UPS Chief Financial Officer Kurt Kuehn was featured on CNBC’s Squawk Box earlier this week as part of the CNBC Global CFO Council series.

In the segment, Kurt and Robert Shanks, Ford Motor Company executive vice president & CFO, provided their perspective on the outlook on business and the economy.

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To earn money as a struggling college student in the 1980’s, I took a night-shift job at the local hospital as a ‘monitor tech’ in the Intensive Care Unit.

Armed only with massive amounts of caffeine and very rudimentary training in what bad ECG cardiac rhythms look like, I spent my nights watching a row of heartbeat monitors for 24 hospital patients. I was given three standing orders:

1. Don’t fall asleep.
2. If anything changes in a patient’s heart rhythm try to print off a paper strip of it for the physicians to take a look at in the morning.
3. If any of the rhythms changed to either very smooth waves or a completely flat line scream for a nurse.

That second responsibility proved to be the most challenging, because the monitors didn’t have the ability to pause or rewind. Catching the anomalies that the physicians wanted to see required gunfighter reflexes to physically get to the right monitor and hold down the print button hoping that the troubling rhythm was still on the screen so that it would show up on the paper slip.

Being jacked up on caffeine did help with the reaction time, though I was a jittery mess in class the next morning. Good times.

Do you know what physicians do now when they want to see their patients’ cardiac rhythms?  Many of them pull out their smart phones. Modern cardiac monitors are intelligent, autonomous, and wi-fi enabled. They can assess and interpret patient rythyms far better than I ever could, and they never fall asleep.

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I initially started riding my bicycle to UPS way back in the late 90s. My van had broken down and lacking the funds to fix it right away, I decided that my 10-speed was my best option. I hadn’t missed a day of work during my first year; and I wanted to complete a year with no absence from work. It was a 16-mile ride in each direction at that time, but on occasion, my preload supervisor, Debbie Fried, would meet me along the way; and I’d throw my bike into the back of her truck.

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Last summer it seemed like the media reports of record-breaking temperatures, wildfires and droughts were never-ending. And like farmers and ski resort managers, heat and cold are of particular interest to me because of my role at UPS as a temperature-sensitive packaging professional.

Keeping medicines at the right temperature is essential if they are to work well, and it’s vital to the health of patients. Whether you need an annual flu shot or your regular supply of insulin, it’s likely that a great deal of work has gone into designing the packaging it’s shipped in. Packaging may be the only protection that stands between your medicine and the outside world, from the manufacturer to the point of care, whether that’s a doctor’s office, an outpatient surgery center or even your own home. In fact, a recent UPS survey investigating healthcare supply chain challenges found that product protection is one of the biggest challenges healthcare manufacturers face.

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Farmers have long practiced sustainability to survive. Whether crop, tree, or various other products, farmers must be good stewards of their lands or the lands will cease to produce effectively. I learned this as a young boy growing up on our family farm.

One day, I was griping to my father about having to plant trees and he commented, “That, son is the future.”

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I enjoy riding my bike every chance I get.  It’s a great form of exercise; it also helps keep the roads less congested and sets a positive, active example for my children. They’ve even started tagging along on their bikes when I go for a run!

Wike Bicycle Trailers is looking to make our world healthier and more sustainable. With an end goal of getting more people cycling rather than driving, Wike introduces people to new uses for bicycles – from using their trailers to transport pets, groceries and equipment to helping disabled triathletes compete.

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When Denise Meissner’s son was diagnosed with Autism, she quickly became educated on the use of Visual Cues – single-image pictures that help those with language and communication challenges perform everyday tasks. Since people with Autism think in pictures, visual cues help them follow a schedule, manage behavior, tolerate new activities, and communicate with others. Denise’s son’s behavior and language skills improved dramatically with the use of visual cues, but the cues were often time-consuming to make and cumbersome to transport and manage. Denise wanted to share this communication method with other parents to experience the success her child had with visual cues. She realized that she needed to create visual cues that would be portable, fashionable and fun to use.

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What if I told you that one of the most prevalent reasons for an unsuccessful course of drug therapy isn’t due to what’s in the pill bottle, but what’s on the pill bottle? It’s an unopened lid. As a nation we have an epidemic of ‘not taking what we were prescribed in the prescribed dosage.’ And like any epidemic, it has serious consequences.

Every year, prescription medication non-adherence (not taking medication at the right time, dosage, or simply not taking it at all) is responsible for more than 120,000 unnecessary patient deaths and $290 billion in unnecessary healthcare spending each year in the United States.

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UPS Chief Financial Officer Kurt Kuehn recently participated in a panel at the Bloomberg Washington Summit that discussed the state of the economy and the impact of public debt on business markets.

Kurt was joined on the panel by U.S. Senator Ben Cardin (D-Md.) and the CFO of the U.S. Postal Service, Joseph Corbett. The panel was moderated by Robert Litan, research director for Bloomberg Government.

Among the issues they addressed were the pace of business investment in the economy and ways in which postal and carrier businesses reflect challenges faced by other businesses.

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I recently chatted with Bryan Silverman, co-founder of Star Toilet Paper and winner of Entrepreneur magazine’s College Entrepreneur of 2012, to learn more about his business. Star Toilet Paper is unique – they print advertisements and coupons on a wide range of environmentally friendly toilet paper. Then they supply venues with this printed toilet paper, free of charge, by using the revenue from the advertising side of the company.

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