Op-Ed Columnist – The Protocol Society – NYTimes.com

David Brooks plugs my friend Richard Ogle’s book, Smart World, and reflects on the changes in the world’s economies. I wish he had gone from physics to biology in the last, but one can cannot expect all one’s wishes to come true….

Op-Ed Columnist – The Protocol Society – NYTimes.com.

How health lobbyists influenced reform bill – chicagotribune.com

The Huffington Post headlined this story: Gift-Wrapped for Lobbyists: How the Health Care Lobby Swarmed Congress and Got What It Wanted. At Least 278 Former Congressional Aides Lobbied On Health Care, Over $600 Million Spent… Health Industry Stocks Hit 52-Week Highs Last Week… Arianna: Lobbyists Should Be Time’s Persons Of The Year.

Hope for a Healthcare Agreement

Deal on health bill is reached.

This link has the President speaking historically about a battle with the healthcare industry over a patient’s bill of rights stretching over decades.

I pray that the extension of care to uncovered citizens that he believes will be now provided, and that this fight is now over. For decades the insurance industry (and other parts of the healthcare industry) have spent astonishing amounts of their customers’ money to aim an army of marketers in the guise of lobbyists at the telling of tall tales, lies, and murderous interpretations about that industry’s behavior to those who we elected to govern the nation. About the nature of the army that has been fighting against healthcare for all of our citizens, the President is right, but I think that the fight is by no means over, and that his words will end up more fuel for partisan fires.

The biggest part of the problem lies with us. I guess that holding the healthcare industry accountable, while a paramount issue, is by no means the crux of the issue of our ‘best of times/worst of times’ healthcare system.

The core of the fight, I think, is over what kinds of human beings we think we are, and what we are going to be concerned with, and right now far too many of us are afraid of the wrong things, ambitious for the wrong things, willing to commit ourselves to care for the wrong things.

When our people was a baby, and in the hands of people named Jefferson and Adams, here is what they said about what we were up to:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. ….”

“We are incompetent for communication,” my friend Fernando Flores said in a speech in the early 1980s. The we is you and I, and the citizens of this country, and one of the areas in which we are presently harvesting the benefits of that incompetence is in our healthcare.

The disappearance of Flight 188. – By William Saletan – Slate Magazine

The pilots “forgot” that they were flying the airplane!

I saw that this had happened a short while ago. William Saletan has asked good questions about what happened here.

This inevitability was anticipated by an early joke of the computer era, about the world’s first fully automated flight, in which a the computer-generated recording announced, more or less, “Welcome to the world’s first computer-managed flight. You will enjoy a new world of comfort, conveniences, speed and safety on this flight. … Sit back and relax. Nothing can go wrong…can go wrong…can go wrong.”

The joke got the danger wrong. The problem is not malfunctioning computers. Nor is the problem malfunctioning people. People “malfunction” as an essential feature of our existential design, and our machines malfunction because we, imperfect and blind to our functioning, are their designers. On the other hand, our “malfunctioning” is the ground in which our freedoms are born, including what we call free will. Without malfunctioning, we have no invention, no new possibilities.

The danger is that the kind of beings we are is being redesigned by the tools and the world we have invented, and we are not observing what is happening.

This is an example of why I spoke so strongly against the metaphoric background that Jill Bolte Taylor spoke from in her poetic and inspiring TED Talk. When we are in the business of inventing what it is to be human and human futures, we should take care about what we are inventing.

Following the line of another joke, we should be careful that we do not end up where we are headed.

Tell me what you think.

Best,

Chauncey

Changes and New Directions. I’m baaaack!

If you have followed me in this blog you will have noticed that over the last year I have been somewhere else! I and my colleagues dove deeply into our commitment to grow CareCyte.

In June/July of this year, after two years of continuous effort, Shirah and I, and my partners in the company, decided to stop investing in CareCyte. The company was not moving. We have not closed the company; we are continuing in conversations with possible customers. Our website is still active; we continue to think that the company represents a historic opportunity, and we look forward to bringing it forward at some moment in the future, but the timing is off and we don’t have the millions that would be required to alter the readiness of the country and the industry for this innovation.

