Many leaders reduce costs by cutting headcount. But too often, they fail to eliminate the work those employees performed. Even when workloads are reduced, the result is higher stress for those who remain and little sustainable improvement in performance. Reducing staffing through productivity improvements is necessary, but most effective when it is done more gradually.

I took a different approach. I believed there were three primary sources of cost reduction and profit expansion that did not rely on workforce reductions: increasing revenue yield from customers who imposed costs on us, reducing vendor expenses, and lowering taxes and regulatory burdens.

I began learning this lesson in my first high school job as a dishwasher in a small bakery. It was physically demanding work, but it taught me something enduring. The owner insisted that partially used wax paper be saved and reused, reducing costs by two cents per sheet. He also corrected a worker who overfilled eclairs, noting that customers were not particularly sensitive to the difference.
The lesson was simple: small amounts matter.

That lesson was reinforced repeatedly. As a student, I sold $2,000 worth of ten-cent raffle tickets. The Harvard Law School Dormitory Council raised $9,000 annually through small transactions: events, films, and pinball machines. Millions of Americans contributed spare change to the March of Dimes. Even the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty was funded through small contributions organized by The New York World.

Over time, I saw a consistent pattern: large sums are often built from small, overlooked increments.

When I became President of Pitney Bowes Financial Services, this insight shaped my thinking. In an overall Pitney Bowes business generating $6 billion in revenue and nearly $1 billion in operating profit, of which Financial Services was a significant contributor. there had to be untapped opportunities hidden in plain sight.

I focused on three areas:
1. Ensuring customers paid for the costs they created and the value they received
2. Challenging every vendor expense
3. Reducing unnecessary regulatory and tax burdens

We viewed ourselves as stewards of our shareholders’ capital. That meant asking disciplined questions about every dollar:
1. Are customers fully compensating us for the value we deliver and the costs we incur?
2. Are vendor charges justified and competitive?
3. Are we incurring costs that regulation or tax strategy could reduce?

These opportunities often go unaddressed because they exist in small increments across many parts of the organization. They rarely appear prominently in financial statements and are easy for senior executives to overlook. I became relentless about identifying and capturing these incremental dollars and building a team that shared that mindset.

Capturing Revenue Hidden in Plain Sight

One of the first opportunities I identified was the underutilization of ancillary fees. I drew inspiration from automobile leasing ads in the Sunday edition of The New York Times. Beneath attractive monthly rates, fine print revealed numerous fees, late charges, application fees, delivery charges, that significantly increased total revenue.

These fees were not arbitrary. They reflected real costs. Late payments imposed financing costs. Credit checks required third-party reports. Equipment delivery and pickup involved real logistics expenses. Yet many of these costs were not being recovered. We implemented charges to cover these expenses across a global base of nearly two million lessees.

We also introduced a new offering, Value-Max. For $10 per month, customers no longer needed to provide proof of insurance. In return, we guaranteed replacement of lost, stolen, or damaged equipment within 48 hours. It was a clear value proposition. Approximately 65% of customers adopted it, generating over $30 million in operating profit.

In total, ancillary revenue grew from $4 million in 1993 to more than $230 million a decade later. Most of it flowed directly to the bottom line.

Turning Vendor Costs into a Source of Advantage

Vendor costs are often treated as fixed. In reality, they are one of the most under-managed sources of value creation. Facilities and administrative expenses, utilities, telecom, software licenses, maintenance contracts, rarely draw executive attention individually. But in aggregate, they represent a significant opportunity.
Our CFO, Bruce Nolop, led a focused effort to challenge both pricing and consumption. The result was annual savings of $10–15 million.

We also addressed discretionary spending, travel, lodging, meals, and events, where costs had quietly accumulated over time. Some opportunities required deeper analysis. For example, we were paying $2.25 million annually for unsuccessful equipment deliveries and pickups. By hiring five employees at a total cost of $250,000, we reduced failures by two-thirds and saved $1.25 million annually.

We also treated employee-related costs, healthcare, disability, workers’ compensation, and absenteeism, as controllable rather than fixed. By redesigning programs, improving engagement, and aligning incentives with outcomes, we reduced these costs by more than $40 million annually compared to peer companies.

The broader lesson was clear: many of the largest cost opportunities are hidden in categories leaders assume cannot be changed.

Challenging Regulatory and Structural Assumptions

The third category involved regulatory and structural inefficiencies.
The Postal Service imposed requirements on postage meters that made sense in an earlier era but became outdated with digital technology. For example, when a customer moved, meters had to be physically replaced rather than updated digitally. We challenged these assumptions. Several requirements were eliminated, saving $5–10 million annually.

We also pursued pricing advantages. I had long believed that postage meters saved the Postal Service money, approximately $500 per meter annually compared to stamps. That insight led to sustained advocacy for pricing discounts.
Over time, we secured discounts for electronic confirmation services and built a presort network handling 15 billion pieces of mail. This business generated $100 million in operating profit. Even a tenth-of-a-cent improvement in discounts added $15 million in profit.

Building a Culture That Sees What Others Miss

These examples share a common theme: meaningful financial impact often comes from opportunities that are individually small but collectively large. In a business environment where core markets were flattening, these incremental gains enabled continued growth in both revenue and profit.

But capturing them required more than analysis. It required a cultural shift.
Someone had to be accountable for identifying and acting on these opportunities. More importantly, the entire organization had to adopt the mindset that no dollar was too small to matter, and no assumption too small to challenge.
Most companies search for growth in big, visible bets, new markets, acquisitions, or transformative technologies. We found it elsewhere.

In small, disciplined decisions repeated thousands of times across the organization. That is where the real economics of performance lives.

And once you see it, you realize: the biggest opportunities are often hiding in the smallest numbers.

Why the roles others avoid often create the greatest opportunity

At several critical points in my career, I accepted roles that others actively avoided.

They were seen as low-prestige, high-stress, and offering little upside. In some cases, even touching the problem felt like grabbing a live wire. Most people advised me to stay away.

In retrospect, those decisions were among the most valuable I ever made.

A Role No One Wanted

When I was offered the HR leadership role at Pitney Bowes by CEO George Harvey, nearly every senior leader I consulted urged me to decline. They saw it as a thankless job, highly visible when things went wrong, but unlikely to create a path to broader leadership. They advised me to wait for a more traditional operating role.

Two people saw it differently.

My father-in-law, an experienced outside counsel to a public company, viewed the role as a developmental opportunity. My father, who had left school at age 14 during the Great Depression, gave even more pragmatic advice: the CEO would be grateful to someone willing to take on a difficult problem, and the job would likely be secure and well-compensated precisely because others did not want it.

I accepted.

What I Learned

That decision revealed a counterintuitive truth that shaped the rest of my career and life: When a role is viewed as unattractive or risky, it often comes with fewer competitors, less interference, and far greater freedom to act.

In other words, the very factors that make a job “thankless” can make it uniquely powerful.

I was not viewed as a contender for the CEO role, and I was not behaving like one. As a result, no one was working hard to stop me. That gave me room to focus on doing the job exceptionally well.

Over time, we redefined key aspects of the HR function, particularly in how we approached employee health, benefits, and engagement. The company had been investing heavily in benefits, but those investments were increasingly viewed as entitlements rather than drivers of performance or commitment. That disconnect created both a challenge and an opportunity.

Because the issues had reached a level of urgency, my freedom of action was far greater than it would have been in a more stable or prestigious role.

Three Principles of “Thankless” Opportunity

Looking back, I have come to recognize three patterns that distinguish thankless jobs worth embracing from those best avoided.

High-Impact Problems Create Asymmetric Opportunity

The best thankless roles sit at the center of problems that matter.

At Pitney Bowes, rising healthcare costs and declining employee engagement were not peripheral issues. They were fundamental to the company’s long-term performance. Addressing them required rethinking the implicit contract between the company and its employees.

When a role gives you the chance to influence outcomes at that level, the potential upside far outweighs the perceived downside.

Neglected Roles Offer Freedom

Prestigious roles attract attention, competition, and second-guessing. Thankless roles often do not.

That lack of attention creates space to experiment, to act, and to lead without constant interference. When expectations are low or unclear, performance that might be considered incremental elsewhere can be transformative.

One of the most important advantages I had in that HR role was simple: no one was working hard to stop me.

Proximity to Reality Beats Prestige

As General Counsel, I had a broad view of the company but was often brought into decisions after key directions had already been set. In HR, I was embedded much closer to the flow of the business.

To do the job well, I had to understand the economics of each business unit, the challenges faced by front-line employees, and the informal networks that shaped how work actually got done. Our employee and labor relations teams were particularly valuable in surfacing the cultural dynamics that formal reporting often missed.

This proximity to reality provided insights that no executive committee presentation could replicate.

A Pattern That Repeats

Decades later, I have seen the same pattern play out in very different contexts.

In Naples, Florida, I joined my condominium association board at my wife’s urging, ,a role many people describe as the ultimate thankless job. I was elected president by my fellow board members.

During my tenure, we faced challenges unlike anything in the property’s 50-plus-year history: transitioning to professional management, navigating new structural and financial regulations, rebuilding after multiple hurricanes, upgrading infrastructure, and addressing rising insurance and tax pressures.

None of these issues were easy. All of them were necessary. The role demanded time, persistence, and difficult decisions. But it also offered something else: the opportunity to make a meaningful difference in a community that mattered to me.

At the end of that period, a group of owners funded and installed a plaque in our lobby expressing their gratitude.It was not something I expected. But it reinforced the lessons I had learned decades earlier.

Where the Real Opportunities Are

The roles that look least attractive on the surface often offer the greatest opportunity to learn, to lead, and to create lasting impact.

They are the places where problems are unsolved, expectations are unclear, and competition is limited. They are also the places where initiative, judgment, and persistence can matter most.

In a crowded field, most people compete for the same visible opportunities. But great careers are often shaped elsewhere: in the roles others choose not to take.

Leaders “See a Different Game”

When I was young, I was an avid reader of The Sporting News, a weekly newspaper whose tagline was “See a Different Game.”

Its promise was simple: by analyzing baseball statistics in new ways, it could uncover insights that ordinary box scores did not reveal. Some of the data came from official Major League Baseball statistics. But some of the most interesting insights came from amateur statisticians in the Society of American Baseball Researchers.

The lesson stayed with me throughout my career: leaders who find better data or analyze existing data differently can get superior results by seeing a different game.

Every business leader agrees in principle that data matters. But the real opportunity lies in finding data and signals that others overlook.

Today that challenge has become even more important. Audited financial statements still provide an essential minimum standard for reporting, but they are increasingly too limited to detect the deepest trends in a business.

Look at the edges of the bell curve

Many business analyses focus on averages. But some of the most valuable insights come from the outer edges of a bell curve.

I learned this when studying research from Dartmouth showing healthcare spending across more than 300 Medicare regions. On one axis was spending, from low to high. On the other axis were outcomes.

The surprising finding was that higher spending did not consistently produce better outcomes. This raised an important question: when does the relationship between spending and outcomes break down?

That insight helped us redesign our self-insured healthcare program. By investing more in prevention, navigation services, and incentives for cost-effective providers, we were able to improve health outcomes while reducing costs.

The lesson was clear: averages often hides the most important insight.

We applied the same thinking elsewhere. A handful of our inventors were extraordinarily successful in generating patents that produced large infringement royalties. One of them, Ron Sansone, secured a patent that eventually resulted in a $400 million royalty payment by Hewlett-Packard.

When we studied what these inventors did differently, we found something surprising. They were not necessarily better engineers or innovators. They were better predictors of where entire industries would eventually innovate and therefore where companies would most likely unknowingly infringe their patents.

The same statistical thinking helped us understand why some telesales customers retained postage meters after trial periods while others cancelled. A surprising pattern emerged: customers who opened the box quickly, installed the meter, and printed postage the first day were far more likely to remain customers.

A simple outbound call shortly after delivery increased retention dramatically.

The bell curve turned out to be a powerful tool for discovering insights hiding in plain sight.

Timeline analysis can reveal hidden trends

Another lesson is that portfolio averages can hide dangerous trends.

