Brian Grey Blog

Before we get too far in to the new decade, I want to circle back on a couple posts I boldly put out there in early 2009.

The first one touted the fact that I had decided to just pick One Resolution for 2009 and that was to lower my weight to 199 lbs by the end of 2009.  What I didn’t provide in that original post on December 31, 2008 was my starting weight for my quest.  So here are the final stats:

January 1, 2009:  240.0 lbs. (no kidding, it’s like I was a major shareholder in Krispe Kreme)

December 31, 2009:  197.8 lbs.

Net loss for 2009:  42.2 lbs. or 17.6%

And my related goal for 2010?  To keep it all off!

As for my Fearless Predictions for 2009, let’s see how I did:

1. The Dow closed above my prediction of 10,092.  Not bad considering after my prediction the Dow fell in early March 2009 to mid-6000.  I feel that my stock picking prowess may have been used up in 2009, but since the Dow is still down like 25% from it’s October 2007 all-time high, I am going to call the Dow at 11,276 (pretty random I know) for a 2010 close.

2. I was half right on this one, kind of.  Microsoft didn’t really “buy” Yahoo! Search, but they did a massive commercial deal that all but puts Yahoo! Search in Redmond’s hands.  But my second call about Yahoo! buying AOL didn’t quite materialize, but maybe I’ll roll this one forward and make it a 2010 prediction?

3. Twitter easily blew through the 10 million uniques I predicted for November 2009 (which was by the way a prediction 5 times the 2 million unique visitors Twitter had in November 2008).  And my little add on about a whole ecosystem sprouting up to plug in to the Twittersphere seems to have also been on the money.  Though I may be a little early on that prediction about a clear revenue model emerging, though at their most recent post-money valuation not sure they are racing to showcase their money printing machine just yet.

4. My call around digital media M&A activity picking up in Q2 as a bit early.  Though it really didn’t pick up a ton after that either (my second order prediction).  That said, the M&A patient did show some life in the second half of 2009 (thanks Google, Intuit, Adobe, etc.), so I can’t say I totally whiffed on this one.

5. And, as for my all important sports picks for 2009, well let’s just say I kind of got side swiped by the Tiger Woods affair(s).  Of the 10 picks I made (not counting the 11th which was my smarty pick for the Kentucky Derby:  “a horse), I only got 3 correct:  Florida winning the BCS, UNC winning the NCAA Hoops Tourney, and the Lakers winning the NBA title.  I came close with the Red Wings in the Stanley Cup (losing to the Penguins) and my Phillies repeating in the World Series (at least they got there again).  But I picked Tiger to win 2 Majors and be SI’s Sportsman of the Year.  He won zero Majors and it turned out was far from Sportsman of the Year — or Dad/Husband of the Year for that matter.

So for 2010, I feel compelled to make a few more sports picks since I have much to prove based on my 2009 performance.  Take these with you next time you go to Vegas:

BCS Champion:  Texas (upset over Alabama)

Super Bowl Winner:  New Orleans

Daytona 500 Winner:  Jimmie Johnson

NCAA Men’s Tourney Winner:  Kansas

NCAA Women’s Tourney Winner:  Connecticut

Stanley Cup Champion:  San Jose Sharks (picking with my heart)

NBA Champion:  Lakers repeat

World Series:  Red Sox over the Dodgers in 6 games

And how about this one:

Roger Federer and Tiger Woods will combine to win 3 Major tournaments out of the combined 8 that will be played in 2010.

Peace to all in the new decade.

This isn’t what I’d call the most significant personal horror story related to health care.  In fact, in the scheme of such stories, what I had happen this past Friday is pretty tame.  However, it does highlight in a small way how screwed up and non customer friendly dealing with health care is even in the context of very simple requests.

My story (or at least the first chapter of the story) is all about trying to get my medical records transferred from my previous primary care physician to my new physician.

The drama began a few weeks ago when I called my old doctor’s office in LA (Pacific Palisades to be exact, in case that adds any color for readers) to inquire about getting my records sent up to SF where I now live so that I could provide some history for my new PCP whom I would be meeting with soon.  Of course, I could not speak with anyone live in my former physician’s office in LA — instead I got to wade through their voicemail tree and leave a message asking that somebody call me back to explain how I get my health records.  Nobody bothered to call me back.

Fast forward to this past week when I set up my appointment to meet with a new doctor here in SF.  My new office emailed me a simple waiver form that I could sign, scan and email a PDF back to the SF office so they could forward to my old LA doctor’s office to get my records.  Great, problem solved.  So I thought.