To all who supported us in this effort, I extend my heartfelt thanks. The challenge of reforming healthcare is unmet and will become more and more difficult as time goes on and it is not addressed. For now, however, it will no longer be at the center of my attention.

I am returning to consulting and constructing another business that fits with the consulting. Stanley Stein, Chris Majer, and I are forging a new offer to customers who need capital to grow their businesses but are having trouble finding it through traditional sources. The new company, PNW Financial Services, will be the subject of forthcoming postings. I will tell you here when we complete an initial website for the company. For those who talk to me directly, my new email address there is cbell@pnwfs.com.

A brief diagnosis of what happened with CareCyte is that we were stopped by paralysis in the healthcare industry combined with structural weaknesses in our own plans. It was obvious in 2008 that there would be a significant challenge in raising money for the company. However, we received almost universal approval for the ideas involved. We thought that the desperate trouble in the healthcare industry, combined with the big commitment of Barack Obama to address the healthcare disaster in the US, would combine to give the company a place to stand given its vast potential impact on healthcare costs and care quality. Obama declared that the ‘…only real danger to the economy is the rising cost of healthcare,’ and he is right. Spending on healthcare in the US is approaching 20% of GDP, at the same time that we will soon will have the largest aging population ever encountered in the country. It seemed a good bet that our offerings, with their systemic effect on the industry, would attract customers and broad support. No such luck, even with good support from the Washington State Congressional Delegation.

I plan to say more about the situation with healthcare in the country as well, in later postings.

I’m glad to be back.

Fernando Flores Offering Workshop in San Francisco

Gloria Flores tells me that Fernando will be leading a three day session in San Francisco on January 27 – 29th, 2010, where participants will explore new ways of learning critical new skills for the 21st century — in particular, learning to work more effectively with others in “pluralistic networks.” During this session, besides engaging in group discussions led by Fernando, participants will participate in various exercises using virtual role-playing game technology to become more aware about how they learn and how they can become more effective in engaging with others. For more information, see www.pluralisticnetworks.com. Fernando and his colleagues are also doing a 4 month virtual leadership and teams program that begins in February. Their website has information on that program as well.

Darwin on Poetry and Music

From my friend Margaret McIntyre comes this cautionary song:

Letter by Charles Darwin, late in his life, to a friend:

“Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure…But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry;…My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts…and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week…The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”

Charles Darwin: His Life Told in an Autobiographical Chapter & in a Selected Series of his Published Letters, Edited by Francis Darwin. London: William Clowes and Sons, Ltd.1892, p. 51.

Qliance Healthcare Goes Upscale in the Internet

Yesterday Daily Kos, one of the most widely read blogs in the Internet, posted a well-crafted story the about the primary care physicians I use and have written about, Qliance (see here and here). The story, titled Seattle Doctors Avoid the Middleman: Monthly Fee Medical Care, is well worth reading. Look for others to follow their lead.

Toyota Taking the Lead

For a decade or so I have been saying terrible things about our automobile companies, and for a couple of years I have been saying them here. (Bullshitting in the Economist is a suitably provocative example. You can search the blog for automobile, Toyota, or Detroit and you’ll get a bunch more.)

Now Toyota is about to pass GM as the #1 auto company in the world. GM, Ford, and Chrysler are not catching up. They are headed in the other direction. Yes, I know the same old excuses are still on the table, to which now we see added “this unexpected economic turnaround.” “Who could possibly have predicted….?” Anyone who was paying attention. Many are culpable. The auto executives, who stopped thinking and learning a long time ago. The media, who have been buying the excuses. The rest of us, who have not spoken out early enough or strongly enough. Our American style of bravado, in which, Rocky style, we praise what is “ours” no matter how obviously troubled it may be.

Business Week, in a December article about the world’s most influential companies, doesn’t spend much space on their automobiles. They tout the way that the quality of thinking in the company is being applied to other fields. Healthcare in this case. (Anne Miller gave me the article.)

Toyota deserves the praise it is getting. What a pity that with 50 years to listen to them – and they have been talking to us for that long, and they have not been hiding their secrets under baskets – we still don’t know how to listen to them.

