Grow Your Business

Sunday was an epicenter of violence on the football field and the leaders of the National Football League took notice and reacted. With the size and speed of players today simple physics will tell you the violence of collisions can have dramatic negative effects on players.

A few years ago the NFL put in new roughing penalties to protect their biggest investment – the quarterbacks. Now they are putting in serious suspensions for those who cause helmet to helmet hits. How can a game that has promoted violent hitting suddenly make an about face? They saw the future and it didn’t look good.

In the last few years new medical studies have documented the long term effects on retired players who have experienced concussions while playing in the league – and that was from hits taken 20 years ago. The NFL had to consider what are the future effects on the level of hitting occurring to current players? We already know the average life span of an NFL player is roughly 20 years below the national average.  Something had to be done before a player died in the game from a hit or became brain dead from a blow to the head.

I take my hat off to the league leaders for making this step. Imagine if suddenly there were repeatable studies done that indicated cell phones contributed to brain cancer, would the leaders of AT&T mandate a termination of cell phones or fight the studies as the tobacco industry has done for decades?

When billions of dollars are involved it’s seems easy for leaders to look the other way when damage is being done. I applaud the NFL for taking a new direction to remove some of the violence from the game. I only ask they look ahead by ten years to envision the product they want to put in front of the public. Now is the time to plan it and be proactive.

Large companies are embarking on a new healthcare strategy for their employees: Offer to pay completely, including travel, for certain surgeries provided they are performed at a select hospital.

According to an article in the Charlotte Observer:

“In a move to control rising health care costs, Mooresville-based Lowe’s has cut an unusual deal with a nationally known hospital.

Lowe’s is giving its full-time employees a choice: Have selected heart surgery at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio instead of at a local hospital, and the company will pay for it in full, even covering travel and living expenses for the patient and a companion.”

With out of control healthcare costs and directionless decisions being pondered in Washington, some employers are taking controls into their own hands.

Which raises the questions:

Will hospitals begin negotiating multi-year contracts directly with employers for specific surgeries thus eliminating the insurer in the equation?

What new jobs will be created as a result of this trend? Doctor agents who will negotiate free agent deals with hospitals looking to strengthen their bench in certain specialties? Hospital negotiators who will approach large employers for such contractual agreements? Travel agencies who specialize in domestic medical trips?

Will drug manufacturers be next?

Will this create favored employer status based on the medical deals they have negotiated?

Obviously, Lowe’s and the Cleveland Clinic believe such an arrangement will be more profitable and the employee incurs no expenses for this surgery. Is this the new model for company-provided healthcare coverage? How will small businesses compete?

This revolutionary step opens an entirely new approach to providing medical benefits to employees.

How would your organization participate in such a venture? It might be something well worth exploring.

The average American watches 30 plus hours of television in a week. That’s a little over four hours a day parked on the couch, letting your mind idle making no progress to be better. Ever wonder if your life feels stale? Maybe it’s time to turn off the TV and get into some shark infested waters.

Not only do sharks never sleep, they keep everything around them more active and alert. The Japanese population enjoys fish as a steady diet, and to feed this population fishing boats had to venture further and with larger holding tanks to catch enough fish. Freezing the caught fish wasn’t an option as frozen fish doesn’t suit the Japanese palate. So the problem facing the fishing industry was how to transport large holds of fish without the fish arriving stale tasting. The fish in these large holding tanks on the boats for days became listless and sluggish without a predator in the tank and actually tasted poorly and people stopped buying fish.

So how did the fishing industry solve this problem? They put a shark in the holding tank on the ships. Although the sharks would eat their small share of the caught fish in the tank, the rest of the fish would arrive alert, and quite lively, and yes, very tasty.

We are creatures of habit. If our habits are sitting on the couch watching TV, then we are embracing listlessness and our minds dull in the process. Put a challenge in your life and you will be livelier, alert, and be able to rise to overcome more obstacles.

What shark do you want in your tank?

Press Release: How Healthy Is Your County? New County Health Rankings Give First County-by-County Snapshot of Health in Each State