On Friday afternoon — a couple days before I was scheduled to meet with my new doctor — a woman from the front desk crew at the LA office called to inform me that in order to get my medical records I had to pay a $35 “administrative fee” to have them copied if I wanted to come in and pick them up.  For a total of $45 they would do me the favor of sending them to me in SF.  My guess is that they would be arriving via Pony Express?

I couldn’t resist.  I just had to call the LA office back to understand how they could justify being charged $45 to get something that would take probably 3 minutes to photocopy and another 3 minutes to fax to my SF doctor’s office (for essentially no charge as part of what I imagine is a flat rate long distance phone plan, but imagine if they had the technology to scan a copy of my medical records and email them to me?).

“How do you justify charging me $35 to get a copy of MY medical records,” I asked the woman on the phone.  She informed me it was an “administrative fee” for the time it would take someone in their office to make a copy.  By my math that comes to $700 an hour to copy my records.  Wow, I think I know where to send my resume for my next job!

“What if I came in to just get my file,” I said — in all seriousness of course.  Again, the kind woman on the other end of the line had a quick reply.  “We’re not allowed to let patients take the records”.  What the hell?  I suspect I signed something along the lines of what the medical profession considers a privacy policy that includes some provision that I can’t take the files.  Do they need a paper trail for insurance purposes, auditing maybe?  Fine I thought, I’ll just go in and get them so I can “go across the street and copy them myself” I said.  “Sorry, we aren’t allowed to let the records leave our office”.

At this point I figured this was going nowhere.  I thought this might actually be considered one of the “procedures” that a doctor gets paid for by the insurance providers — just like doing an x-ray or performing a blood test.  Maybe I need my health plan to call my old LA office to negotiate a price for this service?

So at this point I’m going in to my new doctor here in LA as a clean slate.  Thankfully I have my mental faculties so I can theoretically download from my memory the essentials of my medical history for my SF doctor.  As far as I’m concerned when it comes to my medical history, my next doctor’s appointment is indeed the “first day of the rest of my life”.

I just figured out why it’s so hard for people to lose weight — and keep it off:  Willpower is a scarce resource.

Running across a WebMD article that highlights a study in which it is explained that willpower is a limited resource in all of us and that may explain why it’s so hard for people to exercise on a regular basis — and eat well at the same time.  Basically the theory says that if you use your willpower up on something during the day, say for example not eating a donut for breakfast or even plowing through finishing up that marketing report that you are writing, then when it comes to needing some willpower later in the day you’ll be a pushover.

Now there is hope.  Apparently, willpower can be trained and improved just like your muscles and cardiovascular system can be improved with time in the gym.

When I think about my own personal willpower stores, I buy this research.  I know that psychologically, if I exercise hard in the morning, I’m psychologically more willing to permit a sweet snack to make it in to my mouth later that day.  By the same token, a hard day at the office (say a series of intense meetings) can pretty much sap my willingness to hit the elliptical machine at the end of the day.

The WebMD piece has some general “tips” on how to battle this phenomenon on a daily basis — you should do a quick read of the article.  My own take is that if you focus on just one aspect like exercise and build it in to your schedule as a #1 priority, in a short amount of time you will indeed build up a good dose of willpower to make sure that you don’t easily pass on getting in your hour at the club.

And the easiest way to do this in my book is to schedule it in to my day no matter what else is on my calendar — and of course, whenever possible, do it first thing in the morning so if you do indeed have a limited amount of willpower, you’re at least using it up on a high priority.

One angle of the health care debate that seems to finally be getting a bit of attention is the dynamic between disease management and prevention.  Most of the spending today on health care is geared towards the former — in fact doctors get paid for doing tests and prescribing drugs, they don’t get paid for getting people to lose weight or to quit smoking.

One of the problems with how prevention is measured is the fact its benefit is measured as dollars saved, which rarely enables prevention measures to stack up.  They just don’t “save” enough money or it’s just plain impossible to calculate how much money they do save.  But there is another way to think about prevention, and that’s in terms of how much benefit one gains by spending on prevention.

Pauline Chen’s piece in today’s NY Times cites a measure called a QALY — Quality Adjusted Life Year — and utilized in numerous studies, including most recently by Dr. Steven Woolf of Virgina Commenwealth University.  Woolf uses examples like smoking cessation (e.g. a $5,000 investment in getting someone to quit smoking yields one QALY) and the case that taking a children’s aspirin daily yields QALYs at a third to a fifth the cost of angioplasty.