Argh.

I would appreciate your help

As I noted a few days ago, my colleagues and I at CareCyte have posted a proposal to the Obama Healthcare team, inviting them to undertake a project that we believe would significantly reduce healthcare costs at the same time that it improved quality, and, simultaneously, because we would be using automobile-style manufacturing processes, make a huge contribution to the automobile and steel industries in the U.S.

(Roald Laurenson reminds me that it is not so easy to find the proposal in the way that I pointed to it.  So I put this link to the proposal in this posting. Thank you Roald!)

I would really appreciate it if you would take a look at the proposal and help us raise it to the attention of the new administration. You can leave your comment on the Change.gov website.

To see how to do that, click here.

Thank you very much!

Chauncey

An Invitation from Fernando Flores

My friend Fernando Flores (see here, here, and here, and, for readers of Spanish or those who know how to get a web page translated, see here) briefed me last week about his new venture. I asked him to send me something in writing about what he is doing, and I reprint below substantially all of what he sent me. I recommend you read his invitation and consider it carefully.

Dear Chauncey:

As we discussed, I am in the process of starting a new enterprise that takes the work that we have done together in the past to the “next frontier” if you will, by putting it in the center of what people need to cope and thrive in the reality of our world today.

CareCyte Proposal to Obama Healthcare Team

We just posted an abstract of a CareCyte proposal to the incoming healthcare team, on their website, and we have put the abstract and a more detailed version of the proposal into the CareCyte website and blog. Take a look and leave us a comment on the CareCyte Blog about what you think about what we are attempting to do.

Thanks!

Important Advance in Oral Health

I have had severe gum disease since I was in my late 20s. I brought it on with a combination of poor home care and smoking. I have evidence that 0steoporosis and some poor orthodontia contributed to my difficulties. Of course, as a dutiful son, I held my mother responsible. She always got a laugh out of that.

Along the way I have discovered that a lot of people suffer with difficulties with oral health – cavities or periodontal disease. The published numbers say that more than 5% of those over 35 have moderate gum disease. By the time you get to my age, more than 10% of the population have at least moderate gum disease.

The real problem is some wicked little bacteria that like to live in pockets and create mischief in our mouths. And, recent research has shown, that mischief in our mouths can contribute to even more serious difficulties in other parts of the body, including the heart.

Some friends of mine have developed and just released a probiotic product that puts into the mouth a combination of “good bacteria” which, when ingested as directed (and alongside appropriate home care) will effectively eliminate gum disease and dental caries. Side effects that they promise include fresh breath and whiter teeth….

I have just ordered my first supply of the product, EvoraPlus from ONI Biopharma, Inc. They have an offer where if you set up automatic reorders they pay shipping. In a few weeks or months this product will be available in your local Drugstore.

If you have any concerns at all about the health of your mouth, your teeth, or your gums, I recommend you join me in using this product.

Full disclosure: Stanley Stein, the CEO of ONI BioPharma, is chief strategist for CareCyte, and I serve on the board of directors of ONI BioPharma’s Mexican subsidiary.

Violinist in the Metro

My friend Alan Solinger alerted me to this striking story. One of the world’s best violinists, dressed as a street person, played for 45 minutes in a Washington DC Metro station during rush hour. No one recognized him. He collected some tips, and the most interested listener may have been a small child. No one stopped and really listened. Read the whole story. It’s amazing. What conclusions would you draw about the way we listen in our world today?

Think you know how to be responsible for your money?

My friend Fran Quittel has the background, the discipline, and the diligence to do the homework about what it will take to be responsible for your money in the world that is coming to us. By “be responsible” I am talking about the basics – finding out about the rules of the road at your local financial institution. What can you count on your bank (or credit card issuer, or insurance company, or …) to tell you, and what do you need to plan to dig to find out. The situation is getting hairier and hairier.

What do you need to do to exercise minimal, prudent vigilance over your money? Rest assured that you cannot trust today’s financial institutions, as a general rule, to exercise good judgment in your behalf, to act on intentions that are built around your concerns, or, to put it succinctly, to treat you as a customer. The bad joke of the recent election – capitalism for the masses, socialism for the financial elites – describes our current situation, not one that is in our past.

