The Insurance Institute of Highway Safety released its annual list of the safest cars for the upcoming year. This year’s list, for 2010 models, highlights Subaru, Ford, and Volkswagen cars. The Triangle Business Journal has more:

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety released its top safety picks among 2010 model year vehicles, and the results might have Subaru, Ford and Volkswagen/Audi dealers gearing up for sales spikes in coming months.

The winners (as quoted from the article):

Large cars
Buick LaCrosse
Ford Taurus
Lincoln MKS
Volvo S80

Midsize cars
Audi A3
Chevrolet Malibu built after October 2009
Chrysler Sebring 4-door
Dodge Avenger
Mercedes C class
Subaru Legacy
Subaru Outback
Volkswagen Jetta sedan
Volkswagen Passat sedan
Volvo C30

Small cars
Honda Civic 4-door models (except Si)
Kia Soul
Nissan Cube
Subaru Impreza except WRX
Volkswagen Golf 4-door

Midsize SUVs
Dodge Journey
Subaru Tribeca
Volvo XC60
Volvo XC90

Small SUVs
Honda Element
Jeep Patriot
Subaru Forester
Volkswagen Tiguan

Erickson Retirement Communities, one of the biggest retirement community developers in the country, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Reuters has more:

LLC, a U.S. retirement community developer, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and reached an agreement to sell its assets to Redwood Capital LLC, court documents showed.

Maryland-based Erickson Communities, which was founded in 1983, currently includes 19 campuses and houses more than 22,000 people and has about 12,000 employees.

Erickson has 20 retirement communities around the country, according to their website. The Baltimore Sun reports on the reasons behind Erickson’s bankruptcy filing:

Erickson’s real estate arm, which acquires land for campuses and builds projects, has been hurt by the recession, as seniors who couldn’t sell existing homes put off moving to continuing-care communities.

Erickson was in the midst of large developments outside Maryland but couldn’t get seniors to put down the money to move in. When the credit markets collapsed, Erickson couldn’t restructure its loans.

PETA is sending President Barack Obama a Katcha Bug Humane Bug Catcher after witnessing him murder a fly on CNBC earlier this week. Sky News has more:

Peta spokesman Bruce Friedrich said: “We support compassion even for the most curious, smallest and least sympathetic animals. We believe that people, where they can be compassionate, should be, for all animals.” He said Mr Obama would soon receive a Katcha Bug Humane Bug Catcher which will allow him to trap flies before releasing them outside.

“We’re happy to say that we wish he hadn’t.”

The Bug Katcha

PETA describes the Katcha Bug, which costs $8, as follows:

Simply place Katcha Bug over the bug and slowly slide its plastic trapdoor shut. The bug will step onto the trapdoor as it closes, and you can carry Katcha Bug outside, where all you need to do is slide the trap door open, allowing the bug to walk away. You’ll have no problem catching even large spiders with this handy gadget. Katcha Bug measures 9 inches in length, so you won’t have to get too close for comfort.

Can you think of any other organization that would get this much national coverage sending a product to a global leader? PETA is good.

I joined the board of a large non-profit this year and we recently spent several hours on planning for our year at the helm. Once we’d hammered out what we thought was a pretty near perfect vision and plan for the organization, a former board member dashed our enthusiasm with these words:

This is not a strategic plan. This is an annual plan.

And for the life of me and my cohorts, we could not get a straight answer out of this person as to what was missing from our so-called annual plan that would make it a strategic plan. I’m still grappling with the differences but here’s how I understand it so far.

Strategic plans address fundamental and directional issues. They are over-arching, visionary, and long term.

Annual plans (operational or management plans) target the day-to-day implementation of strategic decisions. These are the immediate (less than one year) objectives and imperatives.

Strategic plans take into account the unpredictability of the future, but plan for it anyway. They develop strategies based on the organization’s strength and weaknesses relative to the opportunities and threats in the external environment. Got it.

Annual plans take on future goals as something to accomplish now. They focus on short-term goals and go into greater detail about how specific tasks will be accomplished. Check.

Okay, so for example, in our organization one strategic goal was to raise our profile in the community. And one of the corresponding annual plan goals to accomplish this was to develop our website as an external (marketing) tool.  To me that’s strategy and operations. But the former board member still says – nope, that’s not strategic. According to her, strategic is more like, ‘Become a benchmark organization for online communication”.