Another way to look at QALYs is the fact that by one estimate 100,000 lives could be saved a year by investing in 5 key preventitive measures:

1. breast cancer creening in women 40 and older

2. flu immunizations in adults 50 and over

3. colorectal cancer screening in adults 50 and over

4. smoking cessation counseling

5. daily aspirin in high risk cardiovascular patients

Now, it’s just my nature to think about the other side of the QALY equation — you know, the top 5 what I would call “non-preventitive” measures that would surely reduce your QALYs:

1. increased volume of bungee jumping and/or base jumping — particularly with bad ropes or parachutes

2. consumption of soft serve ice cream – especially chocolate dipped cones

3. exceeding the recommended “one glass of wine” a night rule — by like 3-4 glasses a night

4. having any special family nights that sound like “family steak night” or “family pork rind and ranch dip night”

5. convincing yourself that playing World of Warcraft is a form of exercise

All kidding aside, it’s refreshing to see some effort being made in trying to measure what real preventitive health measures might be worth — doing this just might lead to more aspirin consumption and fewer angioplasty procedures.

Upton Sinclair must be turning over in his grave.

Last night I went to check out the documentary Food Inc., a movie that chronicles the far reaching industry that one would describe most aptly as the “food production and distribution” industry.  Now, what I learned from the movie foremost is the fact that there exist what are referred to as veggie libel laws (the laws that got Oprah in trouble for her comments about the beef industry back in 1996), so I will keep many of most sacred opinions about Food Inc. to myself.

That said, here are a few thoughts:

1.  Go see the movie now (if you can find an art house near you that will be showing it) or at least rent the movie when it shows up in Blockbuster or on Netflix (hopefully the latter two aren’t owned by Tyson or Monsanto).

The producers of Food Inc. do an admirable job laying out many of the component parts of the food industry that when taken as a whole make you really think about how the food you eat gets to your table — and once on your plate what’s really in it.

2. Find a cause somewhere in the food industry ecosystem

There seem to be so many pieces of this puzzle — from early onset diabetes to e-coli outbreaks to labor practices to questionable policy making — that everyone should feel compelled to do something that has a positive impact on the food industry.  As the movie points out quite effectively, there are parallels here to the tobacco industry, (hint, hint).

3. Act and vote locally

Ever wonder why a fast food cheeseburger costs less relative to a bunch of broccoli or a pack of organic carrots?  Well, next time you feel the sudden urge to swing in to a drive-thru, keep going until you run in to a local farmer’s market or supermarket that carries something organic (heck, as the movie highlights, this could even include your local Wal-Mart).

4.  Don’t think of this as a date movie fellas

Unless your girlfriend or wife is super liberal (e.g. Berkeley grad?), is looking for another cause to take on (e.g. African malaria cure isn’t enough), only eats organic food (e.g. she’ll be able to name the Stoneyfield CEO when he appears in the movie), and you’re not planning to go to dinner afterwards (e.g. this may be a conscious tactic on your part to save a few bucks?), find something else to see as a date-night flick.

Living in San Francisco I have pretty much written off Safeway as a grocery shopping option.  I mean, c’mon, it’s just not cool to shop at there.  Maybe when I’m in a pinch and need a gallon of milk, sure I’ll zip over to the Market Street Safeway.  Or if I need to get cash from the Wells Fargo, a coffee from their mini Starbucks, or a lottery ticket (how else am I going to pay for my kids to go to college?), okay, I’ll do the Safeway thing.  But they have disappeared from my grocery shopping radar, replaced by the ever cool Whole Foods Market and Trader Joe’s outlets sprinkled around the City, and the plethora of neighborhood specialty markets like Harvest and Real (“Expensive”) Foods.

But Safeway may have enticed me to comeback based on what I read this morning.  Their CEO Steven A. Burd wrote an Op-Ed piece in the Wall Street Journal outlining how the grocery store chain has turned their employee health care plan somewhat on it’s head by introducing novel concepts like accountability and incentives into the equation.  The quick summary of Safeway’s health-care program is that employees can receive significant discounts on their monthly premium payments by actually being healthy.  Basically, Safeway is thinking of it’s health-care plan more or less analagous to the way auto insurance works.  Why should the employees who don’t want to get healthy (e.g. the “bad drivers”) cause premiums to be increased for the healthy workers (e.g. the “good drivers”)?

Now I know that many people will read Burd’s article and claim how unfair it is to people who for whatever reason can’t pass the health tests that would result in lower premiums.  (In fact, an interesting sidebar with the Safeway program is the fact that it doesn’t apply to union workers).  And while I am sure there are cases where heredity may predispose someone from being able to lower their cholesterol through diet and exercise or otherwise pass the tests that qualify them for a discount, I also suspect a lot of the critics of what Safeway is doing just don’t want to be held accountable for a significant portion of what they pay for health insurance.  For employees who receive healt-care benefits from their employers, this perk has become an entitlement that in their mind comes without the requirement that they quit smoking, start exercising and/or get their hand out of the Doritos bag.

