Everybody Rides!

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Last week I was honored to be able to speak at the 2012 ConvergeSouth conference, and one of the real highlights was meeting Tracy Myers. If you live in the Piedmont Triad and have a functioning TV set you've probably seen one of Tracy's commercials, but you may be surprised to learn that he's probably the most aggressive social marketers in the local small business community. At ConvergeSouth he gave a very good keynote presentation about his marketing approach and it would behoove any small business person interested in using social media to build his brand to check out how Tracy is approaching it. 

Here's a fun fact: Meyers is a fellow resident of Lewisville.

Will Obamacare Lead to a Part Time Nation?

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Darden Restaurants, parent company of restaurants like Olive Garden and Red Lobster, is experimenting with limiting the hours worked by some of its employees to see if it can avoid provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) – a.k.a. Obamacare – that go into effect in 2014:

Analysts say many other companies, including the White Castle hamburger chain, are considering employing fewer full-timers because of key features of the Affordable Care Act scheduled to go into effect in 2014. Under that law, large companies must provide affordable health insurance to employees working an average of at least 30 hours per week.

If they do not, the companies can face fines of up to $3,000 for each employee who then turns to an exchange — an online marketplace — for insurance.

"I think a lot of those employers, especially restaurants, are just going to ensure nobody gets scheduled more than 30 hours a week," said Matthew Snook, partner with human-resources consulting company Mercer.

Darden said its goal at the test restaurants is to keep employees at 28 hours a week.

Analysts said limiting hours could pose new challenges, including higher turnover and less-qualified workers.

It would seem logical that employers would limit employees to part time status whenever possible in order to avoid fines for not providing health insurance, but on the other hand employers already spend much more than $3,000 per full time employee on health insurance – $10,522, of which the employees paid $2,204, according to the Society of Human Resource Management – so it would seem even more logical for them to stop providing health insurance altogether and lower their expenses by over 50% overnight. 

Here are some other questions:

  • How many companies, in industries that have not historically had high levels of part time employees, will start turning jobs that had been done by one full time employee into multiple positions filled by part timers? 
  • Are there provisions in the ACA that would prevent that?

 

Swiss Table Manners

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Found this list of Swiss table manners via the excellent Swiss Miss blog and think they're useful beyond the borders of Bankerland:

  1. Be on time.
  2. Always wait for everybody to be served before beginning to eat.
  3. All meals are usually started with the words "bon appetit" or "guten Appetit."
  4. If wine is served, wait until the host begins the toast.
  5. When toasting, chink your glass with everybody at the table and look each person in the eyes before drinking.
  6. Keep your wrists on the table, but never your elbows. Do not place your hands in your lap.
  7. Remember to always say please and thank you.
  8. French bread is always torn rather than cut with a knife.
  9. Lift your forearm from the table while moving the fork to your mouth.
  10. Use your left hand for the fork and the right for your knife and gently push food on your fork.
  11. If you are served cheese as a wheel, it should be cut from the centre into slices (as you would slice a pie).
  12. When finished, put your knife and fork parallel to one another on your place as if they were hands on a clock indicating 5:25. If you don't do this, your host will serve you more food.
  13. Finish everything you take on your plate. The Swiss do not appreciate waste.

Additional children rules: make sure children wash their hands before meals. Children generally must wait to leave the table until everyone is finished.

Good luck with that last one.

Where Efficiency Goes to Die

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"Baumol's disease" provides an interesting explanation for why service businesses like health care can only be so efficient. Can they be more efficient than they currently are? Absolutely, but any improvements made will not bring delivery costs down to the levels found on the product side of our economy. From Steven Pearlstein's column in the Washington Post:

No matter how innovative people were in coming up with new technology and new ways of organizing their work, Baumol and Bowen reasoned, it would still take a pianist the same 23 minutes to play a Mozart sonata, a barber 20 minutes to cut the hair of the average customer and a first-grade teacher 12 minutes to read her class “Green Eggs and Ham.” Based on this observation, the duo predicted that the cost of education and health care would inevitably outstrip the price of almost everything else.

