If you made it to Louisville this year at the end of October for GIE+EXPO, I hope that you used your time wisely and profitably. If you’re a dealer or service center I hope you found “The Dealer Experience” with its seminars and speakers rewarding and full of good ideas you could take back and use in your business. It’s an extremely valuable way to spend a few morning hours each day at the show.
You may shake your head at the addition of the Hardscape North America trade show to GIE+EXPO, but I know quite a few landscapers and lawn and garden equipment dealers who sell and install hardscape products quite profitably in their businesses. There is surprising demand for concrete and brick pavers for driveways, patios, walkways, streets, stadiums, and commercial buildings. I know you’ve seen the segmental retaining walls in residential and commercial landscaping. From a distance they look like stone and really make a nice appearance. Once you start looking you’ll be amazed at where and how these products are used.
I like my favorite economist Jeff Threadgold’s take on the recent announcement regarding the end of the current recession. When I read his comment, I said the same thing you just said, ”It ended?”
Threadgold said, “I was wondering if you and your neighbors had a party in recent days, celebrating the end of the longest, deepest, most costly, most painful, and most pervasive recession since the Great Depression?”
“As you have likely heard, the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) announced on September 20 that what we now call the Great Recession ended in June 2009. The recession ‘officially’ ran for 18 months, with a 4.1 percent peak-to-trough contraction in GDP—and a loss of more than seven million jobs.”
(What, you didn’t hold a block party to celebrate? There wasn’t one in my neighborhood either!)
Threadgold continued, “Yes, the recession is over…statistically. However, from an emotional or job creation or housing stability or commercial real estate stability or income growth or confidence building perspective, it is still with us. Our collective growing anxiety about the anti-business, anti-higher income earner rhetoric constantly coming from the Administration and the Congressional leadership has definitely not helped.”
Threadgold’s statements, while true, never do much to cheer me up.
Sometimes small changes in how incentives are designed can bring about immense changes in desired results. Here’s a story about an incentive program the Crown used in Great Britain with sea captains in the 1800’s that wasn’t producing desired results. Maybe our government can learn something from it.
Many settlers in the 17th and 18th centuries in America were convicted prisoners, brought to America as an alternative to a death sentence they received in a trial in England. Once the Revolution began in America, Australia became the destination of choice for convicted British prisoners sentenced to death. Until about 1857, more than 160,000 prisoners were transported from Great Britain to Australia.
The Crown paid a ship captain for each prisoner he took to Australia. The problem was that many of these prisoners died before they got there. No matter how much or how little the captain received, prisoners regularly died of starvation or sickness before reaching Australia. The ship's crew had no concern for the well-being of the prisoners and often stole their food, clothing and valuables they may have had with them.
So the Crown decided to stop paying ship's captains for each prisoner they set-sail to Australia with. Instead they began paying them for each prisoner that got to Australia alive and well. Suddenly the death rate plummeted.
Once incentives were paid for positive results instead of just for transportation, the Crown got the results they wanted and had expected. A simple change in what actions were rewarded yielded a completely different and desired result.
In Stan Slap’s recently released book “Bury my Heart in Conference Room B” by Stan Slap, I found the following wonderful and powerful quote, which will soon adorn the wall of our conference room: "The irreducible essence of leadership is that leaders are people who live their deepest personal values without compromise, and they use those values to make life better for others—this is why people become leaders and why people follow leaders." Wow!
