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Paper production is a notoriously pollution-rich process.One of the most toxic and least necessary chemicals currently used ischlorine.Ìý Paper mills use chlorineand chlorine gas to bleach pulp for brighter white paper products. One mightmake an argument for bright white printing paper, but really, do we need brightwhite toilet paper, napkins, and paper towels?Ìý For that matter, how bright does printing paper really haveto be?Ìý Why do FedEx boxes andenvelopes have to be bright white? Will...

Paper production is a notoriously pollution-rich process.
One of the most toxic and least necessary chemicals currently used is
chlorine.Ìý Paper mills use chlorine
and chlorine gas to bleach pulp for brighter white paper products. One might
make an argument for bright white printing paper, but really, do we need bright
white toilet paper, napkins, and paper towels?Ìý For that matter, how bright does printing paper really have
to be?Ìý Why do FedEx boxes and
envelopes have to be bright white? Will they lose packages if they cannot see
them in the dark?

Paper mills dump tons of dioxins - byproducts of the
chlorine bleaching process - into American streams and rivers. Dioxins
accumulate in fat cells, and have been implicated in higher cancer rates, as
well as reproductive and developmental harm in both animals and humans. If
paper mills only had to bleach a very few premium products, how much less
dioxin would be released into the environment?

Better still, mills could use less environmentally damaging
bleach agents, such as hydrogen peroxide, which produces byproducts of water
and oxygen. The paper industry might need a little nudging. I think the most
effective way to move paper mills from chlorine to less damaging chemicals is
to build a viable market for unbleached products. That's why I've asked my
partners and coworkers to switch to chlorine-free paper products.

Back in the late 80s and early 90s, we faced a surprisingly
difficult challenge introducing recycled paper into our Kinko's stores. At that
time, recycled paper was a specialty product, manufactured in relatively small
quantities. As a result, it was more expensive than virgin bright white
paper.Ìý We introduced recycled
paper at our stores in Portland, Oregon, a city known for its environmental
consciousness. Yet customers balked at paying a half-cent more per sheet.Ìý

This presented a quandary, because people wanted recycled
paper, but did not want to pay more for it. We had a business to run, and did
not want to shoulder the entire burden and expense of offering a more
environmentally friendly choice. Our solution was to grow the market ourselves
- we took a chance and made recycled paper the default choice in our thousands
of copiers nationwide, significantly increasing demand and bringing down the
price in the process.

I'm no longer affiliated with Kinko's, but I think other
companies can do for chlorine-free paper products what Kinko's helped to do for
recycled paper. I understand that FedEx cannot exactly adopt a "brown is
beautiful" environmental campaign while competing with UPS, but there are quite
a few shades still available between the bright white FedEx boxes and UPS brown.

For more information on eco-friendly paper products, check
out this
from the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Ìý

When a person living in a small village in India buys a can
of Campbell's soup, that act triggers an elaborate economic scorekeeping system
that both describes and empowers worldwide commerce. The scorekeeping system is
called accounting, and the score is a measure of rewards owed to people along
the value chain for their effort, ideas and investments.

Accounting is the most practical subject in school, becauseit expresses what all of us do with money everyday. I'm not saying thatgeometry is n...

When a person living in a small village in India buys a can
of Campbell's soup, that act triggers an elaborate economic scorekeeping system
that both describes and empowers worldwide commerce. The scorekeeping system is
called accounting, and the score is a measure of rewards owed to people along
the value chain for their effort, ideas and investments.

Accounting is the most practical subject in school, because
it expresses what all of us do with money everyday. I'm not saying that
geometry is not practical, but when a teacher tells a roomful of ninth graders
that they'll need geometry if they ever want to build a bridge across the
creek, well, most people live to a ripe old age without building a single
bridge.

But we go to the supermarket and the gas station pretty
often, and we want to know whether we can afford a gallon of milk, a dozen
eggs, and a tank of gasoline. We
don't call it accounting, but that's what it is. And with a little instruction,
we could be handling our money a lot better. Most Americans don't budget, don't
regularly balance the checkbook, and can't seem to understand where the money
goes.

Knowledge of accounting empowers business people across a
wide range of disciplines, building credibility into marketing plans, product
proposals, and HR decisions. Today, business students can take classes in
entrepreneurialism, marketing, management, leadership, organizational analysis,
etc.; and they all offer valuable lessons. People often skip accounting because
it seems too banal, or, for those with math anxiety, too difficult. But
accounting is the very language of business, just as mathematics is the
language of science. To fully understand your business, you need to understand
its accounting.

