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Archives for April 2013

How Smart Phones Will Revolutionize the Future of Medicine

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Wow.

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Here’s the intro:

One of the world’s top physicians, Dr. Eric Topol, has a prescription that could improve your family’s health and make medical care cheaper. The cardiologist claims that the key is the smartphone. Topol has become the foremost expert in the exploding field of wireless medicine.

Here’s a link to the video in case it doesn’t show up for you.

And here’s his book, The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care:

(HT: Matt Heerema)

The 5 Most Dangerous Creativity Killers

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A great article from the 99%.The 5 most dangerous creativity killers are:

  1. Role mismatch
  2. External end goal restriction
  3. Strict ration of resources
  4. Lack of social diversity
  5. Discouragement/no positive feedback

Here’s one of the most important highlights of the article. There is truth to the fact that constraints often add to our creativity by creating the “entrepreneurial gap” that requires novel solutions (and thus creativity) to cross when resources are scarce.

Sometimes, however, that reality is used to justify strict rationing of resources in an organization and a caviler imposition of restraints on creatives. That is a complete misunderstanding and misapplication of the entrepreneurial gap. As the article points out:

Although self-restriction can often boost creativity, the Harvard study shows that external restrictions are almost always a bad thing for creative thinking. This includes subtle language use that deters creativity, such as bosses claiming “We do things by the book around here,” or group members implicitly communicating that new ideas are not welcome.

Here’s one other important point: a shortage of time is not good for creativity!

While money and physical resources are important to creativity, the Harvard study revealed that mental resources were most important, including having enough time.

Creative people re-conceptualize problems more often than a non-creative. This means they look at a variety of solutions from a number of different angles, and this extensive observation of a project requires time. This is one of the many reasons you should do your best to avoid unnecessary near-deadline work that requires novel thinking. Also, when we are faced with too many external restrictions we spend more time acquiring more resources than actually, you know, creating.

Is There a Christian Way to be a Bus Driver?

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Justin Taylor gives a great answer to this question, which helps us all understand how any area of life or occupation we have — whether bus driver, marketing director, CEO, web designer, programmer, custodian, or anything else — relates to our faith.

Justin shows that the single question of whether there is a “Christian” way to do seemingly “secular” things actually breaks down into several questions. These are the questions he answers, using a bus driver as the example:

  • Does the Bible teach how to be a bus driver?
  • Does the Bible teach how to be a Christian bus driver?
  • Can a non-Christian be a good bus driver?
  • Can a non-Christian be a better bus driver than a Christian?
  • Is there a distinctively Christian way to think about the particulars of each vocation?

Here’s what it comes down to: the gospel changes three chief things concerning the way we go about work that is chiefly in the arena of common grace:

  1. Our motive
  2. Our standards
  3. Our foundation (source of strength)

That is a slightly different way of stating it than Justin, but it is based on the same principles and comes down to the same thing.

As Justin points out, the gospel does not chiefly change our methods. For example, the Christian bus driver doesn’t have to put on special glasses before hopping into the drivers seat, still stops at red lights rather than green lights (let’s hope), and turns left by steering the wheel to the left and not right.

Read the whole thing.

Three Rules for Making Any Company Great

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Michael Raynor and Mumtaz Amhed nail it in their article in the April Harvard Business Review:

  1. Better before cheaper—in other words, compete on differentiators other than price.
  2. Revenue before cost—that is, prioritize increasing revenue over reducing costs.
  3. There are no other rules—so change anything you must to follow Rules 1 and 2.

I disagree with their critique of Jim Collins’ Good to Great and Tom Peters’ In Search of Excellence, but it’s noteworthy that their conclusions are essentially the same. That is, the findings of Collins and Tom Peters can be boiled down to these three things. Or, perhaps better, these three rules are derivatives of the even deeper and more foundational realities that Collins and Peters show.

The extent to which these three rules are violated is truly breathtaking!

Leading in Ambiguous Situations

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A helpful chapter on speed leading in the book Taking Control of Your Time points out that leading in the midst of highly ambiguous environments requires a different approach than we typically think.

The typical approach for setting direction is geared for relatively known territory. It goes like this:

  1. Observe
  2. Orient
  3. Decide
  4. Act

This is basically a “ready, aim, fire” approach.

But in unfamiliar and ambiguous territory, a “fire, ready, aim” approach is usually more effective. Here are the steps:

  1. Act
  2. Learn
  3. Adapt

The essence of this approach is that, since the environment is ambiguous, you don’t have a map and can’t even see very far ahead. Hence, you have to move forward by trial and experimentation — similar to the scientific method. As the article says, “speed leaders experiment in order to advance knowledge.”

Many of our problems in leadership come from trying to use an approach for known territory in the midst of unknown territory.