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Good for You, Good for Business, and Good for the Earth

Don't you just love a good story, where everyone wins and even the planet benefits? I do. Especially when it's a story about a business that takes a product that has been around forever, and through innovation improves it.

HangerNetwork is just such a company.

Founder and Chief Operating Officer J.D. Schulma brings us the EcoHanger, "a sturdy replacement for wire hangers that can be folded and tossed into the ordinary household recycling bin. Because they biodegrade relatively quickly, the hanger conceivably could displace significant amounts of difficult-to-dispose-of garbage every year," according to an article at CNET News.com entitled Earth-friendly hangers coming to a dry cleaner near you.

According to a quote, "3.5 billion wire hangers go into U.S. landfills every year, and they sit in there for over a hundred years." And the hangers are affordable to owner of the cleaners.

Now that's what I call a good business story. Go to CNET for the entire article.

Secrets to Success?

I just watched a spot on CNN called Secrets to Success, except it offered no secrets nor any measures of success. Instead, it used a few soundbytes to describe New Jersey Nets CEO Brett Yormark, who took the job in January 2005.

How did they measure his success? He works 19 1/2 hours a day, spends 9 1/2 hours a day in meetings, receives 57 telephone calls and 100-plus e-Mails daily, and spends a great part of every day roaming the halls because he is hands-on.

My take: If he puts in that many hours, he must not be efficient and hardly has the time to spend half of his time in meetings or talking on the phone, let alone checking his own e-Mail.

My point isn't that Yormark isn't a good or even great CEO. Everyone knows that CEOs have long days sometimes (although 19 1/2 hours seem extreme and if I were the Chairman of the Board, I might ask what the heck takes him so long to do his job). In fact, my point has nothing to do with Yormark. Instead, it has to do with the way the TV spot measures success. None of these soundbytes have anything to do with results, and they could be interpreted negatively, as I did, neutrally or positively, depending on a person's point of view.

Our culture seems all too often ready to equate long hours at work with success. We need to abandon that perspective, as it results in lower productivity from workers afraid to admit they have completed their work for the day and, therefore, are going home, and it results in fatherless and motherless children whose parents put in unnecessarily long hours, and it hurts business. How?

Every worker's success should be measured by results, not hours on the job. Results drive revenues; results drive margins; results drive profits; results drive better products and services. Hours worked as a measure of success is mindless and useless.