Shortly after I became CEO in 1996, analysts from Capital Group, our largest shareholder, questioned whether our equipment leasing business was earning an adequate return.

Our CFO assured me the portfolio exceeded our cost of capital. But the comment bothered me.

Instead of analyzing the entire portfolio, I asked the team to examine only the most recent two years of lease transactions. The results were troubling. Profit spreads were declining, asset values at the end of leases were falling, and tax advantages were shrinking. New leases were producing returns below our cost of capital.

The overall portfolio still looked healthy because older leases were profitable. But the hidden trend line was deteriorating. We began exiting that business, completing the process by 2006.

Without examining the timeline of new transactions, the problem would have remained hidden.

Pay attention to small anomalies

Sometimes the most valuable signals come from small behavioral anomalies. We noticed that about 250,000 customers were requesting emergency postage meter refills, paying a $25 fee each time.

At first this made little sense. These mailroom managers worked inside large organizations whose treasury departments could easily provide funds at far lower cost.

But the behavior suggested something deeper. When we studied the pattern, we discovered that many mailrooms preferred our financing because it gave them more control over their own spending and avoided internal chargebacks from corporate treasury departments.  This gave us confidence that extending lines of credit to long-term customers could be successful and scalable.

What began as a puzzling data point eventually led to a $200 million financial services business.  

Small anomalies often signal unmet needs.

Risk often hides in the future, not the past

Financial statements are excellent at reporting what has already happened. But they are less effective at measuring future risk.

John Miller, a colleague of mine on the Eaton Board and a retired oil company executive, taught me the value of applying a risk-adjusted cost of capital to major strategic decisions.

We eventually applied this method to our leasing business. Instead of evaluating expected profits alone, we discounted future cash flows using higher rates to reflect risk.

Once we did that, the case for exiting the business became compelling. When we ultimately sold the portfolio, our stock price rose 10 percent in a single day.

A similar lesson emerged in aircraft leasing. During the late 1980s, favorable tax rules made aircraft leases extremely attractive. Many companies, including Pitney Bowes, entered the business.

But these were 24-year commitments. Few companies adequately considered the risk of catastrophic disruptions over a 24-year period, especially given the troubled domestic airlines history. Bankruptcies were frequent and credit losses were staggering over time.

As a result of reduced air travel after 9/11, the airline industry collapsed into multiple bankruptcies in 2002. Pitney Bowes took a $213 million charge, while GE Capital recorded losses exceeding $4 billion.

The problem was not poor accounting. The problem was that accounting rules capture probable and estimable losses, not catastrophic risks which could not sized sufficiently to meet accounting requirements and whose timing could not be predicted.

Looking beyond financial statements

Today we are entering a new era.

Artificial intelligence makes it possible to analyze forms of data that never appear in financial statements or Management Discussion and Analysis sections of annual reports.

For example:  customer complaints in forums and social media, developer activity in software ecosystems, employee sentiment and talent flows, emerging competitive narratives, and supply chain disruptions

These signals often reveal changes in the business environment months or years before they appear in financial results.

Financial statements answer the question:

What happened financially?

But leaders increasingly need to understand:

What is changing in the system around us? What weak signals suggest emerging opportunities or risks? Which capabilities inside the organization are strengthening or weakening?

Building early warning systems

The challenge for modern leaders is to build parallel sensing systems alongside GAAP accounting. AI now makes it possible to monitor customer behavior, ecosystem health, talent flows, technology adoption, reputation dynamics, and competitive moves in near real time.

But the most important signal often remains human judgment.

At a pivotal meeting one year into my career as an operating executive, CEO George Harvey asked a simple question about the shipping products we leased to customers:

“Are these products that our customers want to buy or lease?”

The room fell silent. One manager finally offered a hesitant answer.  That hesitation told George everything he needed to know. Six weeks later he reorganized the business. Posing one question had become an early warning system.

Today, when a product or service struggles, I often ask a similar question:  “What would it take to make this a “must-have” rather than a “nice-to-have”?” The discussion that follows usually reveals signals we were not seeing before.

And that, ultimately, is what leadership is about:  learning to see a different game.

When I was a high school senior, I thought I should have been named valedictorian. My grades were higher than the student who received the honor.

Dad listened to my frustration and then gave me advice that stayed with me for the rest of my life:

“You left too much to chance.”

With the benefit of hindsight, I eventually realized that the school had made the right decision, even though it had to bend its pre-announced criteria to do so.

My classmate had gone all out to improve the life of the school. He was captain of two sports teams, president of the student council, and someone who generously opened his home to classmates. He was an extraordinary ambassador for the school both internally and externally.

I, by contrast, had spent most weekends participating in debate tournaments. I had worked hard academically, but had not invested very much in the institution’s broader life.

The Leadership Lesson

I realized that my father’s advice applied far beyond high school. The most valuable lessons often come from moments when things do not turn out as expected.

Sometimes those moments are failures, situations in which we make reasonable decisions or even make an all-out effort and still end up with disappointing results.

Sometimes they are mistakes, decisions that, even at the moment they occur, are clearly misguided.

The difference matters. But what matters even more is what leaders do next: whether they are willing to examine what happened honestly and learn from it.

Many of the most important decisions I later made as a Pitney Bowes executiv were shaped by lessons drawn from earlier failures and mistakes.

Understanding the Difference

Failures occur constantly in business and in life. Baseball offers a useful analogy. Great hitters fail roughly 70% of the time. Great pitchers lose about 30% of their games. Great teams lose 40% of the time.

Failure is not unusual. It is inherent in any competitive endeavor.

A mistake, however, is different. It is a decision or action that is clearly misguided even at the moment it occurs.

Michael Lynton, the former Chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment, described such a moment in his book From Mistakes to Meaning. In 2014 he approved the production and release of The Interview, a satire in which journalists assassinate North Korea’s dictator.

The consequences were catastrophic. North Korean hackers penetrated Sony’s computer systems, shut them down for months, and released enormous volumes of confidential data, including deeply personal employee information.

The following year Lynton met with President Obama, who asked him a simple question: “What were you thinking?”

That question usually follows a true mistake.

Yet whether the situation involves a failure or a mistake, something counterintuitive happens when organizations analyze them honestly. The process of understanding what went wrong is not just informative, it is therapeutic.

Learning from Failure at Pitney Bowes

Early in my Pitney Bowes time as an executive officer,  I had to inform our CEO that a proposed distribution agreement with a French postage meter company had collapsed. We had pursued the partnership repeatedly since 1956, but the U.S. Justice Department’s Antitrust Division repeatedly refused to approve it.

To represent us in this matter, I had retained an exceptionally capable outside counsel who had previously led the Antitrust Division. The choice proved to be a serious liability.

The Justice Department attorney reviewing the matter was openly suspicious of him and of us. Eventually we learned why. She had once worked for him and believed he had “sold out” too often to large corporations seeking regulatory relief.That perception shaped how she interpreted everything we submitted.

The lesson was clear. Whenever we retained outside counsel who had previously worked at a regulatory agency, we needed to understand their reputation among their former colleagues. They could be a tremendous asset or a serious liability.

I shared that lesson candidly with our CEO. He appreciated the reflection.

When Failure Is Large

Later in my career, an even larger failure led to my election as President, Finance Services. Our German leasing operation produced approximately $100 million in credit losses, one of the largest financial disasters in our history.

When I became CEO in 1996, I insisted that we study the episode in depth rather than bury it. A project team analyzed what had happened and presented its findings to our executive leadership council.

Three lessons stood out.

First, brokers originated most of the leases. We had no direct customer relationships and therefore had limited visibility into their creditworthiness.

Second, the German CFO, who reported solely to the local CEO, did not feel empowered to report the wrongdoing he suspected. We corrected this by creating a dual reporting relationship with the corporate CFO and strengthening our ethics and whistleblower systems.

Third, we realized that even when international executives speak perfect English and appear culturally similar, their business norms and values can be very different.

These lessons had strategic consequences. Over the following decade we exited non-core financial services businesses, particularly those outside the United States. That decision ultimately helped protect Pitney Bowes from the worst risks of the 2008 financial crisis.

Even Small Failures Matter

We applied the same discipline even to smaller setbacks. In 2001 our Management Services business lost its largest client, Bank of America, during a contract renewal.

The explanation initially seemed simple: our price was too high and we had not cultivated strong enough relationships with the key decision maker.

But months later a regional vice president told me something revealing. The real problem had occurred more than a year earlier. Bank of America had quietly signaled that it wanted a smaller and less expensive contract structure. We failed to respond to those signals. By the time the formal bidding process began, the outcome was already left too much to chance.

From then on I asked our teams to review major customer relationships well before renewal decisions approached. Three years later we won the Bank of America business back.

Why Reflection is Liberating

What makes the analysis of mistakes and failures so valuable is that their roots often lie deeper than the immediate decision.

Michael Lynton eventually concluded that his decision to release The Interview was influenced by something from his childhood. As a teenager he felt like an outsider and wanted desperately to be seen as “cool.” Supporting the film allowed him, in that moment, to feel accepted by the actors and studio insiders around him.

Understanding these deeper motivations takes time. But when leaders encourage that level of reflection, they give their organizations a powerful gift: freedom from fear. People become willing to examine what went wrong honestly rather than hide it.

That shift from fear to curiosity is where learning begins. Curiosity allows organizations to explore a wider range of explanations and solutions. It converts painful experiences into sources of insight and agency.

What Leaders Should Do with Failures and Mistakes

Looking back over my career, I have come to believe that leaders should approach failures and mistakes in three deliberate ways.

1. Create permission to analyze what went wrong.

Organizations often try to bury disappointing outcomes quickly. That instinct wastes valuable insight. Leaders should encourage teams to examine failures candidly and without fear.

2. Look beyond the immediate decision.

The most important causes of mistakes and failures often lie deeper—in organizational structures, incentives, culture, or personal motivations.

3. Translate lessons into structural change.

Reflection is valuable only if it leads to action. At Pitney Bowes, our reviews of failures led to changes in governance, reporting structures, customer management practices, and ultimately our long-term strategy.

When organizations do this well, failures become investments in future success rather than sources of embarrassment.

Leadership is not about eliminating mistakes and failures. That is impossible in any complex organization.

The real discipline of leadership is ensuring that every mistake and every failure leaves the organization wiser than it was before.

Fear is an unavoidable companion of leadership. It appears whenever leaders confront uncertainty, disruption, or decline in a core business. What distinguishes effective leaders is not the absence of fear, but their ability to convert fear into agency—by reframing situations, widening the questions they are willing to ask, and expanding the range of solutions they are willing to explore.

The most effective antidote to fear is deceptively simple: get people to ask, in every situation, “What is within our control or power to do that can influence the outcome?” That question shifts attention from paralysis to possibility, from anxiety to action.

I learned this early. More than sixty years ago, I watched my mother, by herself, raise the level of service at the Rochester Motor Vehicle Bureau. Faced with indifference from a clerk and a manager, she calmly explained what she would do next: call a local radio show, write officials in Albany, and tell everyone she knew about the experience. She understood something essential: agency is not about formal authority; it is about using the tools you actually have.

Converting fear into agency is not only good for business outcomes; it is an underrated driver of employee health and wellbeing. People who believe they can influence outcomes experience less stress, make better decisions, and perform at a higher level.

Early in my career, I experienced this firsthand. In 1986, before I was an executive officer, I challenged my company’s IT department when they insisted that the Legal Department deploy only IBM technology. I won only a partial victory, but something more important happened: I demonstrated agency in a situation where most people deferred to experts. Years later, the CEO told me that moment mattered to him because he himself felt insecure challenging the technologists.

Four later episodes reinforced for me how powerful this conversion from fear to agency can be.

1. Suing the U.S. Postal Service

In 1995, the U.S. Postal Service terminated a 17-year contract under which we operated the Postage by Phone revenue collection system—then issued a regulation ordering us to continue operating it without compensation. We believed the action was unlawful.

