As an entrepreneur, there are many things that jockey for your resources. I have already spoken about this a bit in a few of my past articles. CEOs who focus on the right variables at the right time and produce the right results are rewarded. They are rewarded by personal satisfaction, their customers, their shareholders, and the venture capital who believed in them.

What happens when your priorities are out of order? There are no road signs to indicate the proper decisions. The sky doesn’t come falling down. I believe the most dangerous thing about not having your priorities straight is that there are not warning signs. And the most dangerous outcome is not realizing your full potential and experiencing partial success.

As brutal as it might sound, I wish an invisible hand would reach up and just slap me when I focus on the wrong thing. Staying true to the nature of this blog, I am going to give you a personal example.

I travel a fair bit, and today, I saw this. Take a look at this picture. We have all used one of these (I’m giving some of you the benefit of the doubt here – but we have all SEEN one of these, right?

To me, this represents a dismal, borderline inexcusable sense of priorities. Let’s zoom out and take in the environment. To minimize the heckling, I resisted from taking photos of the inside of the men’s bathroom. This picture is the sink of the men’s restroom in Terminal B of Rochester Airport. There were several of these sinks beside each other. Something on the order of 3 or 4 of these sinks.

Let’s talk about some of the elements of this picture.

1. The electrical outlet
2. The water faucet
3. The soap dispenser

While the electrical outlet is non-GFI compliant (meaning, you could electrocute yourself if the wrong combination of water and electrical outlet come into contact), I can’t remember the last time I plugged in anything in the outlets in the bathroom. I’m also assuming that I’m not alone, as I hardly ever see business travelers shaving with electric razors (that need to be plugged in at that moment) in the bathroom. Not sure how much money we could have saved if we didn’t place an outlet there, but let’s just say $X and Y amount of time.

The water faucet is spring loaded, and so you have to use your soapy hand to push down on the hot and/or cold (not sure how you would get “warm”) water. But upon closer inspection you will see that there is rust on and around the faucet. Indicating some water waste going on there.

And lastly the soap dispenser. It is automatic. This presents a great effort and investment to conserve soap.

So now, let’s look at the bigger picture. With organizations like this one
charity water and statistics like: Water Conservation per day for the last 30 days.

Really makes you think.

While I would like everyone to use soap when they wash their hands, I would rank the prioirties as follows:

1. Stop electrocution
2. CONSERVE WATER!
3. … insert a laundry list of the ails of the world
4. conserve soap.

Life is going on. Hundreds, and thousands of people are using public bathrooms, and no flashing neon signs or sirens are going off to indicate a poor set of priorities.

Are you conserving soap or water in your organization?

Now get up and make sure your faucets don’t leak =P

Posted in Social Responsiblity
No Comments Yet Posted by Mike Davis