Read Fran’s essay in a recent issue of the California Progress Report, here.

Lovely Interview with Eric Schmidt

Lavinia Weissman showed me this interview with the Google CEO on “Google’s view on the future of business,” executed and presented by McKinsey & Co. Get it here. Click on “Launch Interactive” just under the drawing of Eric Schmidt. Be patient. It takes time to load. See if you can figure out how to listen to it. Move your cursor around on the page, and click on the little arrows to listen to the different parts of the interview.

Schmidt talks about:

• Changing competition
• The “long tail”
• Making money
• Evolving management
• The nature of innovation
• Strategic platforms and global standards

I find what he has to say lucid, elegant, concise, and very worthwhile. Pay particular attention to his comments on evolving management.

See what you think.

Brilliant characterization of the economic mess

Richard Farrell posted a brilliant story from CBS about the current situation and where it came from.

Take a look here.

Michael Milken and Muhammad Yunus on Charlie Rose

Two profoundly interesting actors speaking with CR on access to capital, education, and healthcare.I recommend it.

more about “Michael Milken and Muhammad Yunus on …“, posted with vodpod

ACM Publishes CB’s Paper on Design

A version of my essay on difficulties with design was published last week by the Association for Computing Machinery in their journal, Ubiquity. Ubiquity, in the words of the ACM, ‘is a Web-based publication of the Association for Computing Machinery, dedicated to fostering critical analysis and in-depth commentary on issues relating to the nature, constitution, structure, science, engineering, cognition, technology, practices and paradigms of the computing profession. Ubiquity is concerned with helping us see what we do not see. Ubiquity looks for novel perspectives on what is going on in the core of our field. Ubiquity looks also to the edges of our field and beyond, seeking the perspectives of those in other fields who are impacted by computing. We need to know about what they think.’

I am honored and pleased to see this essay published by the ACM, and invite your reading and comments.

You can see the ACM’s announcement of the essay here, and the essay itself is published here.

Thanks to Peter Denning for making this possible.

Dealing with Jet Lag

My niece is traveling to Israel this week, and her mother asked me to make suggestions about how to avoid jet lag. She knows that I have traveled above 4 1/2 million miles in my years. (If you divide 4,500,000 by 300 you’ll get the number of hours I have spent in airline seats.)

So I sat down to write a few lines on what to do to cope with it; I doubt there is any way to avoid it. A little later, I discovered that I had written a lot of stuff, and my wife Shirah suggested I post it here as others might find what I had written useful. Here is what I said:

Preparing the Way for Wisdom in Organizations – Part 5

Continuing the set of six tiny essays inviting reflection about the construction of the conditions and situations in which wisdom can be cultivated and exercised in organizational settings.

“Inventing” Waste

Historic inventions are often built from historic difficulties, and they always involve the invention of new distinctions. We have posted about the “Five Great Wastes” before, here.

Let us give two examples in which critical new distinctions of historic inventions have to do with what people at the time thought of as “wastes.”

Henry Ford, Mass Production, and the Model T

At the turn of the 20th century automobiles were expensive toys available only to the very rich. Henry Ford invented practices that we summarize as “mass production” and the “Model T.” He succeeded thereby in making automobiles less expensive and more accessible to the average American worker. At the same time, he produced a way of doubling the income of American Workers, thereby giving them the income to purchase the Model T. Ford’s new system produced cars quickly and so efficiently that it considerably lowered the cost of assembling the cars. He decided to pass this savings along to his customers, and in 1915 dropped the price of the Model T from $850 to $290. That year, he sold 1 million cars. (Parts of the story from http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventors/ford.htm.)

Taiichi Ohno and the Toyota Production System

At the end of the Second World War, the people of Japan were in terrible trouble, their morale, productive capacity, and international relations demolished. An engineer named Taiichi Ohno, in the enterprise today known as Toyota, began the task of building a new capacity for Japanese production on top of Henry Ford’s designs, with some important additions. For example, Ford incorporated everything into one plant; Ohno designed for operation in a network. The operational heart of Ford’s designs was the way the engineers designed the coordination of the work on the assembly line (the employees found the repetition boring and only stayed because of what Ford called the ‘wage motive.’) Ohno centered his design in processes that built the capacity of each person on the production floor to take responsibility for the quality and coordination of their work. His invention became the foundation of the quality movement that swept the world starting in the 1970s and 80s.