We had never sued the Postal Service. It was both our regulator and a powerful counterparty. Many feared retaliation, and those fears were understandable. But in my judgment, we had no choice.

Equally important was how we talked about the lawsuit. We needed to avoid overstating its significance, which could hurt our stock price, or understating it, which could damage credibility. Gershon Kekst proposed a simple message we used repeatedly:

“We have the technology and product leadership, the customer loyalty, the financial strength, and the talent to thrive—regardless of the relationship with the Postal Service.”

That statement did more than reassure investors. By internalizing it, we changed how we thought about ourselves. It strengthened confidence and reinforced a sense of agency across the organization.

2. Responding to 9/11 and Anthrax

In the fall of 2001, we faced two existential shocks. We lost four employees in the 9/11 attacks. Shortly thereafter, deadly anthrax spores were detected in the U.S. House of Representatives mailroom, which we operated.

Fear was unavoidable. But the questions we asked mattered: What can we do to reduce risk for employees and customers?And what opportunities might emerge from responding effectively?

Risk reduction was straightforward: dispersing critical assets, relocating backup data centers, strengthening crisis response plans, and deploying advanced detection tools. We executed decisively.

But we also looked for opportunity. When mail processing was moved out of the House building, we realized members would value having constituent mail opened and delivered electronically. It reduced risk for staff and dramatically improved responsiveness to constituents—especially since roughly 10% of mail was misdirected due to redistricting.

By asking opportunity-oriented questions even in tragedy, we reinforced a culture of agency rather than fear.

3. From “Mail” to “Mailstream”

As first-class mail volumes began to decline, fear spread among employees and investors. Earlier attempts to reposition the company as a “messaging” firm lacked credibility.

The reframing that worked was defining ourselves as a mailstream solutions provider. The pivotal question became: What will continue to grow even if letter mail declines?

Three answers stood out:

• Address management and location intelligence
• Package shipping solutions, especially for small retailers
• Mail aggregation and presort services

We invested in all three. But more important than the investments was the shift in mindset. Teams began asking:

• What profitable opportunities are adjacent to our current businesses?
• What upstream or downstream markets could we enter?
• Where could our U.S. leadership translate into international growth?

We did not succeed in every initiative, but we replaced anxiety with informed optimism, and that mattered.

4. Postal Regulatory and Legislative Reform

For years, postal reform had stalled. Labor unions were seen as immovable obstacles. Rather than surrender to that fear, we asked a different question: What can the industry and Postal Service do that does not require legislation?

The Mailing Industry Task Force identified practical steps, including intelligent mail barcodes, industry advocacy, a census to size the sector, and Sunday package delivery.

The census result was stunning: a $900 billion industry employing nine million Americans—nearly 9% of GDP. That insight changed the power dynamic.

As Chair of the Mailing Industry CEO Council, I asked one additional question: Where is there common ground with labor? The answer was rates. Higher postal rates suppressed mail volumes and union membership depended on volume. Three of four unions eventually supported, or at least did not oppose, reform.

The legislation passed in 2006. But the deeper success was replacing fatalism with agency.

Reverting Back to Fear

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act was well intentioned. But in practice, fear, particularly among auditors, CFOs, and boards, began to dominate decision-making. Mechanical compliance replaced judgment. Avoiding regulatory risk took precedence over serving investors, customers, and employees.

The moment I knew it was time to step down as CEO came when a director insisted we remove information from an earnings release, not because it was inaccurate, but because it might provoke an SEC comment. What our investors wanted no longer mattered.

Years later, a study of nursing home regulation captured the same pathology: organizations prioritize the guidance of the agency that can do the most harm, not the guidance that best supports health and wellbeing.

That is the cautionary lesson. Cultures driven by fear and compliance erode health, performance, and trust. Cultures that convert fear into agency. through curiosity, judgment, and action, do the opposite.

Fear is inevitable. Agency is a choice.

One underappreciated responsibility of public-company leadership is not simply setting ambitious goals, but matching those goals to what an organization can realistically achieve. Leaders must ensure that demands on employees do not exceed the tools, staffing, and time available to do their jobs well.

Stretching people, challenging them to improve and gain the confidence that improvement brings, is energizing. Stressing employees by setting targets that make them feel like failures if they fall short, or by forcing unreasonable hours and deadlines, destroys health and wellbeing.

Stretch energizes. Stress exhausts. Exhausted organizations make bad decisions, miss weak signals, and quietly erode trust.

Achieving stretch without stress requires leaders to think expansively about opportunity while remaining brutally honest about capability and risk. 

It took me several years into my tenure at Pitney Bowes to find that equilibrium. But the market environment shifted so dramatically before at about the time I retired that most CEOs and boards in our industry who served after my retirement, including ours, struggled to find paths to growth that did not over-stress their organizations.

Stage 1: Irrational Exuberance

Between 1996 (when I became CEO) and 2000, Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan described the stock market environment as one of “irrational exuberance.” Stock prices exceeded intrinsic value, and investors punished companies that failed to deliver exceptionally aggressive growth forecasts.

Jack Welch at GE became the industry role model. He appeared to deliver consistent double-digit earnings growth by expanding financial services businesses with massive, deeply hidden downstream risks.

Our stock rose from $24 a share in 1996 to an all-time high of 71⅜ in July 1999. Had we simply extrapolated our growth rates from that period, our market capitalization could have reached $75 billion within a decade. 

The projection was mathematically elegant, but strategically unrealistic. It would not survive unknown, but likely, adverse events. Like many companies, we internalized irrational exuberance.

Stage 2: A Dose of Reality (1999–2001)

Between early 1999 and the end of 2001, a series of events brought us back to earth. Highly profitable fax and copier revenues dropped sharply after 1998, which caused us to spin off both businesses in December 2001. Our mortgage servicing business was hit by an accounting mandate that exaggerated volatility and risk. In the third quarter of 2000, we missed our earnings guidance.

By 2001, we were at a crossroads. We needed a more sustainable way to define opportunity, one that stretched the organization without stressing it, and a more disciplined approach to risk.

At the same time, we faced a panicked reaction from employees and investors to the perceived threat of Internet postage. Despite strong operating performance, our stock fell sharply well before the earnings miss, reinforcing fear and organizational uncertainty.

We were beginning to stabilize when we experienced two back-to-back crises in the fall of 2001: the loss of four employees in the 9/11 attacks and the anthrax bioterrorism crisis, which struck 20 mailrooms, including the U.S. House of Representatives mailroom we operated.

We acknowledged these tragedies and their human impact. But we also asked a critical leadership question: what realistic opportunities might our response create, and how could we pursue them without compounding stress?

Stage 3: Opportunity Hidden in Plain Sight

By 2001, a better strategy was hiding in plain sight. While first-class mail volumes had flattened, the broader mailstream solutions market exceeded $250 billion. With the right mix of organic investment and acquisitions, we could outperform even as our largest legacy business faced limited growth.

The key was deciding where we could win credibly. We focused on adjacent businesses that leveraged existing capabilities rather than requiring heroic cultural or technical reinvention. At the same time, we invested in businesses such as address management, location intelligence, and presort services, that would remain viable even if first-class mail declined.

We repositioned ourselves as a “mailstream solutions” company rather than simply a “mailing” company. That shift gave employees, customers, and investors a more durable narrative and allowed us to reset expectations so that what we promised externally aligned with what employees could realistically deliver.

That balance enabled us to stretch the organization without breaking trust. Over time, we completed roughly 80 acquisitions, entered mail presorting, expanded address management services, and, through the acquisitions of Group 1 and MapInfo, built a strong position in location intelligence.

The Mathematics of Stretch Versus Stress

Beneath these strategic moves was one of the least discussed leadership disciplines: how objectives are set and communicated.

Our public goals were credible and achievable. Internally, however, stretch had to exist. Our CFO, Bruce Nolop, articulated a simple framework:

Externally communicated goals should be achievable essentially 100% of the time.  Internally, individual units should have objectives that collectively exceed the enterprise target, with enough difficulty that some units will fall short while others outperform.

That cumulative stretch drove innovation and accountability without creating the feeling of an endlessly accelerating treadmill.

Front-Line Metrics Shape Culture

Executing this balance required close attention to front-line metrics. Customer service productivity, call-center response times, sales quotas, and technician utilization may sound neutral, but they shape daily behavior, emotional energy, and customer outcomes.

We learned this repeatedly. Overly complex sales promotions sometimes overwhelmed order processing and support teams. Simplifying the commercial environment improved morale and service quality almost immediately.

Sales quotas worked well overall, but uneven alignment between quotas and realistic opportunity in certain geographies or product lines created hidden stress, even as market share remained strong.

Metrics that ignore human reality eventually fail, no matter how elegant they appear on spreadsheets.

Managing Pace, Cost, and Risk

Another persistent source of stress was misjudging the pace of adoption for new products and services. Forcing adoption faster than customers or governments could handle created internal chaos and external resistance. Leadership must manage not just the direction of change, but its speed.

Cost reduction required similar care. In 2003 and early 2004, we reduced service technician headcount too aggressively following early digital rollouts. The short-term costs in customer distress, employee stress, and execution quality were higher than anticipated.

Efficiency gains are real. But people absorb change at human speeds, not spreadsheet speeds.

At the same time, some of the most powerful improvements were small, local, and unglamorous, minor revenue enhancements or cost reductions that compounded meaningfully over time.

Strategic Inflection Points

There is no substitute for continuous risk assessment. I remain a strong believer in Andy Grove’s concept of “strategic inflection points,” moments when fundamental forces shift by an order of magnitude.

That inflection point hit our industry with the 2008 financial crisis, after I announced my retirement. Mail volumes were undermined from an unexpected source: a financial crisis that abruptly and irreversibly burst a consumer credit bubble that had pumped by mail volumes from 2001 to 2008. When it burst, mail volumes collapsed, but few initially understood why.

Despite having teams focused on mail market forecasts, their strategists’ insights were undervalued. Counterintuitively, when a company's major end market is in free fall, employees experience severe stress when the leadership and the Board of Directors do not react quickly enough and act as if they were leading a fragile start-up or early-stage growth company. Most of the mailing industry, including boards and leadership teams, adapted too slowly to the new reality.

Many, including Pitney Bowes, opted to find new growth by placing one or two large bets instead of multiple smaller ones, but it is a high-risk strategy and it did not work to produce an adequate growth path. When those bets fail, the stress on employees is devastating.

The Leader’s Real Job

Culture, capabilities, and market conditions should drive strategy. Execution must be matched to what is achievable with a given workforce. Objectives, staffing, and processes must stretch employees to succeed, but not push them beyond their limits.

This is not a formula. It is an art. And it is one of those leadership capabilities most often recognized only when it is absent.

Kindness is often treated as a personal virtue rather than a leadership discipline. In business, it is frequently dismissed as soft, naïve, or incompatible with hard decisions. My experience leading Pitney Bowes suggests the opposite.

Kindness, when practiced deliberately and systematically, reduces friction, builds trust, lowers stress, increases retention and loyalty and improves performance, including innovation. It is not a substitute for accountability or difficult choices. It is the way those choices are carried out.

It is understandable to confuse “kindness” with being “nice.”  A 2021 Fast Company article entitled “Research Explains the Big Difference Between Being Kind and Nice. One has a Bigger Impact on Success” defines the difference this way:

“Kind leadership is defined by our research as creating a culture of taking concrete action to help others, addressing a person’s need, regardless of tone, and giving permission for real success and failure. Niceness, by contrast, typically centers on pleasing others and being polite so as not to offend.”

This is one of many studies and reports making this argument. Kindness pays off.

A Business Model That Couldn’t Last

When I became an executive officer in 1988, our leadership team knew something fundamental: the way we had recruited, retained, and motivated talent for decades was unsustainable.

Pitney Bowes was never a high-pay company. We compensated with stability, generous benefits, profit sharing, rich pensions, free healthcare, and deep two-way communication through a formal annual structure called Jobholders Meetings and a monthly structure called the Council of Personnel Relations. We were also early in promoting women and people of color and took pride in being a responsible corporate citizen. Despite the fact that other local companies paid far more, even our most talented employees stayed.

