income youth and equip tomorrow’s business innovators, and truly a privilege to be a part of that creative goal. Let’s make an effort to ensure that our means for achieving this are equally regenerative and life-affirming.

Time is Money

Residents of certain countries in Africa have resorted to using mobile phone credit as a stable, defacto currency.  According to the Economist, it has become a preferred payment method in countries whose economies have been wracked by instability and inflation.  In Zimbabwe, while the US greenback has largely replaced the Zimbabwean dollar, the scarcity of US paper currency has made it popular for shop owners to give small change in the form of mobile minutes. 

This trend of using mobile credits as cash has opened up some valuable business opportunities for marketers looking to expand their reach into developing markets. JANA Mobile, a Boston based marketing and research company has access to over 2.1 billion consumers in 85 developing countries around the world.  Their business is simple.  They offer consumers phone credit to complete marketing surveys about their buying preferences.  Alternately, they can offer phone credit rebates to incentivize certain purchases of partner brands.

Paying consumers for market information is nothing new.  Recently I was given $50 to fill out a survey for the Twin Registry of the University of Washington. What is striking about JANA’s case is their ability to recognize mobile minutes as an easy and effective payment system in emerging markets and use it for marketing purposes. Consumers are happy because in addition to phone time, they can also buy groceries and even pay their utility bill with these credits.

The article in the Economist  has sparked a bit of fascination for me in alternate monetary systems.

Many of you have heard of Bitcoin, the world’s most widely used alternative currency.  Developed in early 2009  by a psydeonomymous  hacker named Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin is not released by a central bank or government, but is distributed via a decentralized peer to peer network of computer users.  Unlike fiat currency, it is released at a predetermined  geometric rate that will cease once the amount reaches 21 million bit coins in total distribution. Currently, the value of the world’s Bitcoin is approximately 200 million USD and is accepted by about 1,000 merchants. The history of this currency, as well as the method of disbursing bitcoins, a process called bitcoin mining, is fascinating, and I would encourage you to read more about it here.

While these developments are interesting, it is hard to imagine that small “hobby currencies” would have much in impact in the world of global finance and central banks. 

Or is it?

Amazon recently announced that it would be releasing “Amazon coins” an online “currency” that can be used on their marketplace as tender to purchase developer apps and electronic purchases.

At first glance it is difficult to know why Amazon would go to such trouble to market these coins, which many see as just another unnecessary step in the transaction process.

A possible reason came to me last night in Portland when I overheard the bartender inform a disgruntled customer that there was a $5 minimum for credit card purchases. I had cash that night, but the exchange reminded me of similar rebuffs that I had experienced trying to buy a 78 cent packet of tic tacs or a two dollar cup of coffee from the 7-Eleven. 

Whenever a retailer swipes a credit card, it has to pay around 3 percent of the amount to the merchant bank which oversees the transaction, this is called a merchants fee.  This percentage is higher for small purchases and highest for online sales.  In fact, a recent act of congress last year increased the maximum allowable fee for small purchases.

Amazon, as most of you know is pursuing a strategy that increasingly emphasizes apps and ebooks as a primary revenue stream.  Because of the vast majority of these apps are 1-2 dollars, it makes sense for them to find ways to maximize profit by minimizing their loss to these fees.  By bundling numerous $0.99 app purchases into a larger single purchase of Amazon coins, they are reducing the amount that they have to pay to these credit card companies and adding to their bottom line.

Secondly, Amazon plans to give away millions of dollars of these Amazon coins to consumers over the first months of its release.  Because these can only be used on digital content, like apps and ebooks, it will do much to “prime the pump” of profitable e-sales, and hopefully induce more customer engagement in this down the road. 

I don’t see Amazon coins attempting the same paradigm shift that mobile money or bitcoin is trying to achieve, but it shows a very shrewd strategy to increase app sales while minimizing expenses to credit card companies.  Then again, Amazon is a huge company with over $61 Billion in sales last year, they could be a trendsetter in this money frontier.

Only time will tell.

Nerf Bowl

The Superball was a children’s toy in the 1960s, and was allegedly the inspiration AFL commissioner Lamar Hunt needed to coin the name for NFL’s big game.

It could have just as easily have been the Nerf Bowl.

Neil Leifer, the legendary sports photographer recalls that the first national football championship lacked the spectacle of today’s contest.  According to Leifer, it wasn’t considered to be a big deal, and few expected it to become the fixture of American culture that it is today. Held in 1967, the most expensive ticket was $12, and there were still 20,000 empty seats in LA Coliseum.

Today, the Super Bowl is the biggest event of the year in the United States, in fact, 163 million people tuned in for part of the game in 2012. That’s 40 million more people than the number that voted in our recent presidential election.

Before you drift away to alluring and beckoning call of  Youtube Super Bowl Commercials, I want to make a few things very clear.  This will not be a moral lesson on America’s low voter participation.  Nor will I pontificate on our culture’s fascination with gladiatorial sports. I’ll even spare you an analysis the “socialist” business model of this most American of sports leagues. These are all interesting discussion points, but tertiary to the issue at hand. 

I want to know what possesses 163 million people (myself included) to watch a confusing, long and (for some) moderately boring sports event?

It’s been a long week, if I lack profundity today, I hope you will accept brevity.

I will cut to the chase.

I think that within the human spirit there is a desire to connect with a cause greater oneself, and sports give an opportunity to gather with other people and focus on a common cause or team. Whether as participants or fans, these games elicit powerful feelings of shared purpose and common focus, and community can form that transcends race, gender and class.

This week, Gifford Pinchot III, one of BGIs cofounders advised our class to find purpose in a cause greater than ourselves. I don’t think he was suggesting we root for the Jets.

Nonetheless, those of us that talk a good sustainability game could learn a thing from sports, and would do well to create a similar sense of camaraderie, purpose and team spirit around our common goals. 

Like the Super Bowl, sustainability is a big deal, but it’s not a spectator sport.