Teaching Kids About Nutrition – An Idea I had!

I’ve not blogged in a long time for a variety of reasons. First I’ve been working on a couple of other projects which have kept me quite  busy.  My editor instructed me on quality over quantity and since my mind was occupied with things I couldn’t share, I used that to excuse me too. Mostly though outside of those projects, what has been on my mind weren’t necessarily under the umbrella of topics that I had limited this blog to.  I decided to liberate myself from that limitation and create a category called “The Rest of My Life”. Widening the scope would then permit me to write about my other passions, motherhood, running, dancing and my ever-elusive weight loss i.e. the whole me. After all, the only thing that requires more creativity than business is parenting.

Funnily enough, my last entry was entitled Create Your Own Free Lunch which had nothing to do with food. This one conversely is about the high cost of food, the caloric cost. As the parent of a teenager, the things I worry about are her safety, values, education and nutrition. If you’re the parent of a teenager feel free to share what you worry about. Try not to freak me out.

My daughter will soon be leaving for college and it made me wonder whether I’ve armed her with the kind of education about food that would allow her to make smart choices.  Did I provide her with a good enough formula? I’ve been on a weight loss quest for most of my adult life.  If you’ve shared this journey, you’ll know how much this is something that you don’t want for your kids.  I want her to have a healthy relationship with food.  Far beyond it being fuel, but something to be enjoyed within the confines of providing her body with what it needs to perform optimally. When you read about childhood obesity and the other challenges plaguing children in the developed world you can’t help but wonder how you can help to guide them.   In pondering this point, I had a bit of an epiphany as to how I could teach her about making the right food choices.

Let me first declare that in this quest my only qualification is that I’m a mom and in my humble but superficial experience, foods higher in calories have lower nutritional content and vice versa, generally speaking. The Journal of the American Dietetic Association similarly said that energy density (high calorie content) and nutrient density (dense concentration of vitamins, complex carbohydrates, lean proteins, and good fats) score were negatively correlated.

So it occurred to me that what I needed was some way for her to develop an interest in these parameters, look at food labels or look up the content of food and consider the nutritional values. My hope was that by understanding what her body needed, it would lead to more nutritious choices, which would be a great start.  If I could keep it sufficiently simple and correlate it to something she already understands, even better. Teenagers for the most part understand money, how much they have, need and want.

According to the American Dietetic Association Complete Food and Nutrition Guide, a 16 year old girl needs between 1,800 to 2,200 calories per day. My daughter and I settled on 2000 since she’s moderately active. We embarked upon a 2 week experiment. Here’s how it worked: She got a daily caloric budget of 2000 calories.  Each calorie ‘cost’ her one penny. She had to ‘buy’ her food out of her daily budget, which at a penny per calorie worked out to be $20.00. We didn’t use actual money, instead it was more of a debit system that we worked out verbally. The win in it for her was that I wouldn’t automatically say no to junk food. She would get to make her own choices, she liked that aspect.

If she had a simple cereal and milk for breakfast, that could cost around $2.00 (200 calories, one cup of Cheerios and a cup of low fat milk) which would leave her with $18.00 left for the rest of the day.  Fruits were cheap, a half cup serving would be about 50 cents, unless it was something like mangoes which she loves which was a little over a $1. If she wanted a glass of juice, it would normally run over a dollar, and she’d have to pay close attention to the serving size to understand how much she had left of her $20 per day.  If she was craving something crunchy, she’d look at the chips and look at the carrots, and think, “yeah, the carrots are cheaper, I want to save up my calories for something better.”  She got to eat whatever she wanted, but it was a tradeoff. After the first week she was far more aware of nutritional content, serving sizes and calorie count. While she’s not necessarily a soda fanatic, now that she understands the relative calorie cost of soda, she’ll not have one unless she really truly wants one.  To her, for the most part it isn’t worth it, she’d rather have another mango.  Today she wanted a KFC chicken sandwich for lunch.  Although the experiment phase is over, she calculated and decided on her own that she had more than the $5.40 calorie value left in her daily budget. She opted for no fries, and water, because she really just wanted the sandwich and the other bits weren’t worth it.

The most important thing that it developed for her during our two-week trial was an appreciation for the nutritional details of everything including calorie count. Secondarily she developed the ability to keep a running tally of her total “spend” for the day.  If she really wanted a high calorie treat, she could have it, provided that she had the budget for it.