But the world was changing. Accounting rule changes made pensions and retiree healthcare prohibitively expensive. Medical costs doubled every six years. Meanwhile, digital communication was beginning to flatten and eventually shrink paper-based mail volumes. Competing successfully would require factory closures, automation, fewer service technicians, and leaner operations.

We faced a stark question: why would talented people join or stay with us once the old value proposition disappeared?

The Principle That Endured

When I was named Vice Chair and future CEO in 1994, I articulated five governing principles: Think Big, Work Together, Spend Wisely, Act Fast, and Live Our Values.

At the core of those values was a simple idea, the Golden Rule: Treat people the way you would want to be treated.

That principle shaped a culture grounded in politeness, humility, and small acts of respect. We were “kind,” although some would say we often erred on the side of being too nice. 

My belief was straightforward: people don’t give discretionary effort because of pay, benefits, or perks alone, or even with the promise of rapid promotion. They stay because they feel seen, respected, and treated with dignity.  More recent data supports my conclusion.  That Fast Company article cited a study of Gen Z and Millennial workers who responded that having management that enabled them to find meaning in their work was worth more than a 5% pay increase.  

Kindness During Transition

We tested that belief under pressure.

Profit sharing ended. We froze our pension plan benefits for those long service employees close enough to retirement that they relied on the existing benefit, but phased down pensions for everyone else. Free retiree medical benefits were phased out. Employees began paying a meaningful share of healthcare costs. Factories closed. Service roles were eliminated. These were painful decisions, and there was no way to make them painless.

But there was a way to make them humane.

We invested in retraining. We redesigned jobs to improve productivity without burning people out. We helped displaced employees plan their next chapter. Senior leaders,including me, met personally with people who were leaving, not to defend decisions, but to acknowledge the human cost.

Kindness did not change the decisions. It changed how people experienced them.

Small Acts, Large Effects

Some of the most powerful gestures were small.

When employees reached milestone anniversaries, I sent personal notes describing their contributions in detail. Many framed them at work and at home.

I made a point of sitting with employees in cafeterias and asking about their families, not just their jobs. I learned early that meeting employees’ children, listening to their aspirations, created bonds of loyalty no compensation plan could replicate. 

After 9/11, when I was required to fly privately for four years, I invited employees traveling commercially to the same location to join me. On weekends, I met with local employees in remote cities when I attended my son’s chess tournaments. In Connecticut, I engaged in conversations with them at our town and school events, or community gatherings, or in local cafes, diners, supermarkets, and movie theaters.  Accessibility wasn’t symbolic; it was practiced.

What surprised me most was how quickly kindness became contagious. Members of our executive team found their own ways to express it with employees, customers, and communities. Recently, when our CFO Bruce Nolop passed away, the outpouring of gratitude over many small kind gestures in which he engaged without fanfare reflected a finance organization led with humanity, not fear, and a culture widely practiced by the executive team. 

Removing Friction at the Source

Kindness is not just interpersonal; it is structural.

We adopted a “One Company” mindset to reduce internal rivalries. We increased the portion of incentive pay tied to overall results. We rejected forced-ranking systems that pitted employees against one another and amplified stress.

We flattened executive perks. We narrowed office size disparities. We penalized blame-shifting and rewarded accountability. These choices sent a clear message: respect was not tied to rank.

Even in sales, where stack ranking was unavoidable due to capacity limits, we found alternative ways to recognize strong performers without humiliating others.

When Kindness Is Tested

Kindness is easiest when it costs nothing. The real test is when it does.

Twice, we terminated high-performing sales leaders who violated our Standards of Professionalism. Both took business to competitors. We enforced our values anyway. Their supervisors later told me that, despite the business they took away from us, morale improved because people knew standards actually mattered.

During a factory downsizing, we faced threatened litigation. I met personally with the lead plaintiff, a third-generation employee. What troubled him most was not losing his job, but how his sons had been treated during recruiting. I apologized, met with them, and encouraged them to apply. The lawsuit was withdrawn.

Years later, an employment attorney told me my leadership style had cost him business. I took that as a compliment, especially when he said that our conversations with employees who had already been terminated accelerated the healing process these individuals needed.

The Business and Health Dividend

Over time, the benefits became unmistakable. A culture infused with kindness:

• Reduced internal conflict and social fragmentation
• Built trust across functions and generations
• Lowered chronic stress and anxiety
• Improved cooperation, retention, and performance

Kindness did not make us less competitive. It made us more resilient.

A Modern Imperative

Today, the stakes are even higher. Social media can amplify empathy or cruelty. AI can reinforce dignity or automate harm. Leaders now have tools to stress-test decisions for unintended consequences and to scale behaviors that build trust rather than erode it.

Kindness is no longer optional. It is leadership infrastructure.

If you are a CEO or senior leader wrestling with transformation, performance pressure, or workforce health, I welcome the conversation.

You can reach me at mikeceo@moveflux.com.

When we talk about population health, we usually think of physicians, insurers, hospitals, or public policy. Yet for employed adults, few forces influence health more directly than the CEO.

Chief executives design the environments in which millions of people spend most of their waking hours. Those environments can reduce stress or quietly intensify Chronic stress remains one of the most powerful predictors of poor physical and mental health. The 2024 Headspace Workforce State of Mind annual survey, along with many other studies, firmly anchors population health in the CEOs words and actions.

In this and future editions, I will explore leadership traits that either elevate or undermine employee health. This essay focuses on three that matter enormously: transparency, accessibility, and fearlessness.

I came to appreciate their importance during my years leading Pitney Bowes, especially during periods of significant turbulence. Markets shifted. Technology disrupted assumptions. National crises shook confidence. I could not control those forces. I could control how we addressed them.

Transparency: Eliminating the Anxiety of the Unknown

Uncertainty breeds stress. When information is scarce, rumor expands to fill the void.

As CEO, I could not stabilize financial markets or prevent geopolitical shocks. But I could ensure that employees understood what we knew, what we didn’t know, and what we were doing in response.

Three episodes during my tenure required unusual clarity.

The Internet Postage Panic

In the late 1990s, investors became convinced that Internet postage would quickly make postage meters obsolete. Two venture-backed startups, without revenue, raised enormous capital and saw their valuations soar. Our stock price dropped sharply amid the speculation.

Rather than dismiss these fears, I addressed them directly. I asked a product leader to demonstrate to our Board how long it took to download and print a single stamp: nearly two minutes. The demonstration was simple but powerful. The technology was real, but the threat was not immediate.  I reminded every stakeholder of the quote often attributed to Bill Gates: “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.”

By confronting the issue openly and factually, we reduced internal anxiety. Over time, the hysteria faded. Our business remained strong.

9/11 and the Anthrax Crisis

In 2001, we lost four colleagues in the attacks on the World Trade Center. Soon after, anthrax was discovered in the U.S. House mailroom that we operated. Fear was understandable and widespread.

My response was to create a brief, weekly voicemail message to all employees. I called it Power Talk. Each message explained what we understood about events, how we were responding, and where uncertainties remained. I continued this practice until my retirement.

At the same time, our CFO held regular, candid briefings with senior leaders to explain financial realities and operating decisions. Transparency did not eliminate risk, but it significantly reduced speculation and rumor.

Research confirms this dynamic. Studies show that financial transparency reduces job-related stress. Employees can absorb difficult information; what undermines morale is ambiguity.

What Leaders Can Do

• Institutionalize recurring, concise business updates.
• Explain reasoning, not just outcomes.
• Clarify what is known, what is unknown, and what remains fluid.

Accessibility: Leadership as Presence

Transparency addresses information gaps. Accessibility improves health and wellbeing be reducing emotional distance.

Accessibility is not about optics or casual branding. It is about making leadership visible, reachable, and human.

At Pitney Bowes, we inherited traditions that encouraged executive presence. Senior leaders visited facilities worldwide and engaged in open dialogue sessions called Jobholder Meetings. Questions were welcomed, not filtered.

I expanded these efforts by holding skip-level meetings, smaller group discussions, and extended Q&A sessions. I responded personally to employee messages. Over time, I conducted more than 150 one-on-one meetings annually with employees who did not report to me.

Accessibility also meant reducing physical and symbolic barriers. I commuted by train, drove myself to meetings, and removed visible security barriers at headquarters. In many of our facilities, I took conference tables and personal printers out of indivcidual offices and required executives to walk to conference rooms and multi-functional printers. They would invariably end up talking with direct reports and other front line employees. These actions signaled that hierarchy would not prevent engagement.

This presence had two important effects. It surfaced insights no performance dashboard could reveal.

And Iit humanized leadership during difficult transitions, including factory closures. On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was having breakfast with factory employees discussing the eventual closure of their plant before I was summoned back to Headquarters to manage our response to the events of that tragic day. That setting was difficult, but it reinforced trust that endured long after.

What Leaders Can Do

• Schedule consistent skip-level conversations.
• Protect unscripted Q&A time.
• View accessibility as listening, not broadcasting.

Fearlessness: Creating Agency in Turbulent Times

Communicating agency instead of victimhood

Fear can quietly become the organizing principle of an organization. When that happens, initiative declines and stress intensifies.

Early in my tenure, the United States Postal Service canceled a contract that generated significant income for us. Suing our chief regulator and major customer seemed risky. Many feared retaliation.

After careful deliberation, we proceeded. A communications advisor helped us articulate a critical message:

“We have the technologies, financial strength, customer loyalty, and talent to thrive, regardless of our relationship with the Postal Service.”

That statement did more than reassure investors. It reframed how we saw ourselves. We shifted from worrying about external leverage to recognizing our internal strengths.

Following 9/11 and the anthrax incidents, I asked our leadership team a consistent question:

“What opportunities might emerge from these events?”

Fearlessness does not deny danger. It insists on agency.

Managing Results Without Reinforcing Helplessness

How CEOs explain setbacks have lasting consequences.

When we missed earnings guidance following the travel disruptions of 2001, I acknowledged the external shock. But I emphasized that adaptation was within our control and we returned to performance.

Years earlier, rising interest rates threatened one of our divisions. Instead of seeking relief, we sold assets whose values had risen because of the same economic forces driving rates upward. We exceeded expectations.

Leaders who attribute outcomes solely to external conditions risk teaching employees that effort no longer matters.

Reducing “Emergency Culture”

Frequent declarations of crisis create chronic stress. While true emergencies occur, not every disruption deserves that label.

When we restructured parts of the company, I described those actions as preventive measures designed to avoid more severe consequences later. The message was deliberate: we were acting to stay strong, not reacting to collapse.

Leaders must resist language that dramatizes change unnecessarily. Long-term perspective is stabilizing. As often observed, organizations overestimate short-term change and underestimate long-term transformation. The long game matters.

Agency consistently outperforms victimhood.

Leadership Lessons for Today

When Franklin D. Roosevelt assumed office during the Great Depression, he faced a nation gripped by fear. Through direct communication, visible presence, and steady optimism, he reshaped public psychology. Leaders need not share his politics to recognize the effectiveness of that approach.

Today’s environment amplifies anxiety through media and digital platforms. In such a climate, CEOs must be even more intentional about projecting clarity, steadiness, and confidence.

A Practical Leadership Reflection

This quarter, consider asking yourself:

• Where might my silence be increasing uncertainty?
• Which groups in my organization rarely hear from me directly?
• When performance falters, do my messages reinforce resilience, resignation, or fear?

Leadership behavior is not a peripheral influence on health. It is central to it.

Closing Thought

Executives often underestimate how profoundly their daily choices shape stress levels inside their organizations. Transparency, accessibility, and courage are not soft traits. They are operational tools that influence performance, resilience, and well-being.

If you are leading in uncertain times and want to strengthen both organizational performance and employee health, I welcome the conversation.

You can reach me at mikeceo@moveflux.com.

Why CEOs, not HR or insurers, who want to maximize shareholder and customer value must take charge of employee health and healthcare costs

Too many capable leaders defer to “experts,” especially in technical domains where learning enough to challenge prevailing views feels time-consuming, risky, or just plain uncomfortable. Yet real experts should welcome being challenged. That friction sharpens thinking.

