By Dan Pallotta
Harvard Business Review (www.hbr.org)

Don't read this post while eating.

In college I spent part of a summer at John Denver's Windstar program in Colorado. We ate macrobiotic food, slept in teepees, practiced Aikido, and were treated to lectures by Buckminster Fuller — inside the teepees. Windstar had a pithy water-conservation saying for the toilets: "If it's yellow, let it mellow; if it's brown, flush it down." Which is certainly one way of handling it.

I was recently in Amsterdam, and the Dutch have a more ingenious way of handling "it." Instead of one flush lever, there are two — one large and one small — for two different volumes of water, depending on what the job calls for. When I figured out why there were two levers, I had one of those confusingly satisfying "Why didn't someone think of that before?" moments. 

Click here to read more.