Now, 50 years later, Baumol has updated and expanded his observation with a new book,“The Cost Disease,” which sheds some useful light on our current economic debate.

The basic facts are well-known to most Americans: Over the past 30 years, overall prices have risen 110 percent, median income has risen 150 percent, medical costs have risen 250 percent and college tuitions have risen 440 percent.

To hear the politicians talk, you’d think the rise in tuitions and medical costs was an American phenomenon. But as Baumol points out, the growth rates are pretty consistent across all developed countries.

The whole column is an interesting read, and I would be remiss if I didn't point out that Pearlstein's the Robinson Professor of Political and International affairs at my alma mater, George Mason University. 

The Glaze

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This quote from Mark Bowden's book Worm: The First Digital World War – a book I haven't read but  sounds very interesting so I'm going to get myself a copy – comes via Rex Hammock's blog:

Mark Bowden describes a phenomenon called “The Glaze” that “every geek has experienced” when talking about technology with a lay person: The unmistakable look of profound confusion and uninterest that descends whenever a conversation turns to the inner workings of a computer.

If you change the end of the sentence from "a computer" to "my job" that sentence perfectly describes the look on my family members' and friends' faces whenever I talk about work. There's a reason I've earned the title "King of BS (Boring S***).

Teachers Paying Teachers

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Contained in a blog post about the publishing industry is this eye-opening paragraph about what seems to be a possible paradigm shift in the textbook industry (one can only hope):

So lets take a deep breath and go back a step. The article on earning a million was sent to me by my daughter as a follow-up to both of us quoting the performance of the web service  www.teacherspayteachers.com. Here US teachers deposit their learning plans and receive royalties on their re-use. Deanna Jump, a kindergarten teacher from Georgia, has become the first teacher to earn a million dollars in royalties. The site has had 50 million page views in the last 30 days and teachers post over 800 resources a day. The site has a rival (not mentioned in the article) in the shape of the UK periodical Times Educational Supplement, which has adopted this business model and teamed up with the leading US teachers union in a jv, while exploiting a global market from London. As advertising retreats the TES has executed a wonderful transition: not migrating so much as re-inventing itself in close alignment to what its readers needed to be better teachers. Indeed, in some ways this is re-inventing the textbook as much as the magazine, but whatever it is the outcome is the same: understanding how users work and supplying (in this case user-generated) content in the right context and with the right interface is the new publishing.

Check out the "About" page for TeachersPayingTeachers and behold some pretty incredible numbers:

TpT by the Numbers

40,000+ Free Resources
250,000+ Products
1,100,000+ Registered Users
50,000,000+ Page Views/Month
$10,000,000+ Teacher Earnings

This kind of thing has been a long time coming. It's been baffling how the textbook companies have been able to keep a stranglehold on the school systems even as technology has reduced the cost of self-publishing and enabled peer-to-peer sharing. It will be interesting to see how this service plays out politically – it's hard to imagine school systems allowing teachers to take wholesale control of their curricula, or the textbook industry to go down without a huge fight – but in these days of austerity there might be a chance for some cost saving innovations like this to take hold.

Again, we can only hope.

Visiting Ten Thousand Cities

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Pat Conroy wrote the following parapraph in a Letter to the Editor of The Charleston (WV) Gazette in reaction to learning that two of his books had been banned by the local school board:

The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language. Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer inLonesome Dove and had nightmares about slavery in Beloved and walked the streets of Dublin in Ulysses and made up a hundred stories in The Arabian Nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in A Prayer for Owen Meany. I've been in ten thousand cities and have introduced myself to a hundred thousand strangers in my exuberant reading career, all because I listened to my fabulous English teachers and soaked up every single thing those magnificent men and women had to give. I cherish and praise them and thank them for finding me when I was a boy and presenting me with the precious gift of the English language.

This is why reading is more than fundamental.