The historian Thomas Kuhn explained why in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: breakthrough ideas rarely come from insiders defending the current paradigm. They emerge from those who notice anomalies others dismiss. Business thinkers such as Eric Von Hippel of MIT and the late Clayton Christensen later showed the same pattern in innovation: durable change begins by questioning assumptions everyone else treats as fixed.

Yet social norms, and professional insecurity, still discourage general managers or even CFOs from challenging orthodoxy, especially in healthcare.

That reluctance is costly.

Being Unafraid to Fail

Challenging conventional wisdom guarantees occasional failure. Many prevention and wellness efforts needed redesign before they succeeded. No one could show me a proven path. Tenacity mattered more than certainty.

The leaders who succeed treat missteps as data, not defeat.

Integrative Thinking: Reframing “Impossible” Tradeoffs

Roger Martin, former Dean of the Rotman School of Management, calls this “integrative thinking:” refusing to accept that goals are inherently incompatible and instead asking questions that reveal a better model.

Progress begins when leaders reject false tradeoffs and search for evidence that a different paradigm is possible.

Finding the Evidence for an Alternative Paradigm

In the pre-AI era, leaders I admired hunted patiently for data that contradicted accepted wisdom. It took time and rigor.

Today, AI dramatically accelerates that process, helping leaders surface patterns, anomalies, and evidence in hours rather than years. AI doesn’t replace judgment; it amplifies it.

Building a World-Class Culture of Health

When I was asked to lead HR at Pitney Bowes in 1990, I didn’t intend to challenge orthodoxy. I had no choice but to do so.

On my first day, the CEO gave me five “incompatible” mandates:

• Runaway healthcare costs
• Poor employee health
• Weak access and uneven quality
• Low satisfaction
• Unsustainable free benefits

Our Benefits team and outside consultants said it couldn’t be done. Conventional wisdom rested on two assumptions:

1. Better health and quality require higher spending
2. Employees would never accept shared responsibility

My task was to find evidence that health could improve while costs declined, and to build trust so employees would see shared responsibility as beneficial, not punitive.

The Breakthrough: Delinking Spending from Outcomes

That evidence came from Dr. John Wennberg at Dartmouth. Over decades, his research demonstrated that higher healthcare spending rarely produces better outcomes.

Better management of care, not more care, drives health.

Once employees understood that truth, cost sharing became part of a credible, trusted system.

Seeing the System Whole

Enduring solutions begin by defining the right system.

Our benefits program wasn’t a “healthcare system.” It was a health-management system. That shift changed everything.

Most health is created outside the clinic. Lifestyle and environment drive roughly 80% of costs. Healthcare intervenes when self-management fails.

So we looked upstream.

Beyond Prevention: Social Determinants of Health

In the early 1990s, prevention meant screenings and immunizations. But Sir Michael Marmot of the University College of London showed something more powerful: health outcomes are shaped by education, work design, autonomy, stress, and social cohesion.

In his Whitehall studies of the British Civil Service workforce and leadership cohort, the strongest predictor of health wasn’t pay or title, it was control.

Later, as CEO, I saw something Sir Michael Marmot had not emphasized enough: the outsized role of CEOs themselves. Leadership tone shapes stress, financial wellbeing, trust, and meaning at work. Chronic stress magnifies illness. Supportive environments reduce it.

Health does not start in HR. It starts at the top.

Choosing Better Care—Not More Care

Three truths are still misunderstood in U.S. healthcare:

1. Quality varies widely by provider and region
2. Most plans pay for volume, not outcomes
3. Primary care is reimbursed to treat illness, not prevent it

We responded by steering employees to top performers, building on-site clinics, and investing in navigation and excellence, paying more for value, not volume.

Start with Root Causes

Our clinicians practiced true root-cause analysis. I experienced it personally when our Medical Director avoided the easy answer, another antibiotic, and uncovered the real cause of a repetitive bacterial facial infection. Our nurse practitioners, trained in Mayo Clinic motivational interviewing, learned how to diagnose why behavior change fails and how to help people succeed.

Work Backward from Outcomes

We asked a simple question: What does “healthier” look like?

Then we worked backward.

The result was one of corporate America’s earliest true cultures of health: better outcomes, slower cost growth, and deep trust.

Healthcare costs stabilized at 20–25% below benchmarks, with parallel gains in absenteeism, disability, and injury reduction.  We achieved this despite a workforce that skewed toward lower-income, less healthy service employees in our Management Services Division.

We also redesigned work itself, reducing unnecessary driving, limiting overtime that destroyed sleep, and reshaping facilities to promote movement and healthier social norms.

Health improved. Costs fell. Performance rose.

What This Means for CEOs—Now

The challenge my CEO gave me 35 years ago still confronts every self-insured employer today.

That’s why we built MoveFlux and the MakeUsWell Network, to combine AI-accelerated insight with hard-earned human judgment to solve those same “incompatible” goals at scale.

The approach helped produce a Harvard Business School case study led by Michael Porter and Jennifer Baron in 2009. What once took decades can now be done faster, smarter, and more precisely.

A Call to Action for CEOs

If you are a CEO, or report to one, ask yourself:

• Who truly owns employee health in your organization?
• Are you managing healthcare costs, or letting them manage you?
• Have you accepted tradeoffs that no longer need to exist?

Health is not a benefit line item. It is a strategic operating system.

If you want to explore how AI-enabled, evidence-based integrative thinking can help you improve employee health while bending the cost curve, I invite you to start a conversation.

👉 Let’s rethink employer health together.👉Contact me directly at mikeceo@moveflux.com to continue the discussion. 

Harvard case reference:https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=36829

For more than 37 years, I have been in leadership, Board, investor, advisory, and advocacy roles focused on enhancing the critical role employers play in population health.

Public health researchers like Sir Michael Marmot, who popularized the concept of “social determinants of health,” have shown that career wellbeing is foundational to employee health. Former Gallup executives Tom Rath and Jim Harter, in Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements, went further, arguing that career wellbeing may be the first among equals in ranking the five essential elements.

If that is true, then artificial intelligence—by upending how we define and sustain work—poses one of the most urgent challenges to human health and corporate responsibility.

In every era of technological disruption, fear has been constant. But AI is different: faster, deeper, and more personal. When it can outperform doctors at diagnosis, lawyers at document review, or analysts at financial forecasting, even highly educated professionals are asking: "Do I still have a future?"

For business leaders, the moral and strategic challenge is not to reassure employees that their jobs are safe—because many are not—but to define employability in a world where AI is rewriting what “work” even means.

1. From Job Protection to Capability Expansion

Leaders must abandon the illusion of lifetime job security and embrace an updated compact: employability. The goal is to help people become continually re-employable, inside or outside the organization.

When Pitney Bowes used employment transition training and counseling, we assumed that, while employees might not remain with us, they could find a job either exactly like the one we were eliminating, or one reasonably adjacent to it. AI is cutting such a wide swath that big chunks of the kind of work employees do today will disappear across the board. They will have to think more expansively about what will be available and what they can do.

In the AI-first era, “employability” now means mapping human capabilities that technology cannot replicate—critical thinking, collaboration, contextual judgment, empathy, storytelling, and ethical reasoning—to the emerging tasks that AI will amplify rather than erase. Every role must be reimagined as a learning journey.

A modern enterprise must evolve its employees' capabilities and match them to emerging requirements, not preserve outdated job structures.

What do employees and those who guide them need to understand about AI?

As a practitioner of AI software-as-a-service, I have learned a few things about it:

1. Asking the right questions is as important, if not more important, than knowing the right answers. AI’s risk and opportunity is that it gives those without prior domain knowledge an ability to find a path to learning by questioning large language models until they yield understandable and defensible answers.
2. Mastery matters less than continuous learning, because what we know today is much less settled than it once was.
3. AI connects more data from much bigger systems and bodies of knowledge; humans need to understand the bigger systems in which AI can operate to spot patterns humans take much longer to see.
4. AI should drive work transformation, not automating what we do today. Humans need to think ahead about what that transformed workflow looks like and find their place in it.

Building Transitional Pathways

When the goal is to transform work, as opposed merely to automating it, leaders must build bridges to the newly transformed work. AI transformation should create transitional work pathways that redeploy employees into new projects instead of discarding them.

A customer service representative might train chatbots for usability; a marketing professional can do more rapid testing of different messages, channels, and pricing schemes; an auditor might use AI to enhance forensic analysis.

These bridge roles send a powerful message: you’re not disposable—you’re developing.

2. Make AI Literacy Universal

AI fluency must become as fundamental as spreadsheet literacy once was. Every employee, regardless of title, should understand how to use AI as an assistive tool, not fear it as a competitor.

Organizations can host AI learning and creative sessions tailored to specific functions—marketing, logistics, HR, compliance—focusing on real performance gains. Shared learning sessions, where employees share what they’ve discovered, can democratize expertise and dispel the myth that only data scientists can thrive.

Training must also strip away jargon. When someone claims not to use AI, I ask whether their phone suggests words or phrases as they type. When they say yes, I remind them: that’s predictive AI. Making the invisible visible helps demystify the technology and lower fear.

3. Reward Learning Agility, Not Tenure

Fear flourishes when employees believe they are judged only on current output, not future potential. Leaders can counter this by changing what they measure.

Incorporate learning adaptability into performance reviews. Reward those who experiment, learn new tools, and cross functional boundaries. Publicly celebrate reinvention—someone moving from finance to data science, or from field sales to digital marketing. Each success story becomes a morale vaccine against despair.

4. Recognize That Individuals Learn Differently

We learned at Pitney Bowes that one-size-fits-all training doesn’t work. Some people learn best by reading, others by listening, watching videos, or manipulating physical objects. Understanding how people learn is as critical as knowing what they must learn.

AI can actually assist in this assessment. Adaptive learning systems can tailor modules to a person’s preferred mode and pace, reinforcing knowledge through multiple channels. Using diverse formats—text, visuals, discussion, simulation—ensures deeper retention and broader inclusion.

5. Lead with Psychological Safety and Honesty

Technology transformations fail not because of technical complexity but because of emotional opacity. People can handle bad news; they cannot handle unknowns. Transparent communication—regular briefings about which functions are changing, why, and on what timeline—builds trust.

Create open forums where employees can voice fears without stigma. The goal is not to soothe people into complacency but to help them channel anxiety into curiosity. The healthiest organizational question becomes: What can I learn next?

6. Rebuild Employability Beyond the Company

Leaders have a broader obligation: to ensure employees remain valuable to the wider economy, not just their current employer. Partner with local governments, universities, and nonprofits to build AI-reskilling hubs that keep communities resilient.

Some argue that helping workers become employable elsewhere does not enhance shareholder value. The opposite is true. Investing in shared human-capital infrastructure generates positive network effects—sustained consumer demand, a stronger reputation, and reduced social volatility.

Handled skillfully, even reductions in force can reaffirm organizational values. When leaders demonstrate empathy, fairness, and accountability, employees remember that the company lives its principles. Supporting community partnerships during transitions reinforces moral credibility and brand trust—both essential to long-term shareholder returns.

7. Model What You Preach

Executives cannot delegate curiosity. They must learn in public—demonstrating how they use AI to improve decision-making, simplify communication, or deepen insight. When leaders share their own learning journeys, they grant permission for everyone else to start theirs.

The message is powerful: if the CEO is experimenting, so can I.

The New Social Contract

In the age of AI, leadership will not be measured by how many jobs are preserved, but by how many futures are prepared. The companies that thrive will be those that transform fear into agency and anxiety into adaptive intelligence.

If leaders act with empathy, transparency, and courage, the central question for employees will shift from “Will I have a job?” to “How will I keep growing?” That shift is not just a moral imperative—it’s a strategic one.

A workforce that believes in its own resilience produces stronger innovation, deeper engagement, and lasting shareholder value.

AI is rewriting the nature of work, shifting leadership’s responsibility from preserving jobs to preparing people for continuous reinvention. Companies that build human capability, enable learning agility, and create honest, psychologically safe cultures will transform fear into engagement. Those that invest in employability today will thrive tomorrow.

