Jim Collins 12 Questions

[Jackie Bullinger]

TheCity of Fort Collins defines sustainability as, "the long-term social, economic, and environmental health of a community." Another example is the most internationally recognized definition from the 1987 Bruntland Commission, which is "meeting the needs of the present without jeopardizing the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

To bring the global concept of sustainability to action at the local level, sustainability advocates use the triple bottom line in decision-making. Essentially, that means projects are evaluated based on their social, economic and environmental impacts. Rather than make decisions on the basis of profit or the economic bottom line, three bottom lines (social, economic, and environmental) are considered. For the City, it means creating an optimal mix of resource efficiency, cost effectiveness and employee well-being in daily City operations.

On the planning level, the City has prioritized focus areas based on their potential triple bottom line benefits. In terms of daily decision-making, if the City follows the triple bottom line approach, it might examine the answer to several questions before a final decision is made.

While sustainability emerged out of the environmental movement, there is increased recognition that environmental gains must be balanced with economic and social well-being. Each is given equal opportunity.

The Plan for Sustainability helps identify the commonalities among programs and maximize returns by selecting action steps that incorporate principles from all three categories (social, economic, and environmental). For instance, Green Building could incorporate Energy Policy and Wellness principles, inspiring a building design that saves money from energy costs (economic), reduces energy consumption (environment), and uses low toxicity materials to protect employee health (social).

There are many existing City operational policies that include sustainable practices and overlap with the goals of the Plan for Sustainability. In those cases, staff members can determine how to best refine City practices to include the best sustainable methods. If there are conflicts with existing policies, staff members can determine whether the existing policy or practice should be updated or refined or whether the sustainability goal or target is more appropriate.

As part of ongoing efforts to implement and measure updated or new operations, the implementation team may develop checklists, resource listings, or other effective tools to assure that best practices are being carried out. The City has also developed a Triple Bottom Line Analysis Map which can help city planners apply the triple bottom line approach to new projects.

Many cities throughout the world are practicing aspects of sustainability, and several have developed formal policies and action plans. Three good examples include the cities of Calgary, Seattle, and Portland, which have adopted sustainability policies.

Many businesses and government entities have determined that there is a correlation between sustainability and best practices. Emphasizing sustainable practices throughout operations has a number of long- and short-term advantages. Measurement is used to monitor progress and to determine if new or revised practices need refinement.

What Billy writes makes perfect sense to me, first that he would be contemplating all manner of things such as questions about angels, but also that he would go to the trouble of inviting the rest of us to join him. His poems are wonderfully varied, usually light hearted, sometimes comical. I adore his unexpected left turns.

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Digital health interventions have enormous potential as scalable tools to improve health and healthcare delivery by improving effectiveness, efficiency, accessibility, safety, and personalization. Achieving these improvements requires a cumulative knowledge base to inform development and deployment of digital health interventions. However, evaluations of digital health interventions present special challenges. This paper aims to examine these challenges and outline an evaluation strategy in terms of the research questions needed to appraise such interventions. As they are at the intersection of biomedical, behavioral, computing, and engineering research, methods drawn from all of these disciplines are required. Relevant research questions include defining the problem and the likely benefit of the digital health intervention, which in turn requires establishing the likely reach and uptake of the intervention, the causal model describing how the intervention will achieve its intended benefit, key components, and how they interact with one another, and estimating overall benefit in terms of effectiveness, cost effectiveness, and harms. Although RCTs are important for evaluation of effectiveness and cost effectiveness, they are best undertaken only when: (1) the intervention and its delivery package are stable; (2) these can be implemented with high fidelity; and (3) there is a reasonable likelihood that the overall benefits will be clinically meaningful (improved outcomes or equivalent outcomes at lower cost). Broadening the portfolio of research questions and evaluation methods will help with developing the necessary knowledge base to inform decisions on policy, practice, and research.

SC: My six-month goal is to complete and roll out the new Bhang brand positioning and packaging with our licensees in CA, NV, MI, OH, IL and Canada. The whole concept of licensing is another big difference from alcohol. Ensuring that our partners are super clear on how to produce the product and communicate the branding is a challenge and takes constant communication. We are fortunate to work with great partners, and they are always receptive to our guidance, and collaborative in building the brand. My 12-month goal is more focused on our Red Ace beet juice brand. It is a spectacular functional shot that we are line extending to offer a CBD Beet juice, as well as a whole new tier of refreshing beet-based beverages. When we acquired Red Ace earlier this year, I learned of all the amazing health benefits of beets. They are a spectacular superfood. They have a high level of Nitric Oxide, which has immense health benefits for athletes, high blood pressure, erectile dysfunction and more. They call it the magic molecule for good reason.

SC: Boy, I have a lot of passions. I mean spending time with my family is what feeds my soul for sure, but besides that, I love wine and spirits, particularly apple brandy. I love the cannabis industry because it allows me to be creative and strategic at the same time. I love hiking and sailing. I really love travel, particularly in South America and I love answering questions for Forbes writers (haha!), so thank you for offering to interview me, I am a huge fan of your work, and really honored.

Then I went off to be a graduate student in quantum mechanics at Yale, where I was very compelled with the notion that everything in the universe can be described in a second-order differential equation. I read a little bit about what Einstein had said about God, and I concluded that, well, if there was a God, it was probably somebody who was off somewhere else in the universe; certainly not a God that would care about me. And I frankly couldn't see why I needed to have any God at all. I was in a very reductionist frame of mind. That's often what science imposes upon your thought process, and it's a good thing when you apply it to the natural world. But I sought to apply it to everything else. Obviously the spiritual world is another entity.

So I concluded that all of this stuff about religion and faith was a carryover from an earlier, irrational time, and now that science had begun to figure out how things really work, we didn't need it any more. I think you wouldn't have enjoyed having lunch with me when I was in that phase. My mission then was to ferret out this squishy thinking on the part of people around me and try to point out to them that they really ought to get over all of that emotional stuff and face up to the fact that there really wasn't anything except what you could measure.

COLLINS: I finished up my graduate degree in quantum mechanics, but underwent a bit of a personal crisis, recognizing that I didn't want to do that for the rest of my life. It was too abstract, too far removed from human concerns. And so in considerable disarray as far as my own intentions of what I would want to do with the rest of my life, I decided to go to medical school as a way of trying to explore this more human side of science, namely biology.

So it was really as a medical student, and later as a resident, encountering the realities of what disease and the specter of death does to human beings, that I began to wonder about this. Some of my patients were clearly relying very heavily on their faith as a source of strength in circumstances that were pretty awful. They had terrible diseases from which they were probably not going to escape, and yet instead of railing at God, they seemed to lean on their faith as a source of great comfort and reassurance. They weren't, somehow, perceiving it as the really awful thing that it seemed to me to be. And that was interesting and puzzling and unsettling.

As I began to ask a few questions of those people, I realized something very fundamental: I had made a decision to reject any faith view of the world without ever really knowing what it was that I had rejected. And that worried me. As a scientist, you're not supposed to make decisions without the data. It was pretty clear I hadn't done any data collecting here about what these faiths stood for.

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