As Burd explains, Safeway has been able to essentially keep it’s health-care costs flat over the past four years (compared to an average 38% increase in company health-care expenses nationwide), there are other real benefits from Safeway’s approach here.  The company is clearly prioritizing healthy living as a core element of Safeway’s culture and exposing employees to information they might not otherwise have access.  In turn, this has to increasingly manifest itself in the form of happier, more productive and more retainable employees.  Now all of these so called “soft” employee-level benefits have to lead to a business benefit eventually, right?  Well, over the past 5 years Safeway’s stock has actually outperformed Whole Foods (though, Krogers has outperformed Safeway, so maybe Krogers is keeping treadmills and ellipitical machines in the back of their stores for lunch break workouts?).

The more far reaching takeaway from the Safeway example is that with all of the debate bubbling up around national healt-care legislation, a grocery store chain of all places has institued a very basic principle that would be worth inserting more broadly into the national dialogue.  Accountability and incentives need to be important concepts addressed in the health-care debate, and when used properly as in the Safeway example, they can be very powerful tools to help naturally guide us towards being a healthier, more competitive workforce that ultimately isn’t directing more than 1/5th of our resources to health-care spending.

A rather depressing story in today’s NY Times about cuts spreading rapidly across the college sports landscape.  Seems that the recession’s squeeze is finally making its way to the athletic departments.  As expected the sports getting the knife at schools are what you’d consider “tier 2″ sports – fencing, pistol, swimming…but also fairly popular sports like soccer and volleyball are getting nuked.

Some may look at this as an inevitable outcome given the economic pressures facing universities.  Yet given soundbites like the fact that the University of California system is apparently considering a 10 percent tuition increase and the fact that the BCS got a huge rights increase in their new deal with ESPN, this seems like the wrong time to be ending the careers of student athletes once their high school careers end.

The Times piece states that in the 2007-08 academic year there were 412,768 NCAA student athletes.  I would suggest that there should actually be many, many more than that.  As someone who played a sport in college, I feel lucky to have had access to a physically demanding outlet almost daily, and to have had the opportunity to compete in a team setting.

Given what we are learning today about the connection between physical exercise and brain development, not to mention what we’ve known for years about how competition and teamwork in sports maps to “the real world”, colleges should be doing whatever they can to not only keep their current teams in tact, but they should be coming up with ways to open up competitive sports programs to as many students as possible.

Seems like there’s an opportunity here for corporate sponsors who gladly sponsor the elite levels of college sports to invest in their future workforces today on the soccer fields, volleyball courts and swimming pools across campuses nationwide.

Yikes!  I haven’t posted on this blog in over two weeks.  What gives?

No, I haven’t been on an extended vacation, though it is fair to assume that the Grey Family trip to Mexico has been postponed for Summer 2009.  Looks like that trip to the water park in Santa Rosa is back on the docket!

Consider the last two weeks as a combination of being pretty busy meeting with interesting companies and people in the digital media space — all of which I can’t really be blogging about now can I?  Well, I guess according to the new Twittersphere world we live in, maybe I’m supposed to be life streaming everything I do in real-time?  Sorry, I have to draw the line somewhere — some stuff has to stay behind the firewall brother.

Ok, so what is on my radar these days?

Healthcare. I ran across another article today that pegs healthcare related spending in the U.S. at more than 17% of GDP and the expectation is that eventually it will account for the biggest slice of the economy.  Everywhere you look you can’t help but notice how overweight on average people are in this country and how much TV advertising bombards us with visual images of some of the most unhealthy and outright disgusting food options.  This is a topic that everyone should put on their short list of priorities to help address — starting with their own health.  Exercise more, eat less — starting now!

Sports. April was a great month.  Baseball starts — and the visuals strike me that the economy may be impacting attendance.  The pictures of all those empty seats at Yankee Stadium behind the hitter is a stark reminder that not everyone can afford literally hundreds (or thousands) of dollars to watch a ballgame.  On the flip side, the NFL Draft reminds us that in some instances sports continues to be immune to the macro economy.  Seems a bit incongruous that in a city where an entire industry is dying a slow death their team commits almost $42 million to an unproven quarterback.  Nice message Detroit.