I’m hoping this works and she understands that it’s not about fad diets, but understanding the content of food and making wise choices based on that content.  Some of the things that astounded her were foods like Nutella, delicious but very calorie dense. Certain salad dressings that she thought were healthy  turned out to be mostly sugar and fat and thus not necessarily what she wanted nutritionally. Food is an experience, and it should be fun.  It would be unrealistic to say never eat junk food. She’s a teenager, she’s naturally drawn to it as are her peers. Her mother (me) loves food, so she has my passion for it.  She has grown up in a home where there has always been lots of cooking, baking, creating and entertaining. What I needed for her to leave with is a healthy outlook and a thorough understanding of how foods work to fuel her body.  What I didn’t expect was to learn through her questions (or her odd obsession with sodium content being too high). There were times when she’d ask, “Which has more calories, prunes or dates?” And I didn’t know offhand.  Turns out its dates but only slightly.  My triumph is, at least she cares.  We use a fantastic app called Calorie Counter by FatSecret available on Android, iPhone and Blackberry platforms. It makes it super simple to look up foods and understand how each meal contributes to your daily calorie, protein, fat and carb profile.  It also tells you how much you burn in each of your activities during the day so that she understands when her activity level demands more fuel.

As for my current weight loss journey, I’ll write a blog about it when I get to my goal weight. Well, right after I get back from the beach strutting my stuff.

Create Your Own Free Lunch

I’m sure you’ve heard the saying “there’s no such thing as a free lunch”; I disagree.  If you find something that you can provide for “free” and figure out how to fund it while still building a profitable business, do it.

Free (Wikipedia) Something given or supplied without payment (gratis)

The paradigm of “free” has shifted. Companies, and in fact entire industries, are now being built around and thriving on the concept of “free”.  Think of YouTube, Wikipedia, Google, and Facebook just to name a few.  They are all built on the premise of being “free” to the consumer.  What these companies have discovered is that someone else will pay for the value of having you captive as a customer.

While there are fewer examples of entire companies built on the premise of “free” in our region it is still a deeply entrenched expectation here.  I’ve recently been exposed online to a group known as RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce). They are storytellers and they do so in a very unique way.  This self-professed enlightenment organization is committed to finding innovative practical solutions to today’s social challenges.  Their solutions are typically animated on whiteboard, alongside a provocative talk. If you haven’t heard of them I urge you to check them out on YouTube. In going through their videos I happened upon this one titled The Secret Powers of Time about how people perceive time. It suggests that the closer you are to the equator the less ‘time sensitive’ you are. There are no seasons to change, thus one season flows almost seamlessly into the other. Alternatively, in regions where the climate changes, you’re apparently more aware of time advancing. My father has a very similar theory, one that I’ve heard since I was a child. His theory is that our environment is so naturally abundant that as a direct result we expect more for free. Theoretically it makes so much sense.  Think about it, there are fruit trees growing wild on almost every vacant lot. During mango season the boughs of the trees look like they might break, being so over-laden with fruit. What’s more, there is always something in season. So if you take the leap of logic from ‘response to time’ being a location-based phenomenon, to ‘expectations of Free’ being location-based, then “free” becomes a regional necessity.

So what is your “free”?  There is more to the concept of “free” than B.O.G.O. It’s not as hard, costly or gimmicky as you might think.

Free Example

I’ll give you one nifty example. At The Nuttall Memorial Hospital, Jamaica, all newborns are offered a free portrait at birth, 3 months, 6 months and one year.  You have a captive audience, parents of newborns.  Given the natural instinct to “show-off” the adorability of their babies, they accept the free photo.  The catch is, it is just one picture.  Think about it. How is that going to work, between mommy, daddy, aunties, uncles, grandmas and the list of loved ones?  All of whom, no doubt adore the new baby. So you obviously will need several copies of that picture. Guess what? You have to BUY the extra copies of that “free picture”.  They’ve brilliantly targeted their “Free” at an extremely captive demographic.

My personal “free” example, apart from this blog, was to solve a sales challenge.

My Challenge

Throughout my career I’ve been in a sales/operations function focused on leading teams to deliver  services to extremely large customers. These customers were often just as or more complex than the organizations designed to service them.  The challenge was we had been doing business together for a very long time and as a result they had already been provided with most, if not all, our products and services. Thus, our opportunity to sell them new things required a more surgical and less broad-brush approach. What we needed to sell now were services and add-ons.

Their Challenge 

These customers had

• Many disparate systems
• Operated in a number of different countries
• Various people purchasing services
• An extremely complex IT environment

What they wanted and needed most was to understand the complexity of what had been provided over time. This would allow them to assess whether the current construct of the products they had was optimal, given that it had grown organically.

The Solution

We then embarked on providing a free optimization review. The result of which was a list of recommendations that would help them become more efficient across the solutions we provided.  This provided the opportunity to have a deep discussion regarding how and how much of our services they were using.  At the end of which we could make recommendations for further enhancements. The review was approached from their organizational rather than their IT goals so that we truly aligned our solutions with their big picture.

The Result

It was wildly successful and highly interactive by design. There wasn’t a single engagement that didn’t yield new tangible benefits for our customers and for us.  For our customers they received documentation and analysis on what solutions had been deployed from us, and our competitors and in which countries they had them.  For us we gained insight into new opportunities to sell additional services based on their business objectives. In the end though the most valuable gain was relationship building. Our customers got a chance to experience our ability to deliver consultancy type services, which had not been a typical part of our offering.  They also had the chance to interact with various disciplines within the organization. This built their confidence in our expertise in a number of different areas they would not have necessarily been exposed to at an executive level before.