Think about all the executives in the news who didn't seem
to understand how the finances at their own companies worked. Think about all
those people who panic at tax time because they don't understand basic
financial terminology - even after their accountant explains it! Whether you
are still a student or have long-since graduated, consider taking an accounting
class. It's a great way to empower yourself in business and increase your
overall financial literacy.

Many supervisors feel tremendous angst when they must fire a
coworker. But there are two groups for whom the termination process is easy:
bad supervisors and great supervisors.

Bad supervisors find terminations easy because they areoblivious to their own failures in the hiring and development process, they don'tcare about the person they have failed, and they don't make the connectionbetween these failures and the company's performance. And since they face norepercussions from the bad...

Many supervisors feel tremendous angst when they must fire a
coworker. But there are two groups for whom the termination process is easy:
bad supervisors and great supervisors.

Bad supervisors find terminations easy because they are
oblivious to their own failures in the hiring and development process, they don't
care about the person they have failed, and they don't make the connection
between these failures and the company's performance. And since they face no
repercussions from the bad supervisors to whom they report, it's easy to place
the blame on the terminated coworker, wash their hands of the whole affair, and
move on to the next victim. (BookSurge, 2009) author Dean Zatkowsky calls them "bossiopaths,"
because they bring a sociopath's self-centeredness to the workplace.

Great supervisors, on the other hand, find it easy to fire
poor performers because they do so to benefit the terminated coworker and the
organization. The difference between the good supervisor and the bad supervisor
is that the good supervisor knows that his or her top priority is the success
of the people supervised. Even if that success must be found elsewhere.

Generally speaking, there are two reasons to fire a
coworker: poor performance and values violations. Termination for values
violations should be a no-brainer, because what you tolerate, you encourage.
If, for example, you let a top performing salesperson get away with dishonest
behavior, you will quickly build a culture of dishonesty. Fire them fast and
don't look back.

Great supervisors devote tremendous effort to hiring and
developing coworkers, but the need to terminate for poor performance still
arises. Perhaps a coworker's skills or self-motivation were misjudged. Perhaps
a coworker's motivation has lapsed over time. How do you fire a poor performer
in a way that benefits the coworker?

Bad supervisors tend to handle terminations through the
annual performance review, which UCLA professor of management Samuel Culbert
calls, "...the most pretentious, fraudulent, ill-advised exercise taking place at
companies." In his book, (Business Plus, 2010), Culbert says that instead of holding
an annual adversarial meeting where coworkers defend their mistakes, companies
should engage in "performance previews."

In other words, do what great supervisors have always done:
maintain a constant dialogue with coworkers to ensure everyone understands each
other's goals, objectives, and performance on an ongoing basis. In such
environments, termination is neither a surprise nor a humiliation - it is
merely the fulfillment of an agreement between responsible parties. The
coworker leaves knowing what went wrong and how to find a better fit at another
organization.

Just as with values violations, poor performers must be
terminated quickly. Do not live with a problem - whether you are motivated by
kindness, laziness or discomfort, your tolerance of poor performance hurts you,
the coworker and the organization. The longer you let it go on, the more damage
you do.

When you do your job well and maintain an environment of
accountability and transparency, firing people is easy. I did not say it's fun.
It certainly is not fun. But after hiring, it's the supervisor's greatest
responsibility to his or her coworkers.

Not too many years ago, any teenage sports fan with a
part-time job could easily afford Dodger or Laker games here in Los Angeles.
Today, a few hours at the ballpark or arena is a big financial decision for
working people - it could easily cost two hundred dollars for a family of four
to enjoy a day at the game.

Am I just grumpy and feeling nostalgic for the good olddays? No, I'm angry because the absurd spike in ticket prices is a marketdistortion caused by spendthrift executives wasting...

Not too many years ago, any teenage sports fan with a
part-time job could easily afford Dodger or Laker games here in Los Angeles.
Today, a few hours at the ballpark or arena is a big financial decision for
working people - it could easily cost two hundred dollars for a family of four
to enjoy a day at the game.

Am I just grumpy and feeling nostalgic for the good old
days? No, I'm angry because the absurd spike in ticket prices is a market
distortion caused by spendthrift executives wasting other peoples' money. And I
hate waste.

