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Archive for September, 2015

Will Aetna Walk Its Talk?

Wednesday, September 30th, 2015

Aetna-health-insurance

No matter your age healthcare is/should be a serious concern.

If not for yourself then for your parents and others you care about.

And not just a new app that delivers services a different way, no matter how good.

What needs to change is the culture of not only insurance companies, but medical service providers (doctors, labs, testing, hospitals, etc.), other various and sundry vendors within the ecosystem, not to mention the government in the form of Medicare and Medicaid.

When you look at the deeply entrenched interests on that list the possibility of anything actually happening in the near-term seems remote, if at all.

Not even the proverbial 500 pound gorilla, think Google or Facebook, has the clout to even dent that crowd.

But what about Aetna Insurance under CEO Mark Bertolini, a 1000 pound gorilla and long-time global player in healthcare that has the clout, since it insures two thirds of the Fortune 100 and a great number of the 500?

…Bertolini called the sector “too bloated and accountable to no one.” The system — which will cost US$4.6 trillion, or 20 percent of U.S. GDP, by 2020 “charges patients and rewards care providers on services delivered, not patient outcomes,”…

Aetna is taking a three prong approach that includes, paying for positive outcomes, as opposed to fees for services; changing corporate health offerings in order to tap into positive consumer behavior and eating its own dog food — as every good startup does.

The big question is whether Aetna will walk its talk.

Based on the comments it’s questionable.

Flickr image credit: Aetna

Ducks in a Row: How to Communicate

Tuesday, September 29th, 2015

https://www.flickr.com/photos/britanglishman/5344115406/

All people interactions, whether short or longer, are, in fact, “relationships.”

They are grown and sustained through good communications.

When people are peers, both are responsible for making good communications happen — or should be.

However, when one person outranks the other it becomes the higher ranking person’s responsibility.

As a boss, what do you need to do to be sure you are heard?

What to do is simple; doing it takes effort.

Start by accepting that all people have a mental model through which they hear, so what they hear may have little-to-nothing to do with what is said.

The worst mistake a boss (or anyone) makes is assuming that the person listening has the same model as you.

That said, here is a three-point plan to make sure you are heard.

  • Start by carefully explaining your model and your assumptions when giving direction;
  • give your people clear, complete information; you do not want to be known as an information drip, i.e., the boss that makes her people come back again and again to fill in the details; and then
  • check to be sure that they have actually heard and understood what you mean, as opposed to their version of it.

Do it today, do it all the time and it will become second nature.

Your payback will come in rising productivity, more motivated people, and lower turnover—all positively affecting your bottom line.

Flickr image credit: Graham Dean

Attitude

Monday, September 28th, 2015

https://www.flickr.com/photos/fazen/100739711/

There is nothing like the various advice columns to keep you abreast of societies attitudes.

One I enjoy is called Social Qs; I like the insight it gives into people’s attitudes and questions of how to respond to everyday happenings.

Now and then the attitude behind a question will leave me speechless.

Like this one.

I took my sweet little dog for a walk. He got agitated by a cat sitting on a porch, pulled free of me and raced toward the house, knocking over (and breaking) a large ceramic urn. I acknowledge that I am partly responsible for the damage. But don’t the homeowners have some responsibility, too, letting their cat sit out in the open? —ANONYMOUS

Not surprising that it’s anonymous; few people would have the courage to admit to that level of self-absorption.

The Social Q response was perfect (as one would expect).

You break it; you bought it. “And your little dog, too,” growled the Wicked Witch of the West. The cat is free to sit on its porch with regal impunity.

No kidding. It wasn’t even roaming around, just sitting quietly, minding it’s business and watching the world go by.

Yet it’s the owners who are somehow responsible.

And that’s today’s attitude in a nutshell.

Flickr image credit: Stefano Mortellaro

Entrepreneurs: Maximizing Profit Isn’t Everything

Thursday, September 24th, 2015

https://www.flickr.com/photos/opensourceway/5161094177/

That said, here are some stories that drive the point home.

A beautiful 23-foot air purification tower developed by a partnership of three Dutch companies that’s not for sale to the highest bidders.

