We find winter to be mostly miserable, and to add insult to injury we’re striving to shed the inches we’ve accumulated around our waistline over the last five years. The point of wearing a big coat is to cover up the effects of pizza we eat during these gray days and long, cold nights, right?
We’re feeling cynical, and hopeful, and we’re doing it via weightwatchers.com. It got us thinking about the genius of business when integrated with your whole self.
Weight Watchers (NYSE: WTW) offers a service to individuals who want to develop healthier eating habits. They provide a frame of reference by which to look at and measure your consumption of food, provide social support to keep you moving toward your weight goal, and less helpfully, produce packaged processed foods. For more sedentary folks like us–do you know bloggers who DON’T sit all day?–there’s the online interface.
How did all this start? In the early 1960s, Jean Nidetch of Queens, New York wanted to curtail the effects of her penchant for cookies, which brought her to 200+ pounds. She needed encouragement to stick with her new nutrition plan, so she recruited some heavier friends who could benefit from group support, and the first “weight watchers” meeting was born. Fast forward to 2001 when the company went public, and ten years later, today’s stock price fluctuates around $37.
So where does bringing your whole self to work fit into the picture?
Jean Nidetch looked inside and tapped into her wish to find help in losing weight. Momentum grew around Nidetch’s success, and in time financiers at Artal Luxembourg and the H. J. Heinz Company identified the remarkable business potential of WTW. With the requisite knowledge, skills and abilities, they’ve made many people wealthy, and healthy.
How does one monetize an internal, invisible feeling? We have alot to learn from WTW. In the end (couldn’t help it), it behooves your pocketbook for you to stay connected to your internal world. Pay attention to your own desire, dreams, and fleeting thoughts; this is a large part of what constitutes the treasure trove within you, waiting to become a worldwide multimillion dollar business.
Image by author, because we couldn’t find a picture of Jean Nidetch that was legal to use.