I went to the World Economic Forum Family Business Community meeting last weekend. The highlight was definitely a meeting on health, where all participants sat on Swiss exercise balls for the entire 90-minute session.
The health trends as outlined by the Forum’s expert Arnaud Bernaert are simply unsustainable. There is every likelihood that this is the first generation in which children will live shorter lives than their parents. The epidemic of Type II diabetes, the growth of smoking in developing nations (70 percent of males in Indonesia are smokers, he said), the percent of obese or overweight adults in markets as diverse as Mexico, the U.S. and the UK… on and on.
Nerio Alessandri, CEO of TechnoGym, the Italian maker of exercise equipment, was very simple in his explanation of the trends. He said that humans used to walk 15 kilometers per day, now it is down to one kilometer or less. For him, fitness is all about movement, of any kind. Use the stairs instead of the elevator at work. Put the parking lot far away from the entrance to the office. Have a gym facility or give subsidies for exercise club memberships. Drink water, lots of it, about eight glasses a day. Make sure that employees are regularly tested for body mass index, blood pressure, and weight, with financial incentives such as lower insurance premiums for compliance.
Here are a few things that Edelman is doing. I persuaded four people at our new Three Monkeys Zeno operation in the UK to quit smoking the other day and gave them $2,000 each. I am closing in on the 100 person mark for this personal anti-smoking campaign. We have active sports programs, with Edelman teams playing everything from basketball and softball to football and volleyball. We support our employees as they participate in Tough Mudder and other team challenge events, cycle to work, run and walk together. And we’re looking to sponsor and/or encourage more activities to help our employees get up and moving in the coming year.
Richard Edelman hiking at an old mining site in Idaho
As for me, I am working out every day. I have changed my routine. I now have a trainer who makes me work as hard as I did back in my high school football days. I run sprints, do burpees, pull-ups and push-ups as well as box. Here is the difference from prior years; I would ride the exercise bike and lift weights and play tennis but I never pushed myself to exhaustion. If you want to get stronger, you have to be seriously out of your comfort zone. And it will happen… I can now do twice as many pull-ups and push-ups as I used to.
Here is a funny story to send you in to the Memorial Day weekend. I went for a bike ride with my pal John Allman. He has a top class long distance bike, I have a Trek middle of the road model. He also rides every day on the weekend. So he proposes a ride to the Tappan Zee Bridge from Manhattan and back. As always he disappears far ahead of me and I doggedly pursue, getting off my seat on every hill, determined not to give up, even on the brutal stretch of 1.5 miles of serious elevation coming back from the Bridge. So I get home, utterly spent, drag myself to the bath tub with the sports page and get into the hot water. I start reading and the next thing you know, I wake up an hour later, my arms still straight forward but the paper completely soaked, having absorbed water from the bottom up. It was a perfect metaphor for the aging athlete.
Richard Edelman is president and CEO.