Digital Media Business. I’m loving the never-ending game of musical chairs in the digital media space.  AOL makes the latest move as new CEO Tim Armstrong exits Greg Coleman (one of my former bosses when I was at Yahoo!) from his job running Platform-A after basically 3 months.  Then there’s News Corp. — bringing in Jon Miller as Chief Digital Officer and a new management team at MySpace.com, starting with a new CEO, COO and CPO.  Yahoo! and MSN have been active as well — even swapping some players so to speak.  Eventually all of the moves will be a net positive for the digital business.  Once all the new management teams get settled in they will be anxious to make a mark — and the fastest way to do that is through acquisition.  So if you are running a start up, keep your head down, build your audience and get profitable if you can.  A big media company may come knocking later this year.

Here we are in the midst of Little League baseball season so it must be about time for more outcry from psychologists, parents and journalists about how our star craved culture is ruining our kids’ lives by driving the little ones too hard in youth sports.

Sure enough, Monday’s WSJ “Bookshelf” section takes a full column to review BusinessWeek writer Mark Hyman’s book “Until It Hurts:  America’s Obsession with Youth Sports and How it Harms Our Kids”.  Okay, first off Mark needs to slow way down with that title.  He makes it sound like we’re back in the 19th Century running our 11-year olds through 14 hour days in the neighborhood sweatshop.

According to the WSJ book reviewer (I obviously haven’t read Hyman’s book — and I don’t intend to), much of Hyman’s focus on youth sports centers around the physical injuries that apparently millions of kids suffer playing sports each year.  From the author’s research, he claims that last year 3.5 million kids suffered a sports related malady that required treatment.  Sorry, mom putting a band-aid on a skinned knee doesn’t really count here.  I’d like to know how many kids actually had Tommy John elbow surgery (one of the actual examples in the article)?

This one sided view of youth sports misses the mark on two fronts.

First, as those who know me well know, two of my favorite movie characters are Vic Morrow as the overly rabid Yankees manager in “The Bad News Bears” and Robert Duvall as the demented military dad in “The Great Santini”.  Both roles epitomize the evil wrongness that we all fear about youth sports.

Now if I could point to any real life examples where I saw a coach slap his pitcher like Morrow did in “The Bad News Bears” or if I had even one example of a parent berating and/or embarrassing his or her child on the field of play, I might be receptive to Hyman’s thesis.  But I can’t recall a single incident that even comes close.  The annual story of the Texas dad who beats up the Pop Warner football ref in the parking lot after the game is an anomaly — but a convenient one for the 11 o’clock news and USA Today’s front page.

Actually, my experiences have been far different.  The parent-coaches that I have come in contact with have by in large understood the purpose of youth sports.  What’s more, I would reckon that the percentage of kids who even in today’s society zero in on just one sport before high school (e.g. move to Texas to be a gymnast or play on the year-around traveling soccer club team) is pretty darn low.  Like probably a very low single digit percentage.  Hardly numbers that would lay claim to youth sports being the epidemic that Hyman’s book appears to claim.

The bigger point, however, apparently not addressed by Hyman as relates to youth sports — or at least not highlighted in the WSJ review — is the fact that we have a glaring epidemic afflicting our youth today that youth sports can actually help address.  Child obesity and early onset diabetes.  And one of the best things we can be doing is encouraging youth sports participation wherever possible.

Again, I would be willing to bet that not a single kid on the team of little leaguers I am coaching will ever play baseball in the majors — let alone in even college or high school.  But I do hope that little league is just one of many sports they all try and that eventually they pick a couple (team or individual) that they really like and that this pursuit keeps them off the couch and keeps their hand out of the Doritos bag.

A book like Hyman’s smacks of sensationalism — playing off of corner cases and the easy line that can be connected from any topic to our “star struck society”.  Maybe Hyman will do a sequel that tells the other much bigger side of the youth sports story.  The one about how sports can have so many positive impacts on the lives of kids not only when they are kids but when they are grown ups too.

Nothing says accountability like publishing to the world your New Year’s resolution – especially when it’s all about shedding a big chunk of your body mass.

So, how am I tracking one month into my Project 199 plan? Well, my weight fell 4.2% in January, half as much as the stock market (down 8.8%) over the same period. What the hell does that comparison even mean? Nothing, but seems like everything these days needs to be couched in terms of the financial crisis.

Bottom line is I got rid of 10 lbs in January. What do I chalk up the early good results to? Eating habits.

First off, I haven’t gone head first into a crazy low carb diet or some other gimmick routine. In fact, I still eat pretty much the stuff I like.

Basically I have drastically reduced my calorie intake by making two eating habit changes.

1) Smaller portions – no more mondo plates of food, no more 2nd and 3rd helpings.

2) Paying attention – no more mindless snacking during the day, being aware of how much I am consuming each day.

I’ve got 31 pounds to go! The focus this month is now on doing a better job on the exercise front.