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Archives for January 15, 2010

Massachusetts Vote Could Bring an End to the Health Reform Bill

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Very interesting turn of events, which could prevent the very wrong-headed health reform bill from being able to pass:

Voter disenchantment in liberal Massachusetts with President Barack Obama’s policies has turned a Senate election into a nail-biter that could imperil U.S. healthcare reform.

Democrats envisioned a smooth passing of the baton in the January 19 special election to fill the seat of the late Edward Kennedy, a political giant who died of brain cancer in August after holding the seat for 46 years.

A victory would maintain the Democrats’ 60-seat Senate majority, allowing them to overcome Republican procedural hurdles that could block reform of the $2.5 trillion healthcare sector, Obama’s top legislative priority.

Instead, some polls say the race between State Attorney-General Martha Coakley, 56, and her Republican opponent, State Senator Scott Brown, is too close to call.

“The closeness of the race reflects deep voter dissatisfaction with how the president and the congressional majority are dealing with vital matters,” including healthcare and the war on terror, said Mark Landy, a political science professor at Boston College.

For my view on health reform, see my posts The Worst Bill Ever and How Health Savings Accounts–Not New Laws–Are the Key to Health Reform.

Innovation Comes from Unexpected Juxtapositions

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From FedEx Delivers: How the World’s Leading Shipping Company Keeps Innovating and Outperforming the Competition:

When it comes to innovation, the question is not how to innovate but how to invite ideas. How do you invite your brain to encounter thoughts that you might not otherwise encounter? Creative people let their mind wander, and they mix ideas freely. Innovation often comes from unexpected juxtapositions, from connecting subjects that aren’t necessarily related.

Another way to generate ideas is to treat a problem as though it were generic. If you’re experiencing a particular problem, odds are that other people are experiencing it too. Generate a solution, and you may have an innovation.

If You Take a Bottom Up Approach to Productivity, Will You Ever Make it to the Top?

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There are two main ways to put in place an approach for staying on top of things. First, you can start with the “runway” level — all the actions and stuff that lies right before you. Second, you can start at the top levels of mission, values, and goals.

The difficulty with the top down approach is that all of the things at the runway can easily keep bugging you and make it hard for you to see at that level.

But starting at the bottom is worse. If you tell yourself that getting all of your runway actions in order will allow you to work on up to the level of roles, goals, values, and mission, you’ll never make it.

It’s like a few months ago when I was jogging through a field of grasshoppers. When I went faster, there were just more grasshoppers to jump out.

That’s what happens if you focus on the runway level of actions and the stuff you need to process and try to work on up from there. The runway-level stuff will just multiply, and you’ll never rise much above it.

The best solution is to take a both/and approach. You have to deal with the stuff right before you, of course, and that will in turn provide good illumination on the nature of your roles and goals. But if you start there, don’t stay there too long. Go up to the higher levels and work down so that you will have your priorities defined, which will enable you to cut out a bunch of that stuff that’s been cluttering the runway anyway.