Was it a time-consuming process? Absolutely! Did it cost us money? Definitely, there were times when we found services they didn’t need.  Did we charge for it? Certainly not, but we profited greatly from it.

Sometimes in setting out to provide a free lunch, you’re satisfied as well.

RG

Present Fearlessly: RUN!

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LIME and Digicel Scrabble it out

Recently while playing a game of scrabble, I realized what all recreational scrabble players eventually do. Which is that the winner is not the player with the best tiles, or the most extensive vocabulary, but the one that makes the most strategic moves. If you combine strategy with the luck of the tile draw as well as an extensive vocabulary then you certainly improve your odds of winning. A word like “vex” ending up on a triple word score can land you 39 points whereas “obelia” in the wrong place is only 8 points. As a player it can be frustrating to use your 4 precious vowels on something like “obelia” for a measly 8 points although patting yourself on the back for your savvy vocabulary.  However if you create this word in the vicinity of a triple word score you open up the board for someone with a v and an x to truly upset you with their 39 points. The lessons we learn from these childhood games are not at all dissimilar from the rules we learn in business; strategy is everything. Think about it, Google wasn’t the first search engine, but they remain the best. They strategically improved upon a market largely developed by Yahoo. Facebook wasn’t the first social network, but they are currently eons ahead of MySpace, one of their predecessors.

Nearer afield the telecoms giant LIME with 140+ years of history, technology excellence and a superior network (3G vs EDGE) let the obscure entrant Digicel in 2001 become the dominant mobile player in a matter of months. Now David has become Goliath and vice versa. As a former senior executive at LIME, you don’t leave the company without a tremendous sense of optimism and hope for their future, an understanding that they have many of the right ingredients, including number of bright, dedicated and hardworking employees. You also leave with a great deal of respect for the competitor that Digicel is. But finally you leave knowing that everyone, has an opinion about the battle, thus so do I.

I’ve also partnered with Digicel in a number of efforts, and did some work for Claro while they were operating in Jamaica prior to my time at LIME. Through all of those interactions I have wondered if the issue isn’t a simple and fundamental one for LIME. Who is LIME competing against? Notwithstanding the fundamental question, the complex regulatory framework that they have to navigate represents a significant disadvantage which, shouldn’t for a moment, be diluted.

Years ago someone asked me what was Coca-Cola’s business. I erroneously answered that they were a beverage company. Coca-Cola is a marketing company. Their distribution system is entirely franchised. The value they provide is marketing the global Coca-Cola brand, the world’s 3^rd most valuable brand in 2010. It’s the same for Digicel; they are a marketing company. They do a better job of marketing themselves because that’s the business that they’re in, and it’s what they know how to do, it’s also where they focus their spend, on their core competence. The question then becomes “How do you compete with an opponent whose core competence puts you at a strategic disadvantage?”

Looking now as an outsider with a few insights I’d say

 1.  Keep the strategy simple - While it’s hard to out market a marketer, LIME would have to use marketing very strategically to get the story out:

• Employ a number of different channels, a trend that I’ve observed them employing more and more of late.
• Keep the messages simple so that they are easily reinforced.  One of the things you notice with Jamaican marketing is just about everything is set to song, it makes it more memorable.  If that’s what works in this market, employ it.
• Maintain a level of momentum. What you learn from marketing is that it takes time to seed a message, invest in making that message stick.
• Delight with excellent customer service, this too takes years to build and reinforce and is also trending with LIME. Every interaction with each customer while not necessarily satisfactory, as that is both expensive and near, if not impossible to do, should leave each customer with a distinct sense that LIME cares.

LIME is a technology company, a full service technology company providing excellent solutions; that’s the message.

2.   Keep it reasonably consistent yet flexible  - In order to reinforce a strategy you have to maintain a level of consistency to give any strategy a chance to work, however you also need to measure on an ongoing basis to confirm that your plans are working as outlined.

3.   Finally, find a model that works and follow it – I’m a huge advocate for finding something that works and following it. This isn’t the first telecoms battle in the world.  There have been sufficient examples of companies turning things around. Pick one such model and follow it, making modifications for the local environment. Learn what the greats did, the Googles and Facebooks of the world; you don’t have to invent the strategy, just find one that works and make it even better.

In the end as this battle persists and the playing field levels, consumers win. Here’s to the consumer!

RG

About Tools

What are our options for tools that can assist in making us more efficient, more effective and to measure what we do so that we can focus on doing more of the right things and less of the wrong things to make best use of our investments.

RG

About Competition

Who are our competitors and how do we outpace them and stay ahead, are we competing with them effectively or are we defining our business by their standards rather than defining our own space.

RG

About Costs

What are the cost saving technologies available in pursuing the customers that we are competing for to make best use of limited resources in an environment that mostly lacks economies of scale.

RG