Daddy Dan

I cannot believe how quickly gas prices are falling.  I paid $2.79 a gallon this morning, which was amazing to me.  It actually cost me $48 to fill up my tank.  In the summer I was paying $80 and up.  The gas station by our house limits credit card purchases for gas at the pump to $75, so every time I filled up I had to put my card through twice to completely fill the tank.

I’m not going to turn this blog into a “Green” blog, but there’s something about gas prices I wanted to point out.

There is a drawback to lower gas prices.  The lower the prices fall, the less incentive there is for companies to develop alternative fuels and energy.  It’s hard for an electric or hybrid car to compete with cheap gas, and companies will be more reluctant to invest significant dollars into researching and developing alternatives because they’ll worry they won’t recoup their investment.

Hopefully, our next administration will focus more on alternative energy and offer incentives for companies to continue to work on this important issue.

With the advent of all this great new technology we’ve experienced over the last 10 years, it should be easier and easier to free us up to work from anywhere.  We can work from home with high-speed internet connections, wi-fi networks, and virtual private networks (vpn).  We can work nearly anywhere with a Blackberry, an iPhone, or any number of advanced cell phone.

Some of you are lucky enough to get to work from home, at least part of the time.  Some of us with old-school managers are not so lucky.  Although I have a great job that I truly love, I don’t love the fact that my one-way commute is upwards of an hour to 90 minutes.  I know that I’ve chosen to live that far away from work, and I accept it, but it’s still tough.

What truly irks me is my boss, who’s getting ready to retire soon, is adamantly opposed to telecommuting.  He’s a great guy, don’t get me wrong, he’s just the type of manager that always needs his team available to him, in-person, when he needs them.  I think as the old-school managers begin to retire we’ll begin to see more and more telecommuting.  I just hope I don’t reach retirement age before it happens.

There’s some great arguments in favor of telecommuting:

• It gives your company a greener reputation.  We’ve all seen tons of commercials with companies hyping what they’re doing to be a greener company.  Imagine the positive publicity your company could receive if they started making telecommuting a regular part of each employee’s schedule.
• It helps your company recruit better employees.  What person wouldn’t want to work for a company that supported telecommuting (and also flexible schedules, while we’re at it)?  It’d be a great selling point.
• It would promote greater productivity.  Most people take pride in their position and want to do a great job.  Telecommuting would not only take away the long commutes, which would allow employees to work longer, but it would also help employees avoid office distractions like the chatty co-workers, the long lunches, and useless meetings.  At the very minimum, if you’re conferencing in on one of those useless meetings you could continue working while you’re on the phone.  It’s difficult to do that during an in-person meeting.
• More telecommuting would improve the traffic for everyone still commuting to work.
• It would take a lot of cars off the road, reducing our dependence on foreign oil
• and most importantly, telecommuting would improve employee morale.  I know it would for me.

Why hasn’t telecommuting caught on to the extent it should have by now?  I understand that some careers just don’t lend themselves to telecommuting, but many do.  Also, some bosses just love to hold onto that sense of control and don’t trust their employees to work from home.  That’s just sad.

I guess it’ll be up to our generation to start the telecommuting revolution.  Let’s all hurry up and become the leaders of our companies so we can get telecommuting into the mainstream of the business world.

I’m one of ‘those people’ that have never been totally convinced about global warming.  It seems to me that the scientific community is somewhat mixed in their opinions on the topic, but who knows what scientists and experts are in the pocket of the oil industry, the auto industry, or for that matter the environmental-related businesses.  Lately I’ve been leaning more and more toward the global warming side, but I’m still not totally convinced.

I read Thomas Friedman’s new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded to educate myself more on this issue, and I’ve come to realize that it doesn’t really MATTER whether or not it’s true - we still need to do something about our addiction to oil, coal, and natural gas.

With the world’s rapidly expanding middle class, and exceptional growth in China, India, and other developing nations we’re using more natural resources than ever before, and there’s no infinite quantity.  Some day we’re going to run out of these resources and we need to start working on clean alternative energy to take its place.

Friedman’s book discusses the various problems with our dependence on ‘dirty’ energy, and it’s not just climate change.  The West buys our fuels from dictatorships in the Middle East and other areas that are hostile to us (Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc.) and we’re passing along enormous wealth to these countries.  The development of these fuels are destroying tropical forests and other ecosystems, despoiling rivers, and leading to an incredible amount of species extinction.

If we want our kids to grow up in a better world than we did, we must move forward with discovering and developing clean energy solutions that will improve our environment and our societies and help the developing world continue to flourish.  The book outlines steps that our world needs to take to make this goal a reality.