Concerned about Healthcare? Watch this!

Last week I had my first meeting with my new primary care doctor. He works with Qliance Medical Group here in Seattle. I cannot tell you how pleased I am with their services. I have already recommended here looking at what they do.

On March 26th, Dr. Garrison Bliss, who founded Qliance Medical, spoke to the Washington Association of Health Underwriters about the situation of healthcare in the US, and what to do about it. If you are concerned about healthcare, for yourself or for the nation, or for both, I strongly recommend listening to this talk. Listen here.

Below I have paraphrased a little of what he said, as a teaser. The talk is really excellent.

Bliss asks, Why do we have the healthcare system we have? His answer: we designed the system to work this way, albeit not with the intention of producing the results we have produced.

He asks, with the current system, who wins?

Revised on Problems with “Compumorphizing”

(We revised and re-posted this on April 21st.)

In response to my posting on Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED Talk, my son Nicolas posted a comment. “Papa,” he said,

“I know that this take on the human being as processor (Pentium 17) really gets your Heideggerian goat. If I recall correctly, this is the approach that has taken over university philosophy departments, leaving guys like Rorty to sneak Nietzsche into literature classes. I wonder if you would say why you so dislike the compumorphizing interpretation? What kinds of problems do you see this interpretation producing in the world?“ (My italics.)

I am going to attempt to answer the biggest questions I think Nicolas is asking.

In my interpretation, he is touching on one of the central questions of the great spiritual and intellectual traditions. His question, ‘What kinds of problems are produced by poor interpretations about what human beings are?’ sits alongside what I consider the most important questions for us as human beings: Who are we? What are we doing here? and How best to use the short time that we have here?

Just for Fun

It is SNOWING in Seattle this Friday evening, as we are headed out to walk to the home of some friends for dinner. April 18th. Goodness.

Remembering Francisco Varela

Thanks to the passionate involvement with certain questions and communities of my wife Shirah and my friends Jon and Tova Ramer, I had the opportunity last week to visit with His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Bishop Desmond Tutu (at the Seeds of Compassion Event, in the company of a lot of other people).

Video feeds of the many parts of this extraordinary event are already available on the Internet. Go here. I particularly recommend the video of the morning of Tuesday April 15th. You have to scroll down in the window entitled, “EVENT GUIDE” to select it.

Francisco Varela, of blessed memory, “sat beside me” while I was there. I kept remembering him. Fernando Flores introduced me to Varela. As a scientific advisor to the Dalai Lama, Varela was instrumental in starting the fruitful exploration being supported by the Mind and Life Institute.

Here is Francisco talking about his life’s work:

“I guess I’ve had only one question all my life. Why do emergent selves, virtual identities, pop up all over the place creating worlds, whether at the mind/body level, the cellular level, or the transorganism level? This phenomenon is something so productive that it doesn’t cease creating entirely new realms: life, mind, and societies. Yet these emergent selves are based on processes so shifty, so ungrounded, that we have an apparent paradox between the solidity of what appears to show up and its groundlessness. That, to me, is a key and eternal question.

“As a consequence, I’m interested in the nervous system, cognitive science, and immunology, because they concern the processes that can answer the question of what biological identity is. How can you have some kind of identity that simultaneously allows you to know something, allows cells to configure their own relevant world, the immune system to generate the identity of our body in its own way, and the brain to be the basis for a mind, a cognitive identity? All these mechanisms share a common theme.”

And here he is speaking about his dream of a peaceful future of survival and dignity for everyone on the planet:

“If everybody would agree that their current reality is A reality, and that what we essentially share is our capacity for constructing a reality, then perhaps we could all agree on a meta-agreement for computing a reality that would mean survival and dignity for everyone on the planet, rather than each group being sold on a particular way of doing things.”

Argh, but we miss you, Francisco.