I expect frugality in my business partners, and chose
Kinko's owners who showed a history of saving money - if they were not careful
with their money, why would I expect them to be careful with mine? Today, when
I buy stock in a company, I view that company's executives as my business
partners, and I hold them to the same standard of frugality.

I've written in the past about Manhattan's opulent
restaurants, crowded to capacity at lunchtime as executives treat each other to
lunch on the shareholder's dime. I also find it outrageous that people brag
about their $2,500 Lakers tickets. Companies purchase expensive tickets because
they are tax deductible - those fancy skyboxes are taxpayer-subsidized entertainment.

That's right: We can't afford daycare or school lunches or
pre-school, but we can subsidize luxury skyboxes. Don't let anyone tell you
that such entertainment is necessary to conduct business, because it isn't. In
fact, the business use of luxury entertainment seems highly suspect. How poor a
salesperson do you have to be if you need to offer such expensive gifts? What
kind of customer demands such things?

This kind of entertainment has no business purpose, costs
the taxpayers money, and makes sports events too expensive for local fans. As points out, the main reason tickets have
become so expensive is because companies bid up the prices by throwing
shareholders' and taxpayers' money around.

According to authors Richard Schmalbeck and Jay Soled, "Over
the last two decades, the average ticket price for a Chicago Cubs game has
increased 265 percent, more than four times the inflation rate."

Current business-entertainment deduction rules encourage
waste. The authors call them "...little more than an excuse for corporate
executives to consume luxury items at a discount, distorting markets and
cheating the public out of substantial tax revenue."

I don't like anybody wasting money, whether it's the
government or a private company or a child that hasn't learned the value of his
or her allowance. It just rubs against the grain. Schmalbeck and Soled
recommend a fixed $50 deduction for luxury tickets, and I see the logic of
their idea. Not only would this bring ticket prices back to a more natural
market level; it would also help executives remember their responsibility to
spend the company's money wisely.

Ìý

A curmudgeonly colleague of mine claims that he prefers
automatic teller machines to human bank tellers because, "the machine knows me
better, and it always says, 'thank you.'"

He may be on to something. Online retailers Overstock.com,Zappos.com, and Amazon.com came in 2nd, 3rd, and 4thin the , right behind 1stplace winner L.L. Bean, the catalog-retailing giant. Television shoppingchannel QVC came in fifth, which means that none of t...

A curmudgeonly colleague of mine claims that he prefers
automatic teller machines to human bank tellers because, "the machine knows me
better, and it always says, ‘thank you.'"

He may be on to something. Online retailers Overstock.com,
Zappos.com, and Amazon.com came in 2nd, 3rd, and 4th
in the , right behind 1st
place winner L.L. Bean, the catalog-retailing giant. Television shopping
channel QVC came in fifth, which means that none of the top five retailers in
this customer service survey is known for face-to-face service.Ìý

Brick-and-mortar retailers Nordstrom and Kohl's tied for
tenth place. These companies seem to maintain a culture of customer service in
shops dispersed throughout hundreds of malls, but in many other stores, it
seems as if the salespeople often know less about their products and services
than their customers do, and nothing at all about the customers themselves.

Two differences leap to mind when I consider the survey
rankings.

First, the online and catalog retailers know how to use
customer information. For years, consumers ridiculed Radio Shack, which
continuously badgered them for information but never seemed to use it for any
specific purpose. Amazon, on the other hand, quickly seems to know its
customers better than their own spouses do.

When you walk into a department store, your buying history
does not change the layout of the store to accommodate you, but when you log
onto Amazon, it does. Customers may
choose to refine the system's knowledge by rating purchases, but even when they
don't, the personalization of the shopping experience is surprisingly accurate.

Ironically, the automated shopping experience often seems
more personal than the in-person store visit. While mall clerks robotically
attempt to upsell whatever product their manager overstocked, online retailers
suggest additional products and services based on your known preferences.
Upselling has long been a retail profit enhancement tactic - online retailers
turn it into a customer benefit.

Another significant difference is that unlike
brick-and-mortar retailers, catalog and online companies have the option to
hire and train a small core of centrally located customer service
representatives. As a result, the company's leadership exerts direct influence
on coworker development and organizational culture.

Physical retail chains face a tougher challenge. A far-flung
empire of buildings, managers, and part-time coworkers presents numerous points
of failure. As the survey notes, some physical retailers do a good job, but the
world of shopping has changed, and it will be interesting to see whether
in-person retailers will find a way to benefit from the customer service
innovations of their online competitors.

Ìý