Recent Posts by Kathleen Wolf Davis

In the art world, the future dates back to 1909. And the future began in Europe—Italy, to be exact. The Futurism Movement was, hands down, the most important Italian art movement of the 20th Century. And it saw technology and industry as beautiful things—beautiful things to be celebrated with the right curve, the right color, the right creativity to showcase it all. The future can still be a beautiful thing—a symmetry of stockholder profit and stakeholder benefit, a balance...

What truly separates (and connects) customer and utility differs by point of view. From the customer angle, it’s simple—a narrow definition. They see one thing only. What’s between them and the utility is the meter. (They pay cash for what the meter tells them they use. The end.) No matter what they expect the utility to supply them on usage data and billing information, on product offerings and management sets, on marketplaces and renewable possibilities, in the end, they...

Let’s be totally clear right up front: even innovators fail. They muck up, foul up, trip over bad decisions and make a mess of things sometimes (at least a little). But, there are tried and true “isms” that all innovators fail to fail at. Some mistakes are expected. Some mistakes are unavoidable. But these particular failures can’t happen if you want to not just survive disruption but thrive in it, live for it and own it. (And who doesn’t want to own disruption?) Here are the...

So, I admit this: the clickbait in our headline isn’t based on “hard data.” We haven’t aggregated the engagement rates of every utility in the world and run a comparative analysis. We haven’t drawn charts and facts and figures on the subject. (There is no Venn diagram that I know of.) We haven’t had long and drawn-out Zoom meetings reviewing submission entries and “unpacking” the appropriate use of GIFs for business. And you don’t have to do any of that either. Truly. You’ll...

The first question I asked Kevin Lynskey, director of Miami Dade’s Department of Water and Sewer, came with a caveat he’d heard before—namely that we were going to be talking a lot about poop in the next hour, which generally made people a little uncomfortable. Well, “uncomfortable” is the nice way of putting it; a coworker used the slang “wiggy,” which is likely more emotive of the true situation. (And, yes, “wiggy” is a real word, as it is accepted in a game of Scrabble, and...

Sometimes innovation is discovered in hindsight. I think the best story to illustrate this point is the history of aluminum. The original techniques to refine it were so very expensive that aluminum was a major player in the jewelry market of the 1800s—right up there with gold and silver. It was hard to get, and its use was reflective of that uphill trudge. Then two fellows—one American and one French—hit upon new and cheaper ways to refine aluminum. As aluminum got cheaper...

Hurricanes and other extreme weather that blow out masses of power infrastructure in giant sweeps seems to happen in clusters—as if by some serious, if sad, planning. Utilities may go a decade without a hurricane coming only to find two or three hit them in a year with a particularly bad season. Three utility executives—two in the U.S. and one from Europe—sat down to talk to us about the storms they’ve weathered (literally) and what they’ve learned from those storms...

You’re a manager of operations and maintenance at a top U.S. water utility. As such, it’s your job to make sure service isn’t disrupted—that people’s water flows uninterrupted. You’re doing the best job you can with the equipment and software you have on hand. You’re contentious about your work down to the very last detail, but you have a suspicion that what you have to work with may not be up for the job, not entirely anyway. Then the worst happens: a pipeline collapses,...

I have a psychological theory about pantries, and it’s a simple one: The inside of your kitchen pantry is an excellent reflection of your cooking skills (or lack thereof). My pantry is cleaned and staged “like you’re taking realtor pictures tomorrow,” as a friend noted. It’s like that every single day. I like things simple, easy-to-get-to and streamlined to purely, minimally functional. (Here’s the thing, though: I also don’t really cook unless Pop Tarts count somewhere, and I...