• Is it just that we’re not thinking big enough?
• Just how detailed should long-term goals be?
• And must they always be measurable?

I’m still confused, and betting I’m not alone. Planning seems to get pushed to the back of the list in order to put out today’s fires and we all know that’s not the best practice. It’s exciting to be part of an organization with such a forward thinking planning model. Now if only I could wrap my mind around it!

Please, strategic thinkers out there – enlighten us! (Okay… me.)

Image Credit: Wolfgang Staudt, Flickr

Found this odd claim reported in the Christian Science Monitor:

In San Diego, mobile users pay more than $3 per minute on average. The Utility Consumers’ Action Network surveyed 700 cellphone users and found that the average cellphone bill went down since 2004, falling from $57.92 for a single-line account to $37.15 today.

However, “cost per minute can be outrageous,” says the report. “Doing the simplest of calculations – dividing the total cost by the number of minutes – we find that the average ‘account’ is paying $3.02 a minute.” This average is driven up by a small slice of consumers who buy large plans but rarely use them. If you cut out these big-spenders, the average falls somewhere between 50 cents and $1 per minute – far more than the “10 cents a minute” claim made in many ads.

The study says that part of the problem comes from consumers overestimating how many minutes they need, which makes them overpay for plans (study claims that they only use 32% of their total time allowance). In addition, consumers rarely change their contracts once they’ve signed up.

This is a strange study. How could an average cell phone user possibly pay $3/minute? The study doesn’t mention data usage, cost of the phone (which is heavily discounted with most contracts), night/weekend/anytime minutes, text messaging, or taxes.

The study (located here) needs to clarify its claims. At the moment, they don’t make much sense.

It’s IHOP Pancake Day 2009, and what better way to celebrate free food than to feel guilty if you don’t pay for it? ABC has details on the event:

It’s National Pancake Day and to celebrate, free pancakes will be handed out all over the (nation) today… as local IHOPs join with that chain’s restaurants across the country to help the Children’s Miracle Network.

Since beginning its National Pancake Day celebration in 2006, IHOP has raised nearly two million dollars to support charities in the communities in which it operates. With your help, we hope to raise $1,000,000 for Children’s Miracle Network in 2009!

IHOP will serve one free short stack per customer, then ask for a donation for the Children’s Miracle Network. In other words, if you take the free pancakes and don’t donate, you’re a soulless freeloader. If you do donate, the pancakes aren’t free.

But hey, it’s for a good cause, so get out there!

The government really nails it with sex offender awareness. Family Watchdog is a new website allowing users to find sex offenders in their neighborhoods via an easy-to-execute map search.

Note: the website is Familywatchdog.us, NOT .com–that’s some kind of Internet security company that must be rolling in high Web traffic this morning.

After seeing it on Oprah, and reading about it again this morning, I decided to check out Family Watchdog to see what the hype was all about. After searching my home nieghborhood, I found no less than six sex offenders living down the road. Luckily, there’s also a jail there. Most of them are located inside.

The thing is…there are about 30 sex offenders total, living in town. That means .03% of the population (of about 100,000) are registered sex offenders. No cause for alarm there, but it does make you think a little harder about the people you meet on the street.

Implications for the Business World
So, now that we know where the nasties are, is it safe to assume that Family Watchdog might have implications for business? I can think of three ways:

1) Pity the local businesses who either employ or are located next to registered sex offenders. I’d steer clear of them. I can’t imagine I’m the only one.

2) Family Watchdog is a powerful resource. It not only provides sex offender information, but customizable portals, the latest FDA information, product recalls, offender updates, statistics, etc. As a portal, Family Watchdog serves a niche market thirsty for its services, acts as an authority in its field, and is customizable enough to carry everywhere. It’s the kind of resource a business would drool to be.

3) How about Business Watchdog? Being a bad business isn’t cause for online scarlet lettering the way being a sex offender is (if it is…that’s another issue). Still, in this day and age, harnessing consumer concern could really provide a needed service. I’m picturing Fraud Watchdog, Ponzi Watchdog, or something of the kind.

What do you think?