#Artificial Intelligence, #Future of Work, #Workforce Transformation, #Leadership, #Employee Wellbeing, #Career Wellbeing,

My high school freshman History teacher, Mike Fitzpatrick, began our first class by quoting Spanish philosopher George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” That simple idea became an enduring principle of my leadership philosophy.

Rigor and non-defensiveness in examining both successes and failures is essential to future success. Too often, organizations settle on tidy narratives that oversimplify complex events. I have always been obsessed with understanding outcomes—not to assign blame, but to uncover root causes others overlook.

We love reliving successes while avoiding failures, but both deserve analysis, more so the latter. The following cases—two failed joint ventures, a major credit loss, a lost large customer, and a lost talented employee—show how disciplined learning transforms organizations.

Creating a Culture That Learns

Learning from failure requires both structure and psychological safety—principles Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson describes in The Fearless Organization. My own “rules of the road” evolved from experience.

Be selective in terminating people.

Accountability matters, but indiscriminate punishment kills candor. When Pitney Bowes suffered a major credit loss in Germany in 1993, the CEO fired the Financial Services President because he seemed unable to recover. I succeeded him, but retained the rest of the leadership team, because their involvement with the failure was marginal. However, if they feared termination, honesty would vanish, and with it, truth.

Discourage finger-pointing and promote reflection.

When many contributed to a failure, I reducing annual incentive payouts to those guilty of finger pointing and increased payouts to those who took initiative to analyze and share lessons. Learning begins with self-examination and transparency.

Be skeptical of simple narratives.

The neatest explanation is usually wrong. Deeper truths hide in messy details.

Case 1: Why Joint Ventures Failed

One of Pitney Bowes’ worst disasters pre-dated my employment: a 1970–73 joint venture in the electronic cash-register business with Alpex. A decade later, Monarch Marking Systems’ retail anti-theft device venture (1982–85) failed similarly. I had to get documents on the Alpex disaster from law firm archives. I served as a legal advisor to Monarch, so I had better access to those who knew why it failed.

Afterward, a myth emerged: “Pitney Bowes should avoid joint ventures.” That was convenient—but wrong.

Avoid over-enthusiasm.

In both cases, we partnered with smaller innovators, assuming our marketing strength would ensure success. The markets weren’t ready. Incumbents—NCR in Alpex’s case, Sensormatic in Monarch’s—framed innovation as risky. Consultants told us what we wanted to hear. Enthusiasm blinded us to resistance.

When I became CEO, we created an Acquisition Review Committee that reported quarterly to the Board, focusing on business-plan progress, integration, and culture, the usual roots of failure, for acquisitions, joint ventures and partnerships.

Plan the exit.

Every partnership agreement must spell out a process for unwinding in the event of failure. In Alpex, Monarch and a 15-year Japanese joint venture we exited in 1995, neither side had agreed on exit mechanics, causing costly disputes, including a costly and embarrassing jury verdict against us in the Alpex case. Governance discomfort today prevents crises tomorrow.

Case 2: The German Leasing Losses

In 1993, we uncovered over $100 million in credit losses at Adrema Leasing, our German subsidiary. CFO Carm Adimando led the wind-down; I replaced the Financial Services division head. In 1996, as CEO, I ordered a full post-mortem. It revealed a convergence of flaws—a perfect storm of structure and culture.

Risky market.

German privacy laws made it nearly impossible to vet creditworthiness or repossess leased assets. Germany superficially resembled the US in its business rules, but was not a viable equipment leasing market for us.

Misaligned incentives.

Our businesses originated with leasing brokers, who were paid on volume, not profitability, encouraging reckless deals.

Isolation.

German business norms granted the Geschäftsführer (CEO) near-absolute authority. The CFO reported only to him, shielding problems from oversight. My Division President predecessor compounded the problem by discouraging his senior team from providing oversight.

Weak oversight.

Auditors raced deadlines and relied on sanitized reports instead of reality checks. The illusion of stability persisted until losses became undeniable.

We exited the German leasing market permanently and, in 1998, sold Colonial Pacific Leasing, our U.S. broker-based leasing business, to GE Capital—who later shut it down after facing the same issues.

We redesigned governance: division CFOs had dotted-line accountability to the corporate CFO, ensuring tighter oversight. Auditors had to engage informally with staff to surface hidden problems. Finally, before entering new markets, we performed deeper due-diligence on local laws and business culture.

Case 3: Losing Bank of America

In 2001, our Management Services Division lost its largest customer, Bank of America. Early explanations blamed the competitor’s relationships or “low-ball” pricing. The bank’s debrief—that the rival better understood “partnership”—seemed plausible.

Months later, our Southeast Regional VP Dave Hutchinson revealed a deeper truth in a private conversation with me: a year earlier, the bank had asked us to restructure its contract to reduce costs. We appeared inflexible, eroding trust long before renewal. We lost long before the bidding process through rigidity.

That insight changed our renewal strategy. Relationships are continuous, not single point in time events; we learned to trace every loss back to its earliest fracture, and look for early warning signals to detect vulnerability.

Case 4: Losing—and Regaining—a Top Sales Professional

Soon after I became Financial Services President, a Group VP told me his top salesperson was leaving for a higher-paying job with a promotion. When I asked why he’d taken the initial recruiter call that culminated in this offer, he admitted that he felt disrespected and unheard, an insight he had not shared with HR or his supervisors. Money mattered less than respect.

I promised that disrespect would stop and left the door open for his return. A year later, he came back—and stayed until we sold the business in 2006.

That episode reshaped my views on pay and culture. Competitive compensation matters, but inclusion and respect sustain loyalty.

Broader Lessons

Stimulate and reward curiosity over arrogant self confidence..

Leaders who keep asking “why” discover patterns others miss. Those who cling to tidy narratives repeat mistakes.

Structure shapes behavior.

Incentives and culture can defeat even sound strategies. Design systems that reward long-term learning, not short-term volume.

Governance is foundational to foresight.

Strong oversight isn’t bureaucracy; it’s an early-warning system that preserves trust and capital.

Learning requires seeking out front-line manager and employee insights.

The best insights come not only from consultants or dashboards or the most senior leaders, but also from people closest to the work.

Final observation

Santayana’s warning still applies. Progress depends on tapping institutional memory—not just applying narratives, but learning from the past by digging deeply into why things went wrong and having the courage and discipline to prevent recurrence.

#Leadership, #Organizational Learning , #Corporate Governance, #Risk Management, #Culture of Psychological Safety, #Lessons Learned, #Executive Leadership

In every organization, the people with the deepest knowledge surprisingly often do not have the highest titles. I learned this early in my career at Pitney Bowes, when my supervisor, David O'Hearne, Vice President of Legal Affairs, taught me where real expertise hides.

Working on a major antitrust trial in San Francisco, David frequently called to ask me to prepare affidavits on specific topics. What mattered most was not the drafting itself, but whom he directed me to contact: front-line career employees several levels below their unit presidents. These were people in windowless cubicles whom senior leaders rarely visited. By seeking them out, I gained a richer understanding of the company, its products, and its culture than any executive briefing could provide.

Many became lifelong friends and invaluable allies. When I treated them with respect and helped when I could, they repaid me many times over with responsiveness, insight, and honesty.

Over time, whenever cross-disciplinary teams tackled tough problems, the same people resurfaced—the company's informal "knowledge network." I called them the "usual suspects," borrowing Captain Renault's line from Casablanca.

Building Networks at Every Level

Conventional career advice emphasizes cultivating mentors and senior sponsors. That's good counsel—but incomplete. Senior executives have less time to meet with lower-level employees, and organizational layers shield them from the broader company.

As I rose in leadership, I shared the lesson from my learning experience with others. When recruiting or mentoring executives, I gave them lists of long-tenured people who had helped me learn the business. Pitney Bowes honored its veterans through the "Oval Club," and even retirees remained institutional repositories of knowledge. I frequently connected current executives with them when they faced unfamiliar challenges.

As CEO, I held about 150 "skip-level" meetings annually with employees who didn't report directly to me. These candid sessions provided unfiltered insights, free of the corporate gloss that accompanies upward reporting.

Learning from the Front Line

One of the most valuable people in this network was Bob Hoffman, who retired in 1995 after 56 years with the company. His modest title—"Assistant to the Vice President, Customer Service"—didn't capture his immense influence. Living in Pelham, NY, Bob commuted by train, and, as a reverse commuter living in Manhattan, I often took the local, instead of the express, to spend an hour talking with him.

Those conversations were mini-seminars in corporate history. Bob remembered why strategies succeeded or failed. His knowledge was contextual, not theoretical—precisely the kind that disappears when organizations fail to listen to their veterans.

Early in my legal career, I accompanied top sales professionals on client calls for a full day each year. In 1980, I completed the company's two-week sales-training program, meeting field veterans everyone sought out for guidance. That summer, I gave antitrust-law presentations at five regional conferences. More valuable than the podium time were the hallway conversations—where people shared insights no manual could match.

Meeting People Where They Are

As CEO, I visited about 20 field offices a year for town halls and small-group discussions. Sometimes I combined family trips with these visits—breaking away from my son's chess tournaments to meet local teams. During one Nashville tournament, I was driven two hours to Memphis to visit FedEx and St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.

I also visited telesales and customer-care centers in Spokane, Appleton WI, Savannah GA, Chesapeake VA, and Albany. During one visit, our National Accounts Customer Care Director revealed how much customized billing we were doing on low-revenue accounts—an inefficiency invisible in reports, but obvious to those taking the calls.

This cost little beyond travel expenses, yet built an invaluable reservoir of understanding that made me more effective as an attorney, HR leader, and operating executive.

Extending Beyond the Company

I applied the same philosophy in government and industry relations. Many CEOs focus on meeting members of Congress or cabinet officials. I met them too—but also spent time with the staffers who drafted legislation and shaped regulatory details. These were the "usual suspects" of public policy: they did the grunt work and often outlasted their political bosses.

With the U.S. Postal Service, one of our largest partners, I met with leaders of three postal unions, spoke at their conventions, and visited facilities few corporate leaders had seen, such as its Memphis National Change of Address Center.. I even befriended postmasters to hear what customers were saying on the ground.

Most of these interactions took place during off-hours and attracted no publicity. They weren't glamorous, but they were profoundly informative.

Solving Problems Others Couldn't

Because I listened to the right people, I often became the go-to problem solver. In 1982, when a New York State staff attorney blocked a multimillion-dollar contract, business leaders on both sides blamed "the lawyers." Instead of escalating, I called the attorney directly and drove three hours to meet him in Albany. His small, windowless office reminded me of those early cubicle conversations. Within an hour, we worked out a practical solution, and the contract was signed.

The Larger Lesson

My career confirmed a simple truth: in every system—corporate, governmental, or civic—the people who quietly keep it running know more than anyone else about how it actually works. By honoring and learning from them, leaders gain insights unavailable in reports or executive briefings.

Organizations that fail to "round up the usual suspects" lose both institutional memory and operational wisdom. Those that do build resilience, credibility, and effectiveness far beyond what hierarchy alone can deliver.

Many leaders resist this engagement, not out of arrogance alone, but because modern management systems reward efficiency over curiosity. It feels faster to read a dashboard than have a conversation. Time pressure, ego, the protective barriers staff members build around leaders, and the illusion of omniscience that data creates all discourage leaders from seeking out those below the radar. Yet the most important truths—the ones that determine whether strategies succeed or fail—rarely appear on a spreadsheet.

In the Age of AI and Remote Work

In an age when AI dashboards and remote meetings dominate leadership, the danger isn't too little data—it's losing touch with the people who hold knowledge no algorithm can capture. I walk into too many offices today that still have most employees working remotely and spending little time in the office. The leaders who will thrive are those who remember that insight still lives at the edges of the system—in the voices of the "usual suspects" who quietly keep it running. Without a critical mass of in-person workers, the learning path I followed cannot be duplicated today.