“We’ve gotten a lot of requests from property developers who want to place it in a few filthy rich neighborhoods of course, and I tend to say no to these right now,” he says. “I think that it should be in a public space.”

Marco Arment built an ad-blocking app that blazed to the top of Apple’s App Store, but he pulled it almost immediately.

But he said that building such a successful ad-blocking app “just doesn’t feel good.”
“Ad blockers come with an important asterisk: While they do benefit a ton of people in major ways, they also hurt some, including many who don’t deserve the hit,” Arment wrote on his personal blog Friday.

Finally, Kickstarters founders, with the full support of their board, reincorporated the company as a B Corp, i.e., a public benefit corporation.

“We don’t ever want to sell or go public,” said Mr. Strickler, Kickstarter’s chief executive. “That would push the company to make choices that we don’t think are in the best interest of the company.”

Still for profit, but focused on something more.

Other companies, including the e-commerce site Etsy, Warby Parker, Brazilian cosmetics maker Natura, Plum Organics and Method are B Corps — and Unilever is considering changing.

Doing good by good by doing well, as Sir Richard is so fond of saying.

Flickr image credit: opensource.com

Technology Alone Can’t Save the World

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2015

https://www.flickr.com/photos/restlessglobetrotter/2513014001/

According to Kentaro Toyama, the W.K. Kellogg Associate Professor of Community Information at the University of Michigan School of Information and self-described “recovering technoholic,” technology isn’t the panacea it’s cracked up to be.

“Technology works best in organizations that are run well to begin with. (…) The technology industry itself has perpetuated the idea that technology will solve the world’s problems. (…) Everyone wants to believe the work they do is good for society. But a lot of people in the industry have drunk a little too much of their own marketing Kool-Aid.”

What is often ignored is that people are a necessary ingredient for the Kool-Aid to actually work.

The tech eco-system forgets a lesson driven home by Bill Gates in the 1995 book The Road Ahead.

“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”

Aetna Insurance found this out when they first equipped their claims processors with their own terminals connected to the mainframe (before the advent of personal computers).

The effort was considered ground-breaking and was touted as a way to streamline the claims process.

It failed miserably, because the process itself wasn’t redesigned.

In short, claims had multiple steps with approval required at each. Because the process stayed the same, i.e., claims stalled in electronic form when someone in the approval process was on jury duty or out sick just as they did in the paper version.

Once people redesigned the process the desired efficiencies were reaped well beyond expectations.

Technology is a tool, not a silver bullet; the only real silver bullets are found within the human mind.

Ultimately the right thing is for us to find the optimal use of technology — not to eliminate it, but also not to assume that it can replace human skills.

Flickr image credit: Jason Rogers

Ducks in a Row: Destroy Morale? There’s an App for That

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2015

https://www.flickr.com/photos/archeon/2379648126

Want to integrate almost real-time employee action analytics to give your people better feedback and potential career boost?

There’s an app for that.

Imagine a tiny microphone embedded in the ID badge dangling from the lanyard around your neck.

The mic is gauging the tone of your voice and how frequently you are contributing in meetings. Hidden accelerometers measure your body language and track how often you push away from your desk.

The app is from Humanyze, the test subjects work for Deloitte, participation was voluntary and the anonymous results positive.

“The minute that you get the report that you’re not speaking enough and that you don’t show leadership, immediately, the next day, you change your behavior,” says Silvia Gonzalez-Zamora, an analytics leader at Deloitte, who steered the Newfoundland pilot.

“It’s powerful to see how people want to display better behaviors or the behaviors that you’re moving them towards.”

But only when there is choice and trust.

Then there’s the truly evil app that records everything employees do 24/7, with no anonymity .

The U.K.-based company The Outside View, a predictive analytics company, also recently gave staff wearables and apps to measure their happiness, sleep patterns, nutrition and exercise around the clock in an experimental project.

So your boss knows when you decide to watch your favorite TV show, instead of taking a work-related course, or sing karaoke, instead of going to bed early.

“It’s bad enough that we lose control of our identities with threats of identity theft. I think it’s even worse if we lose the privacy of our actions, our movements, our physiological and emotional states. I think that’s the risk.” –Kenneth Goh, professor of organizational behavior at Western University’s Ivey Business School

They actually think that employees will be motivated by coming to work and having their boss ask why they didn’t work-out, but were up until 2 am.

