Wax On, Wax Off

One of my all-time favorite films was the 1984 version of The Karate Kid. In it, Daniel LaRusso, played by Ralph Macchio, is being bullied as a teenager who has just moved into a community. He seeks out a karate master, Mr. Miyagi, played by Pat Morita.

LaRusso expects Mr. Miyagi to drill him in karate moves, but, instead, he has Daniel doing seemingly unrelated household chores, such as waxing a car, painting a fence, and sanding a deck. At one point, Daniel is bewildered by Mr. Miyagi's directive to focus on the waxing task with the command: "Wax on, wax off" Daniel learns from Mr. Miyagi that the repetitive motions required for these tasks are directly relevant to the mastery of karate. His muscles memorize the movements and they become second nature. He defeats Johnny, played by William Zabka, in the climactic karate match and stops being bullied.

Mr. Miyagi's technique for teaching karate seems far removed from the incorporation of a culture of health in a business, but, in many respects, it points us toward a way of integrating business and physical activity to benefit both business and health. Unfortunately, many CEOs are so consumed with the dictates of their business that they believe they cannot take time to figure out how to create a healthy workforce.

The good news is that they can do both. The key is to develop processes that improve business results through activities that require walking and other forms of physical activity. These activities can reduce costs, increase revenue, organizational collaboration and learning, or participation in worthy community initiatives

Reducing costs

Until 2003, when Pitney Bowes had a large on-call customer service workforce, too much of their day was spent sitting in automobiles. Aside from the additional cost of traveling and the wasted time not serving customers, five hours of what we called "windshield time" was unhealthy. Excessive sitting was a symptom of unnecessarily low productivity.

In 2003, we changed the on-call routing system to reduce driving time, increase service productivity and reduce sitting time, which improved health. A business benefit drove the initiative, but it also reduced physical inactivity and improved health.

As a general rule, sitting time, whether in meetings, in project work, or in traveling and commuting is often less productive, especially if it dominates a workday. Businesses should be inventorying the number, duration and purpose of meetings to see if they are achieving their intended purpose. In many cases, as Dr. James Levine of the Mayo Clinic noted, "Sitting is the new smoking," meaning that sitting most of the day is as bad for health as smoking a pack of cigarettes.

Increasing revenues

I learned a harsh, but necessary, lesson in my second law firm when I was told that another attorney had been invited into the firm's partnership, whereas I was told to look for another job. The life lesson I learned is that, for almost any customer, getting out of our offices and visiting customers or clients where they live, work and play, gives us invaluable insights.

For businesses that sell to other businesses, visiting a customer site, walking around, and, as a Pitney Bowes Sales Training Center instructor told me in 1980, "stealing with your eyes" increased revenues. The attorney that got the partnership I was denied found that when he wandered at the client's place of business, he picked up random legal inquiries that added billable time to his ledger.

The physical activity was not the reason attorneys visit their clients or Pitney Bowes sales people did mailroom tours, but it was an ancillary benefit of doing so.

Learning

I am the co-chair of the Smithsonian Postal Museum Advisory Council. At this year's first meeting, we spent the first several hours doing a learning tour of the Air and Space Museum. It was exceptionally valuable. We gained insights about the visitor museum experience that we could not have gotten at a Postal Museum conference room. For example, museums have to strike a delicate balance between increasing the number of visitors to make them places that exude energy and excitement, but not so many visitors that crowds prevent individual visitors from enjoying the experience.

When I went to Berlin to see our daughter Katie, we visited the DuetschePost Postal Museum in Berlin twice, once on a guided tour and once a few days later on our own. I learned a great deal, which I shared with my colleagues at the US Postal Museum.

At Pitney Bowes and Eaton Corporation, where I served on the Boards for decades, site visits and attendance at trade shows were incredibly good learning experiences for Board members. When I was Pitney Bowes' Board Chair, the site visits gave Board members a chance to walk around our facilities and talk in a less structured, more open, fashion with frontline employees. At Eaton, the trade show opportunities, especially overseas at the Hannover, Germany CEBIT show and the Paris Air Show, both of which I attended in 2019, were great opportunities to see competitive products and to meet directly with large customers. It was a far more enriching experience than sitting in the Boardroom.

The current CEO Board Chair and CEO, Craig Arnold, changed our site visits from having all 12 Board members go to one site a year to having 3 Board members each do two site visits. We walked more, had deeper dialogues with management, and felt freer to divert from the prescribed site paths with fewer Board members. We also learned about 8 sites, instead of one by dividing our Board into four groups for these visits.

In the early 1980's, Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, in their great book In Search of Excellence, popularized the practice of "management by walking around." Physical activity was a side effect of an unstructured, but highly valuable, learning process.

Teamwork

Pitney Bowes had a residual image issue with respect to how our company was viewed when we hosted sales recognition events. Because of the wild, undisciplined, often alcohol-fueled behavior of our attendees in the 1970's and early 1980's, we were unwelcome at many popular venues, like The Breakers in Palm Beach, FL in 1996, when I became the CEO.

Our Chief Marketing and Sales executive, Kevin Weiss, and his team developed a brilliant solution to the problem. We decided to devote one afternoon at these conferences to a highly visible and beneficial community service event in the community. These events not only made the conference venues happy to host our event, but the cities and towns in which these events took place looked forward to our conferences and helped us with public relations activities.

We cleaned beach refuse in Bermuda from trash deposited overboard from cruise ships, painted a community center in Boca Raton, and went from class to class doing sports and fitness activity in Scottsdale, AZ and reading in multiple class on the island of Kauai, HI. Each of these activities involved physical activity, but their main benefit was community service.

HealthCode

For many years, I have been an advisor to HealthCode, a non-profit based in Austin, TX. Steve Amos, its founder and CEO, and a good friend, has been focused on the health value of physical activity, particularly walking. I have been doing a 10,000 steps-a-day program since 2004, a program to which I was introduced when Pepsico sponsored a National Urban League walking event through downtown Detroit. Since 2009, I have missed the 10,000 step target only the four days after a 2021 surgery.

Recently, HealthCode announced a partnership with the National Fitness Foundation, the only non-profit organization established by Congress for the purpose of supporting youth sport, health and fitness initiatives. The nation's health is deteriorating, which is why our healthcare insurance, payment, and provider system is failing and is not sustainable. We have to get back to basics and focus on nutrition and physical activity.

Relative to the last point, one of my learnings is that when we are engaged in purpose-driven physical activity, we are far less likely to graze at a desk and eat mindlessly. The difference between purposeful eating at meals and the incremental mindless eating we do at long meetings or long sessions at a desk is what makes so many more Americans overweight or even obese.