#LeadershipDevelopment, #OrganizationalCulture, #InstitutionalKnowledge, #FrontlineInsights, #ManagementExcellence, #PeopleFirstLeadership, #AIandLeadership, #WorkplaceLearning

Both the Biden Administration and the second Trump administration converged on a rare point of agreement: America must mine more rare earth minerals at home. These minerals—17 chemical elements with unique magnetic, catalytic, and electrical properties—are indispensable for electronics, electric vehicles, and renewable energy. While not scarce, they are difficult to extract and process, and today the U.S. relies heavily on imports, particularly from China.

For President Biden, rare earths were critical to the clean energy transition. His administration issued Executive Orders to secure supply chains, provided financing, and sought to streamline permitting. He has cast domestic mining and processing as essential to both national security and climate goals.

President Trump, by contrast, made tariffs his signature tool to promote US businesses and jobs. He imposed duties on copper and other imports but pointedly exempted rare earths, fearing retaliation and industrial disruption. Instead, he leaned on deregulation and Department of Defense contracts to support U.S. projects like MP Materials’ Mountain Pass mine.

Despite their differences, both administrations ran into the same immovable reality: America’s mining ambitions collide with a thicket of spiritual, environmental, and cultural resistance.

The Sources of Resistance

Thomson Reuters journalist Ernest Scheyder, in The War Below, details how proposed mines in Arizona, Minnesota, Nevada, and North Carolina became battlefields of competing values. Indigenous tribes invoked deeply rooted spiritual principles: the sanctity of ceremonial sites, the inviolability of burial grounds, the view of water as a sacred relative, and the interconnectedness of all life. From this perspective, mining is not simply an economic disruption but a spiritual desecration.

Environmentalists, too, see mining as an existential threat. In Minnesota, recreational areas face the prospect of heavy industrial scarring. In Nevada, the Tiehm’s buckwheat wildflower has become a flashpoint. This plant grows only in lithium-rich soils and cannot be transplanted elsewhere; mining threatens its extinction.

Farmers in North Carolina resist projects that would convert fertile cropland into pits and waste sites. Ranchers in places like Thacker Pass, Nevada, fear for grazing land and groundwater. And across the West, legitimate anxieties about toxic runoff and aquifer depletion animate local opposition.

These conflicts are not easily resolved. During World War II, when Japan cut off Asian supply lines, the U.S. government forced through mining expansions despite opposition. Today, however, no such overriding consensus exists. Instead, elected officials find themselves caught between constituencies with irreconcilable worldviews.

Political Paralysis

Scheyder recounts one telling moment: a staff member for a Senator who worked assiduously to reconcile policy disagreements, asked him to delete a tweet noting her support for a mining initiative in her own state. The Senator’s political survival depended on balancing pro-mining voters against those who saw the project as an assault on sacred land.

He deleted the tweet reluctantly, but the episode illustrates the paralysis of American democracy. Our system multiplies veto and conflict points—environmental reviews, litigation, and regulatory hurdles—without providing clear pathways or moral guidelines for reconciling legitimate, but conflicting, claims.

When Policy Ignores Reality

I have seen the effects of this dynamic on a personal level. A friend I advise runs a specialty copper cookware business. She has searched in vain for domestic sources of both raw copper and small-scale production facilities. None exist.

Yet the Trump Administration applied a 50% tariff to copper imports (on top of other tariffs), recently eliminated the de minimis tariff exemption (imports of less than $800 we personally experience when returning to the US), and did not create an off-ramp for businesses in precisely her position—those with no domestic alternatives. This policy was imposed suddenly and aggressively, leaving small firms like hers facing higher costs and potential closure.

The lesson is clear: when governments set exceptionally ambitious policy goals without acknowledging real constraints, they punish the very businesses and communities they claim to support. Just as my friend cannot conjure up domestic copper cookware production that does not exist, the U.S. cannot wish away the cultural, spiritual, and ecological limits to mining.

The Need for Strong, Principled Leadership

Attorney Philip Howard, founder of Common Good, has long argued that America’s legal culture piles on rules that make decisive action nearly impossible. He is right, but this issue goes beyond bureaucratic excess. It is a clash of absolutes.

For indigenous tribal leaders, mining sacred land is a nonstarter. For environmentalists, extinction of a species like Tiehm’s buckwheat is intolerable. For national security planners, dependence on China or the Democratic Republic of the Congo for rare earths is unacceptable.

Reconciling these positions requires leaders with both moral credibility and political skill. They must be able to forge creative compromises: revenue-sharing agreements with tribes, serious commitments to recycling and substitution technologies, expedited permitting in less sensitive areas, and narrowly tailored exemptions when no alternatives exist.

Without that leadership, America will remain stuck in the same cycle—declaring mineral independence as a priority while watching project after project collapse under the weight of irreconcilable opposition.

There is no substitute for strong, principled leadership if the United States is to align its energy, security, and moral priorities. Until then, the dream of green or other energy independence will continue to meet the hard reality of sacred lands, fragile ecosystems, and policies imposed without practical escape routes.

During its 105-year history, Pitney Bowes, a mid-sized company in a large industry, had a history of surprisingly effective political advocacy. That tradition traces to the most important leader after co-founders Pitney and Bowes: Walter H. Wheeler, Jr. As an advocate, Wheeler's Congressional testimony in 1931 enabled the company to head off legislation which would have crippled the company's meter rental business in its early stages. Wheeler was a member of the National Urban League Board and a well-respected business leader at both the federal and state government levels.

Arthur Pitney had to be tenacious—he invented the postage meter in 1901, but did not get approval to market it until 1920. I truly did “stand on the shoulders of giants,” and this essay distills how we carried that tradition forward.

Rule One: Focus Like a Laser

Major business leaders are bombarded with policy issues, but only a handful truly affect survival or success. Pick those battles—and then commit.

For us, Postal Service reform was non-negotiable long before I became CEO. Healthcare policy was another critical front: I aimed to build a culture of health at Pitney Bowes and avoid derailment by simplistic “Medicare for All” legislative proposals, like Connecticut's Sustinet initiative, that threatened to wipe out employer-sponsored health programs.

In 2008, lawmakers targeting Walmart inadvertently threatened our industrial loan bank model. We fought to preserve it; Walmart ultimately stepped back, and Dodd-Frank closed the door behind them—protecting our position.

Well-intended but poorly conceived state laws on transportation and economic development regularly put us at risk. Behind the scenes, I rallied CEOs to oppose a downtown Bridgeport casino that would have strangled southern Connecticut’s already fragile infrastructure.

Lesson: Focus isn’t passivity; it’s conserving energy for fights that move the needle.

The Advocate Is the Message

Who represents you matters almost as much as what you advocate. When I became CEO, our VP - Federal Government Affairs position was unfilled. The default instinct was to hire a polished Washington insider. I went a different way.

I remembered a 1981 jury trial in San Francisco. Our most persuasive witness wasn’t an executive or economist—it was Bob Hoffman, our Assistant to the Vice President for Service, a 42-year company veteran in modest suits, humble and decent, trusted even by adversaries. Jurors sided with us because they trusted Bob. That memory guided me in 1995, when our Washington reputation had curdled into “arrogant monopolist” because we had no full-time Washington presence. We didn’t need flash; we needed credibility, empathy, and visibility.

I chose David Nassef—a social worker, Marine veteran, employee-relations leader, and corporate ombudsman—with no government-affairs pedigree. But he had deep listening and creative problem-solving skills and moral authority. He built relationships in churches, coffee shops, and Little League bleachers. He worked seamlessly with union leaders and congressional staffers. No one could peg his political party affiliation—which made him more credible. Many doubted him, and he was initially puzzled as to why I had chosen him. David proved everyone wrong, unlocking access far beyond our size and budget.

Lesson: often, the ideal political advocate is the least obvious candidate—the one who embodies your values and disarms skeptics.

Master the Substance—and the Process

The third lesson: know more about your issue than anyone you need to persuade. As a debater, undergraduate, communications and political science major and law student, I dove into postal history, communications law and policy, administrative law, and healthcare ( the 1963-1964 national debate topic was universal healthcare.)

With a political science degree, legal training, and extensive public policy reading, I thought I knew the federal legislative process completely. I was wrong.

I was both unaware of and underestimated procedural hurdles, like Senatorial "holds." In the Senate, a single “hold” can freeze a bill; I personally cleared four "holds" during the Postal reform legislative process.

At the state level, last-minute amendments unrelated to the legislation's main purpose can undermine legislative goals. We once supported a drug-testing bill, only to be blindsided by a last-minute smoker-protection health insurance amendment. The lesson: monitor text, floor action, and committee maneuvers obsessively.

See the Whole Chessboard

Lobbyists and lawmakers are just the tip of the iceberg. Real influence often lies beneath the waterline.

At a 1995 retreat convened by Postmaster General Marvin Runyon, to which I was one of 30 invitees, the power map came into focus:

1. Career executives, not their CEOs, were invited, because they outlasted CEOs and accumulated knowhow and relationships over several decades (e.g., Laurel Kamen at American Express, Vince Giuliano at ADVO).
2. Pragmatists inside “opposition” groups can become allies (e.g George Gould, the VP of Government Affairs for the National Association of Letter Carriers).
3. Credible consultants sway agencies and lawmakers (e.g. Luis Jimenez at Arthur D. Little; John Dowson at Coopers & Lybrand). We hired Luis Jimenez in 1999 and he was invaluable in guiding our thinking on global postal trends.
4. Ex-staffers retain potent networks and influence (e.g. J. Pierce Myers, a sole legal practitioner who specialized in postal law, Jim Cregan of the Magazine Publishers Association, and Jerry Cerasale of the Direct Marketing Association).
5. Trade association CEOs are invaluable as both thought leaders and influencers: Gene Del Polito of PostComm and Maynard Benjamin of the Envelope Manufacturers Association were two of many examples.
6. Seasoned Congressional and White House staff members shape outcomes because they often outlast those to whom they report, who rotate over time,
7. Seemingly unrelated influencers—from Grover Norquist to major donors—can veto progress if ignored.

Lesson: err on inclusion. If someone might tip the scales, build the relationship.

Build Relationships Before You Need Help.

A rookie mistake is showing up only when you want something. The better play: invest early. Offer education, credibility, and moral support before you ever ask for a favor. When the moment comes, you’re not a stranger—you’re trusted.

When staffers realized we could educate them—not just plead—we gained credibility. Over many years, we hosted monthly tech-center tours for congressional and White House aides, followed by 90-minute working lunches. I asked as many questions as I answered.

Lesson: Accessibility and humility build trust.

Find—and Frame—Common Ground

In a polarized environment, it’s easy to see half the system as hostile. Resist that reflex. Overlap exists.

We made common cause with postal unions by tying predictable, lower rates to higher mail volumes—and, therefore, more union jobs. On healthcare, while I opposed “Medicare for All” sloganeering, I built cross-partisan support around prevention and wellness—hard to oppose and genuinely beneficial.

I built rapport with the National Association of Letter Carriers by giving them a detailed blueprint for how to improve member health and reduce healthcare costs. The savings they could realize would be usable for salaries and other benefits in collective bargaining negotiations.

Just as important: avoid obviously divisive “dead on arrival” positions. Some CEOs and lawmakers proposed that we advocate privatizing the Postal Service. That was political self-immolation.

Use Every Asset—Not Just Money

Money matters, but timing, symbolism, and authenticity often matter more.

Connect96 (1995): We gave $10,000 early to a bipartisan push to wire Connecticut schools and libraries for the Internet. I did photo-ops at low-income schools. We earned outsized credit and access—more than a later $150,000 donor.

Semper Fi Fund (2002): Asked for $5,000 to support Marine families at Walter Reed, we gave $10,000 and I matched it personally. The generosity built moral authority and enduring goodwill. It probably saved us hundreds of thousands of dollars we would have had to pay in campaign contributions to get comparable access to elected officials and their staffs on Postal reform advocacy.

Bridgeport jobs (2004): We moved 210 customer-care and tech-support jobs into downtown Bridgeport—a Democratic stronghold—turning a potential Congressional hearing about outsourcing into a positive “in-sourcing” narrative. This was particularly important when I testified before the House in 2004 on Postal reform at a time when "offshoring jobs" was a hot campaign issue.

