Salty Lamb - Strategically Simple Food Innovation

I recently read an interesting innovation of New Jersey-based, D'Artagnan Foods, one of the first farm-to-table, antibiotic-free meat producers.

They introduced a breed of lamb that are raised on seaside cliffs.  Their meat becomes naturally salted by ocean breezes.

Value Stacking

I recently read a Forbes article about Jeffrey Owen, whose company, Lightning Technologies, is innovating the pallet industry.

Traditional wooden pallets can harbor bacteria, become contaminated, break, or catch fire easily.

Plastic pallets haven't replaced them because they cost three times as much and can't be easily fixed.

Lightning, on the other hand, uses a spray coating that keeps wooden pallets safer, cleaner, and more durable.

But the thing I found most profound is that Lightning builds value by stacking multiple innovations together into an unbeatable package.

Besides the coating, they also:

1. have active (vs. passive) ID chips installed in the pallet.  While passive chips need to be scanned, the active chips beam information into the cloud automatically.  This allows for intelligent, easily traceable supply chains.

2.  The wood comes from fast-growing, sustainable forests.

3. Their manufacturing process has almost zero waste.  Access sawdust is vacuumed up and sold for making more wood pellets, while extra spray is recirculated.

Uber, Lyft, and City Congestion:The Future of Urban Planning

Chicago, and several other big cities, have found that Uber and Lyft have increased urban congestion.

The thinking had been that these services would replace drivers.

Instead, people are also using them as a convenient substitute to mass transportation.  Ridership on CTA buses and trains are down, while downtown roads are getting clogged with drivers picking up and dropping off passengers.

Today, I had the idea that one future solution would be to convert strategically chosen parking lots into drop-off zones.  They could also create ride share-only lanes which connect these drop off lots.

Then, while regular traffic flows on the main roads, Uber and Lyft drivers can traverse downtown by these side streets and pick up/drop off in the closest drop off lots.

Metra: Why Mobile Apps Can Trump Traditional Websites

My April column in the "Chicago Business Journal" is out. It looks at Metra as an example of why mobile apps can trump traditional websites:

https://www.bizjournals.com/chicago/news/2018/04/26/metra-is-an-example-of-how-mobile-can-trump-the.html

Gender Pay Gap, Transparency, and Privacy

The Economist recently had an interesting article on the gender pay gap.  April 4th was the deadline for employers in Britain to start reporting the difference between the average pay of men and women (for disclosure, The Economist reported a median gap of 29.5%).

As The Economist pointed out, there are some caveats to these values because they compare total salaries, without regard to similarity in roles.  So, for example, the gap will be really high for Premier League football (soccer) clubs because they would be skewed by the players' salaries on the men's side.

However, in general, they think the data could lead to a dialog about the causes of the pay gap, which they think would make it worthwhile.

One of the causes that The Economist mentions (besides the need for better parental leave) is the asymmetry between employers (who know all salaries) and workers, which give employers an advantage in negotiations.

They feel that more salary transparency is needed for good-faith negotiations.

The trade-off then becomes transparency vs. privacy.  For example, in Finland, Norway, and Sweden, anyone can look up anyone else's salary.  This is pretty radical and would probably meet with resistance elsewhere, such as in the U.S.

However, from the article, I thought that Germany has found an elegant compromise.  Rather than showing individual salary data, companies with at least 200 employees have to provide employees who ask with the average salary in their peer group.

For Business Success, Your Strategy Should Support Your Loyal Customers

New Lands' End current CEO, Jerome Griffith, is cleaning up after the previous CEO, Federica Marchionni, who was ousted in 2016.

Before Lands' End, Marchionni was a former Ferrari and Dolce & Gabbana executive.  She tried to remake Lands' End to compete with trendy chains such as Zara.  Instead, she alienated the chain's loyal customers and employees—who objected that she stayed in Manhattan, rather than locating to headquarters in Dodgeville, WI.

The new CEO, Griffith, grew up on a dairy farm and now lives near headquarters.  He discontinued the flashy clothes lines that were higher priced and smaller sized than traditional Land's End products, and he returned to the chain's roots: outdoor clothes with elastic waistbands.

The lesson for businesses: don't try to copy others.  Instead, remember the reason for your initial success.  Embrace your unique advantages and become an improved version of yourself.

My March 2018 "Chicago Business Journal Column" is Out

How to document worker knowledge: Choose quick and dirty over bells and whistles