So a few weeks ago we asked folks at GE what they were reading. They gave us lots of great books and we’ve now compiled them into a little Amazon reading list to make it easy for you to buy anything on the list. We’d like to keep expanding this, so feel free to add your books in the comments.
And without any further ado: What’s GE Reading? (On Amazon)
Just ran across an interesting chart that shows the number of guaranteed sick and leave days in different countries (sick days are like you have a cold, leave days are like you have cancer).
This relates to my post about the role of companies in the health of their employees (and the country as a whole). The sick leave entry suggests that the government mandate some number of days. I’ll avoid that question for politics sake, but I do generally think that this speaks to the misaligned incentives in health in this country. As a sick person I’m encouraged to go to work because otherwise I won’t be paid. When I go I am spreading that sickness to all the other folks in the office, ultimately creating a larger loss in productivity than if I had just stayed home for the day (not to mention I’m less likely to get better than having rested).
Yup, misaligned incentives seems to be where it’s at. Excited to speak to David Lee, one of GE’s health economist about some of this stuff.
One of the things that struck me at Thursday’s health briefing was the trend of companies taking an active role in the health of their employees. As we’ve been thinking about preventative health (which we’ve been tending to think of under the heading life optimization), it’s pretty clear that people aren’t so good at taking care of themselves. For better or worse, they tend to value today over tomorrow. The same isn’t true for businesses, however, where a sick employee can carry a hefty price tag. With that in mind, some businesses are beginning to invest in the wellness of their employees in all sorts of different ways.
One of those companies is General Mills, who were actually represented at the event. On one of the panels they mentioned an article about them in the New England Journal of Medicine which I quickly pulled up and purchased. It was super interesting and actually started to put some meat on the bones of some of the preventative health ideas we’ve been throwing around.
Essentially these companies are putting rewards (and sometimes penalties) for not keeping healthy. While I’m sure that sounds a bit big brotherish for some, I have to say it doesn’t bother me a whole lot (after all, employment is an agreement between both parties). What’s more, it reflects some of the stuff going on in government with cities all over the world banning smoking (and even trans fats in New York City).
Anyway, one of the core features of the General Mills program s a thing called the “health number”:
Employees at General Mills assess their risk factors and compute their “Health Number” by answering seven behavior-related questions — concerning exercise, diet, alcohol intake, tobacco use, stress management and mood, seat-belt use, and cancer screening — plus three questions concerning body-mass index, blood pressure, and blood lipid levels. Employees with a Health Number indicating intermediate risk are advised to consider lifestyle changes, and those with high risk are urged to initiate such changes, either on their own or with the company’s help.
This was especially interesting as we’ve been thinking a lot about how you begin to make health a little bit more like a game. Actually one of the conversations we had at the briefing was about just this, where we were told about some company (whose name I can’t remember) that does something similar and then creates an anonymous leaderboard for you to see how you stack up against the competition. Not sure how effective this stuff is, but would love to find out more.
Anyway, lots of good stuff to think about.
Hrm, this is super interesting. Apparently there is a company called 3TIER that has a bunch of products to help people who are considering renewable energy products figure out the feasability. (The feasability studies at the beginning of any renewable project is apparently one of the more time and money consuming parts of the project. Part of the reason why EOS exists.)
Here’s how they describe one of their products, Firstlook (pictured above), on their site: “FirstLook Prospecting for wind is the first and only online tool that allows you to evaluate a potential site quickly and for a fraction of the cost of traditional methods.” You can even play around with it a bit here.
No idea if it actually works, but clearly there will be lots more entrepreneurs playing in this space in the future. I wonder whether we can’t find some good way for GE to support/promote folks like this. Seems to me like the more smooth and easy it is for people to get their renewable projects off the ground, the better it is for all of us (even if GE doesn’t normally sell single turbines).
Oh, and here’s the Forbes video interview with the CEO of 3TIER:
This was going to be a post about the economics of wind (which I will get to and add a link once I post), but I decided to first tell the story of how Jiminy Peak got their wind turbine. First, it’s important to understand that there aren’t a lot of other single wind turbines around, most of them are part of large wind farms. Jiminy Peak actually has “the only privately owned megawatt class turbine in the nation for on-site energy usage,” according to the EOS Ventures website. Basically, after going through the process of surveying and procuring the turbine the team at Jiminy learned a ton and decided to start a company to help others get their renewable energy projects off the ground.
Here are the steps they went through (which come from full case study outlining the process at the EOS site).
Then, once they finished all that and realized it was a viable option they went to talk to GE. Because GE doesn’t sell a 1 megawatt turbine (the smallest is a 1.5 mw) Jiminy had to go back to the drawing board and do a few more studies to make sure the larger turbine wouldn’t be an issue. This second round looked like this:
Finally after everything was cleared they installed it (a whole other ordeal, since it’s not every day you need to get a structure of that size to the top of a ski mountain). The total cost $3.9 million and it’s predicted to take 8 years to pay back (all according to EOS of course).
Clearly not a very easy process, which is exactly why the team at Jiminy started EOS. Very interesting.