I don’t think so.

As with so many inventions through the centuries, no matter how pure the motives of creators, anything can be corrupted and its use perverted by other humans.

Hat tip to KG Charles-Harris for pointing me to these stories.

Flickr image credit: Hans Splinter

Watch This and Weep

Monday, September 21st, 2015

Assuming, that is, you care at all about the future.

Sometimes I post about subjects not really business-oriented.

In this case, because 300 years isn’t all that long…

And disruption isn’t always progress.

Video credit: Business Insider

If the Shoe Fits: Innovation vs. Marketing

Friday, September 18th, 2015

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

5726760809_bf0bf0f558_mThere is a myth out there that large companies aren’t creative and don’t innovate.

Not only is it a myth, it’s pure BS.

Watch this video for a look at pure innovation as done by Samsung.

So why the persistent myth?

There’s a great answer in the comments.

In two years Apple will come out with the same thing for their semis, call it iPass, and be lauded as innovators. –CommanderCorner

It used to be that if you built a better mousetrap the world would beat a path to your door, but these days the mousetrap matters less than the mystique of the builder and the skill of the marketers.

Image credit: HikingArtist Video credit: Leo Burnett

Entrepreneurs: Teachers as Entrepreneurs

Thursday, September 17th, 2015

https://www.flickr.com/photos/mikesansone/4577861695/People usually go into teaching because they had a great teacher who inspired them; they care about kids or believe that it’s a way to make a difference.

No one in their right mind will argue that teachers are underpaid.

Sadly, the politics, internal and external, the system, often working without even minimal resources or adequate textbooks combined with the grind of producing daily lesson plans that engage their students year after year takes a toll on their idealism and enthusiasm.

Teachers differ in their skills, strengths and creativity — as do people in every field.

What if creative, high-performing teachers had a way to share successful lesson plans with other teachers and make money at the same time?

Further, what if the cost was personally affordable, so that teachers didn’t have to find funds or get approval?

That’s the idea behind TeachersPayTeachers, a virtual marketplace where educators can buy and sell lesson plans just like an app store and similarly priced.

What kind of tunes do you think Iago, the villain in William Shakespeare’s “Othello,” would listen to if he had an iPhone?

That is the kind of question that Laura Randazzo, an exuberant English teacher, often dreams up to challenge her students at Amador Valley High School in Pleasanton, Calif. (…) “For a buck, a teacher has a really good tool that she can use with any work of literature,” Ms. Randazzo said in a phone interview last week. “Kids love it because it’s fun. But it’s also rigorous because they have to support their characterizations with evidence.”

The site’s been around since 2006 and is highly successful.

To date, Teacher Synergy, the company behind the site, has paid about $175 million to its teacher-authors, says Adam Freed, the company’s chief executive. The site takes a 15 percent commission on most sales.

Read the article; then share it with every teacher, or their relatives, you know; tweet it and share it as widely as possible.

Whether they sell or buy they’ll win.

And if your effort saves just one teacher from burnout or makes their life a bit easier then, you’ll deserve a pat on the back — whether you know it or not.

Flickr image credit: Mike Sansone

Ad Blockers are Bad Business

Wednesday, September 16th, 2015

https://www.flickr.com/photos/streamishmc/5974012920The other day I was thinking about downloading an ad blocker, because the auto-video ads make me crazy.

But even before I read about the Washington Post blocking people with ad blockers from reading their articles I decided not to.

Why?

Because I know that, as the saying goes, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

“Many people already receive our journalism for free online, with digital advertising paying only a portion of the cost. Without income via subscriptions or advertising, we are unable to deliver the journalism that people coming to our site expect from us.”

No one expects to get a free car or for even Amazon to give away books, but when it comes to content on the Internet they cry, “That’s different!

Copyrights are suddenly meaningless and any effort to generate revenue to pay for the creative talent, technology and other expenses required pollutes the experience.

Even sites that are built on user-generated content have expenses.

You deserve to be paid for your work and your company deserves to generate revenue to pay you — and so do they.

Think about that before you block ads or complain about pay walls.

Flickr image credit: Jason Tester

 

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