This is actually a nonprofit, but it’s interesting to think about the ramifications of running a business that helps people die:

Switzerland, in a law dating back to 1942, permits foreigners to come and kill themselves, placing few restrictions on the how, when and why. Doctors have relative freedom to prescribe a veterinary drug for that very purpose. Now the country’s suicide practices are under the spotlight after British TV last week showed Craig Ewert, a 59-year-old Chicago man with a severe form of motor neuron disease, killing himself in Switzerland two years ago.comes to die.

Other such organizations in Switzerland say they are cheaper and do not charge the patient directly, relying instead on membership fees and donations. “We need to ensure that there’s no economic incentive for these organizations to encourage people to commit suicide,” says (a critic).

The drug they use is pentobarbital, generally used in veterinary clinics. Here in the States, people sometimes travel to buy a drinkable dose of the stuff in Tijuana, then take it back home with them.

I’m going to make two assumptions here:

1. People have the right to choose assisted suicide

2. Writing a check for $8,300, booking a ticket to Switzerland, checking into a death hotel, and drinking a cup of pentobarbital are the only barriers to entry for your assisted suicide

If those assumptions are true, does that make setting up a nonprofit and charging a flat fee for assisted suicide ethical? I don’t think so. The Swiss laws provide a fruitful environment for that kind of business, but that doesn’t justify making it easy to sign up.

Capitalism is a useful philosophy, but it has a tendency to usurp ethical limits in the name of profit. Allowing the seed of a profit-off-death industry to flourish is a bad idea. For now, Dignitas has a certain set of parameters, but what if a money-hungry outfit sets up shop across the street, one that costs less and has fewer requirements? I shudder to think of what kinds of people could slip through the cracks.

Doctors, ethicists, and terminally ill patients need to advocate an additional layer of requirements before allowing patients to admit themselves, a system designed to give sufferers access to as many life-affirming options as possible before they decide to die. A year of therapy, for example, or a year of participating in a social network comprised of people who suffer from similar afflictions.

It’s a shame to see a system so accommodating to the loss of hope.

We all seem to be broke these days. Why would anyone in their right mind want to donate money during a financial crisis?

Easy. Because the person you’re donating to feels the economic crisis, too. The difference is that while you may lose your house, they may lose their lives.

The financial crisis has resulted in drastically reduced commodity prices. That’s good for us, but not so good for the farmers in the developing world who sell the things we consume. For them, tumbling prices mean higher odds of starvation, losing educational opportunities for their children, perishing from health problems, or turning to prostitution to survive.

50% off is not always pretty.

When you give a microloan, you’re not just helping someone out. In bad global economic situations like the current one, you could save someone’s life.

Kiva.org offers microloans to select entrepreneurs around the world. Through donations, the organization helps lend tiny amounts of capital to entrepreneurs who would otherwise not have access to funds at all, or be subject to loan sharks.

Most recipients are women. Their businesses run the gamut from car repair shops to small farms. Business owners generally take their loans very seriously and repay them as soon as they can.

Loan applicants are featured on Kiva’s website, allowing lenders to connect to them as people as well as lenders. When website users decide to lend money—usually a few hundred dollars—the money goes to a microfinance institution, which then hands the money to the entrepreneur.

Loans aren’t risky–defaults are at 1.4%. And Kiva is totally hip. Here are some of Kiva’s most recent statistics, from their website:

Total value of all loans made through Kiva: $45,292,510
Number of Kiva Lenders: 343,694
Current repayment rate (all partners): 98.62%
Average total amount loaned per Kiva Lender (includes reloaned funds): $131.69

If you’re a traveler, Kiva certainly beats giving money to begging children. If you have a big heart, browsing through entrepreneurs’ profiles is enough to convince you that the program works.

Entrepreneurs usually take up to a year to repay loans. Kiva donations start at only $25.

Sound good? Advanta now offers a credit card that will match 100% of your Kiva grant donation of up to $200/month. Additional perks include:

–A 5% credit on all grants made to Kiva, other charities, and some qualifying purchases. Hitting the limit of $1,200 nets you $60 in credit each year.
–15 months of balance transfers at 0% APR.
–APR is fixed at 7.99%.
–No annual fee.
–It’s called a business card, but individuals can apply, too, if their credit rating is very good.

The card is a simple way to do serious good. If you can pay it off, try it out.