Category Archives: Rigidity

Thinka Linka Do

“Divide et impera”, or in English, Divide and Conquer is a phrase that we’ve all heard, many have experienced, and the clever have overcome. Forms of it have been attributed to Philip of Macedon and Julius Caesar and some incorrectly to Machiavelli, who in fact was denouncing it. It speaks to the power of effecting fragmentation, disintegration and dissolution of unity as a means to overcome adversaries or as a means to break down tough problems.
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Cool Beans!

Today I experienced something some really cool healthcare! It left me contemplating that maybe we really do have the capacity to sort out the hurdles we face with the healthcare issue
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Fast Times with Heisenberg, Gretzky, and Carroll

Ever hear of Werner Heisenberg? Unless you are one of those people (confessed addict here) that is curious about lots of stuff, in this case quantum mechanics, you may not really care.
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“How Aren’t You Doing?”

How aren’t you doing? That’s right, how are you at what you’re not doing? Have you ever been asked that question? I hope so! How well do we choose what to do and what to measure?
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“Good, or Got Lucky?”

“To the victor belongs the spoils” is the famous quote by New York Senator William Learned Marcy (1786-1857), recited in the U. S. Senate, 25 January 1832. This one sure gets lots of traffic. It brings with it a lot of imagery of the uglier side of politics, graft and an all or nothing perspective. I can recall, as I read world history in high school, images of conquerors doing all the pillaging and other stuff. Certainly, the principle still has legs today, ugly legs at that.

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This is Not What I Expected!

Planning has lots of meanings. Often, planning is a bridge between intent and action. That means once we want to accomplish something, get somewhere, achieve a goal, make a number, change, transform, grow, shrink, acquire, dispose, win, or a myriad of end states, we spend time some effort wrestling with the how to (plan) achieve the aforementioned intent (vision). The vision is described with adjectives and nouns, but the plan needs verbs to have any useful meaning. If the vision is big and farther out than the budget, the plan is often called strategic. If the vision looks out as far as the budget, the plan is often called business. The vision creates provide promise and the plan provides confidence to achieve the promise. Planning is getting harder to do.

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“Ouch! Labor Hurts!”

Yesterday was Labor Day in the US. When I was growing up, it was usually a milestone close to the end of summer and a signal that back to school was here. The contributions and needs of labor did not weigh into my view or feelings about the day back then. They are a big deal today and weigh heavy.
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Burned by the Budget

This has been a tough season for many. As business belts and budgets tightened, the focus to become leaner has led to some tough choices. Many of the activities we engaged in with customers had to change, even go by the wayside. Maybe it was fewer visits, or less personalized care, as we moved their requests into more “efficient” centers, thereby reducing transactions costs. Some of the requests we did for little or no cost, now are fee based. What about when the economy improves?

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“I Know You Just Love My Idea!”

I get really excited when a new idea somehow gets into my head. It may not be original thought, as some of our ideas have been waiting around for millennia or a chance to germinate. Some died an earlier life where circumstances may have starved it. Some were just bad ideas. But when I think I’ve got a good one, I get charged up and stay up all night trying to give it legs.

I always want others to like it and in some way, feed my ego. I have wanted it a lot, so I did not push hard on others to tell me why they did not like it, or seek skeptics for hard-to-take feedback. I’ve been lucky to have learned that my approach was dumb-dumb. My first question should have been, is this worth my time? Then, should I pursue this idea and invest in it? Do I have an understanding of the nature of constraints and obstacles I will need to resolve and overcome? At what point in my development process do certain questions and answers belong? Can I objectively differentiate opportunity from stubbornness or obsession? It’s not nearly as bad as those (in the field of megalomania) who exhibit the attitude with others that, “You just don’t get it. Why can’t you see I’m right all the time?” If we’re lucky, Darwin is taking care of some those guys.

I confess that I find the questions may be to easier ask and more difficult to answer.
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Mean Times

We like symmetry. Most of us do. There is something in our wiring or programming that finds symmetry attractive, pleasing, and embodying some balance that might actually communicate harmony. We see it in the YinYang and the Taoist philosophy. We often characterize justice as a balanced scale, and countless studies have measured our perceptions of beauty among individuals and found facial symmetry the driving attractiveness variable. When we measure and analyze to find meaning in data, there is also an underlying “hope” that we find symmetry. When we see a “normal” distribution, or bell curve, we enter a comfort zone. In fact, I know countless people who work terribly hard at converting data that is not symmetric or normal into a set that is. Some, actually too many, take out data that does not fit the beauty of symmetry, proceed to insult it with names like outliers and dismiss them from our view.
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