Danbury tour and photo-op (2006): Hosting Senator Joe Lieberman during his difficult re-election let us showcase U.S. manufacturing in-sourcing and mail-in voting systems—low cost, high return.

The right gesture, at the right moment, can outweigh the biggest check.

Influence That Rings True: What to Do Very Cautiously

Celebrity endorsements are double-edged. They work when the endorser’s brand reinforces yours (e.g., the Allman Brothers aligning Jimmy Carter with grassroots authenticity; Oprah validating Barack Obama with middle-class and women voters). They fail when they feel imported, transactional, or polarizing.

In corporate advocacy, the same principle holds. Our most effective “influencer” wasn’t a celebrity; it was David Nassef—the everyman who turned suspicion into trust. Influence is resonance, not volume.

But when we sought out a celebrity, his brand and messaging matched our needs. I secured actor Ed Begley, Jr. to get him to appear at the 2007 Postal Forum to give a speech about the value of mail. He was starring in a reality TV show called "Living With Ed," which promoted eco-friendly living. Because his theme about eco-friendly living was complementary to our goal of promoting mail as an eco-friendly medium, this celebrity endorsement worked.

What Really Moves Policy

The most powerful changes are often those that look tame. Indexing postal rates to CPI seemed modest; it fundamentally rewired incentives. The Postal Service’s evolving discount structure for presort and downstream entry looked like “self-service” thrift; it quietly moved work to private operators and helped USPS meet service standards without endless capital projects or environmental reviews. These “boring” levers were transformative precisely because they didn’t trigger existential fights.

The Playbook (Short, Hard, True)

1. Pick battles that matter. Ignore noise; conserve energy.
2. Send the right messenger. Choose credibility and empathy over credentials and pedigree.
3. Know more than anyone in the room about issues, processes and key influencers.
4. Map hidden power. Include career execs, consultants, ex-staffers, committee pros, and unusual influencers.
5. Invest early and wisely. Build relationships before you need help.
6. Frame for overlap. Find shared interests; avoid “DOA” extremes.
7. Leverage timing and symbolism. Money helps; authenticity closes.
8. Protect your brand. Advocacy is reputational capital in action.

The art of advocacy isn’t shouting louder,, but listening sharper, choosing the right levers, and making the smallest change that unlocks the biggest shift. That’s how Pitney Bowes had surprisingly large impact.

Since ABC’s decision to remove Jimmy Kimmel’s show from the air, many entertainers, politicians, and media figures have claimed that the move—believed to be a preemptive step to avoid licensing issues with the Trump Administration—violates the First Amendment. Others argue that President Trump’s threats to networks are unprecedented efforts to suppress free speech. Both of these opinions are understandable, but are incorrect and miss some key points. I am not going to comment on Kimmel's comments, but on the bigger question: what did the Disney decision signal about the future of broadcast TV and radio entertainment platforms?

FCC Regulatory Power and Its Limits

The Federal Communications Commission Act of 1934 gave the FCC power to regulate broadcast TV and radio, as well as telephonic and telegraphic communications, under the standard of “public interest, convenience, and necessity.” In Red Lion Broadcasting v. FCC (1969), the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the FCC’s “fairness doctrine.” In so doing, it explicitly supported federal government restrictions on free speech on broadcast TV because broadcasters are granted an exclusive license by the federal government to use specific frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum. The trade-off for that grant of exclusive bandwidth is the acceptance of FCC regulation.

The "fairness doctrine," codified in 1959 and first enforced in 1963 under President Kennedy, required broadcasters to cover controversial issues in a balanced way, discouraging one-sided editorializing. The "fairness doctrine" was repealed in 1987, largely because Reagan-appointed commissioners believed it chilled conservative speech. Nothing has replaced it, but the Supreme Court doctrine affirming FCC regulatory authority over TV and radio affiliates that are granted exclusive broadcast licenses remains in place.

FCC jurisdiction applies only to local broadcast TV and radio stations licensed to use specific frequencies of the public airwaves. It does not apply to networks that aggregate and supply content to local affiliates. ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, and the cable or streaming platforms are not subject to FCC regulations, only their broadcast TV and radio affiliates.

Disney or any other media conglomerate could easily showcase Kimmel's show on multiple non-broadcast digital platforms beyond FCC reach. Media companies have a great deal of freedom in presenting content, which has been obscured in the public commentary. In fact, if someone subscribes to YouTube TV and it carries Jimmy Kimmel's programming on ABC's online version, the FCC has no regulatory authority. In this case, viewers access ABC on a laptop or a smart TV, which are not using the scarce electromagnetic spectrum bandwidth.

FCC Commission Chair Brendan Carr's statement was vague, and, to many, threatening in giving the appearance of an overreach. If all he intended to communicate was that the FCC would eventually issue new regulations governing broadcast TV and radio content, that would be within the FCC's authority. But it would take an extended period of time for those regulations to be proposed, made available for comment, and implemented.

It would be difficult for the FCC to revoke local affiliate broadcast licenses, based on a decision by the affiliate to carry Jimmy Kimmel's show, since the "fairness doctrine" has been repealed. An FCC decision to refuse to approve a media merger would not be grounded in any sustainable legal theory.

What May Really Have Driven ABC's Decision

In a Variety interview, media executive Shari Redstone observed that the economics of late-night television no longer work, given shrinking viewership and financial strain on media companies. Disney and ABC may have found Kimmel’s political commentary alienating to parts of its audience, but the deeper issue is profitability.

According to multiple sources, Kimmel's Nielsen ratings, which determine how much advertisers are willing to pay for spots on his show, had been declining, as have the ratings of every other late night entertainment program. The decline is from 2.4 million viewers in 2015 to 1.6 million in 2024. One estimate is that his September, 2025, numbers had dropped to around 1.1 million viewers.

Moreover, the 18-49 audience dropped by 72% between 2015 and 2025.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/jimmy-kimmel-live-ratings-plunge-over-decade-suspension-likely-not-about-censorship-reports-claim/ar-AA1MWT0c#:~:text=Data%20shows%20Jimmy%20Kimmel%20Live,your%20thoughts%20in%20the%20comments.

Like CBS’s decision to cut costs with Stephen Colbert or NBC’s retooling of late-night, ABC’s move reflects harsh economics, but the political fallout from his commentary gave it a convenient basis to suspend his show. We also know that both owners of affiliate TV stations, like Sinclair and Nextstar and advertisers, as well as their viewers, reached out to Disney to demand that they suspend Kimmel's show. Some affiliates announced that, regardless of what Disney decided to do, they would not air Kimmel's show.

The Disney decision was likely an acceleration of a decision they would have made anyway. Given long-term entertainment consumption trends and the cost of producing his show, it is unlikely that Kimmel would have stayed on the air with a format like his at his current salary.

The New Audience Ecosystem

Scheduled TV programming of all kinds, except for sporting events, has declined. In fact, streaming exceeded cable TV for total viewers.

The landscape today is far removed from the 1969 world in which the FCC secured unanimous Supreme Court approval of its content regulation power over broadcast TV. Audiences now consume programming in layered ways, in addition to the declining number who consume it on scheduled broadcast TV or radio:

1. On-Demand Full Episodes: Networks recapture audiences who missed the live airing through Hulu, YouTube TV, or network apps. These incremental views extend relevance.
2. Short Clips: The real engine of reach. Viral monologues or interviews on TikTok or YouTube often attract more viewers than the live show itself.
3. Reruns and Extended Slots: Re-airings and rebroadcasts provide modest additional viewership and residual ad revenue.
4. Secondary Platforms: Podcasts, highlight reels, and themed collections diversify reach, engaging people who never sit down for video.

The “audience pyramid” now extends well beyond broadcast. For networks and advertisers, the total sum matters—not just live ratings. The FCC cannot even regulate online clips or streaming platforms drawing on content from broadcast TV programs, unless that content violates other FCC rules. In legal terms, those are “information services,” not broadcasters. While online content may be subject to copyright or obscenity laws, it lies outside FCC purview.

Disney or any other media company can relaunch Kimmel's show and clippings from it as a cross-platform offering. All these companies know the playbook they would need to employ. Those who want to afford him the ability to speak freely can put him on platforms beyond FCC authority. He could probably reach a wider audience than his show was attracting on scheduled late night broadcast TV.

The Presidential Tradition of Media Intimidation

Trump’s attacks on broadcasters—threats to challenge licenses and branding networks “enemies of the people”—sound dramatic, but they are far from unique. Past presidents have pressured or punished media outlets, especially broadcast TV, because it is federally licensed. The difference is that, with a handful of exceptions, they engaged in intimidation behind the scenes.

Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John Kennedy complained privately about radio and TV coverage to media outlets, but their complaints were done privately. Lyndon Johnson notoriously made intimidating late-night calls to network executives. In 1967, he berated CBS chief William Paley over the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, which CBS eventually canceled. Richard Nixon was one of the few openly hostile Presidents, but he also directed aides to explore FCC action against networks critical of Vietnam or Watergate.

Barack Obama praised press freedom publicly but privately pursued leak prosecutions under the Espionage Act and secretly monitored reporters. Fox News journalist James Rosen was even labeled a “criminal co-conspirator” in a warrant application.

The Biden Administration, both directly and through intermediaries, attempted to suppress content on social media platforms, especially relative to commentary on Covid and "climate change" to counteract what it considered to be "misinformation."

FCC Commission Chairs have openly attacked broadcast TV in the past. Newton Minow, President Kennedy's FCC Commission Chair, described TV in 1961 as a "vast wasteland." He did not threaten regulation, but the message was clear and, like Carr, he was criticized for interfering with freedom of the press.

The FCC has even intervened directly in attacking comedy content. In the 1970s, it threatened license revocation against a station airing George Carlin’s “seven dirty words” routine. The Supreme Court upheld FCC authority, but the controversy boosted Carlin’s cultural standing.

None of these forms of intimidation are defensible. Each poses different kinds of threats to democracy. But they predated broadcast TV and radio and will continue relative to any medium that Presidents attempt to use to get their messaging across in a less filtered way. Trump's Truth Social platform, which is designed to bypass broadcast TV, cable and other social media gatekeepers, hearkens back to the tactics of Presidents Jefferson, Lincoln and Harding who had significant financial interests in newspapers that they could reliably use to communicate their messages.

Why History Matters

The history of presidential-media clashes is not just trivia—it shapes how we interpret today. FCC Commission Chair Carr's license threats may feel ominous, but the value of FCC’s authority has shrunk. Viral online clips now define influence more than any broadcast slot. Unlike any previous media environment, there are too many platforms through which people promoting or opposing points of view can get through to audiences. Attempts to intimidate broadcasters increasingly feel like shadow boxing against a fading foe.

The Fairness Doctrine Debate

Some argue for reinstating the fairness doctrine to curb hyper partisan commentary in all media. While superficially appealing, the "fairness doctrine" chilled free speech the way it was administered and its 1987 repeal had bipartisan political support.

Even if clear one-sidedness exists on broadcast TV, it is not the biggest problem. It is the cacophony of voices on the many media platforms where FCC authority does not extend. Unless Congress revisits Section 230 of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which shields social media from liability for user content, the battle will continue outside the FCC’s reach.

Conclusion: A Fragile Freedom

The Jimmy Kimmel decision has occurred in a different environment from CBS' decision to cancel the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. Today,the tactic of threatening revocation or non-renewal of broadcasting licenses looks increasingly futile. A viral clip can eclipse an entire broadcast, and online platforms lie beyond FCC jurisdiction. The more Presidents or the FCC threaten more regulation of broadcast TV and radio, the more they will drive content providers to platforms beyond current regulatory authority.

The fragility of the 1st amendment today lies in the freedom of influencers and others to use social media platforms to spew out hateful and false commentary. Hateful social media content can make Americans more receptive to devaluing the 1st Amendment and seek out leaders who convince us to suppress not only that content, but content which might make us uncomfortable, but which has an absolute right to be in the marketplace.