Not long ago an entrepreneur with whom I work and I disagreed. He said that entrepreneurs and managers were different and that while entrepreneurs should be managers managers couldn’t be entrepreneurs.

A study using brain scans from MIT professor Maurizio Zollo seems to back him up.

…when entrepreneurs performed explorative tasks, they used both the left and right sides of the frontal parts of their brains, the entire so-called pre-frontal cortex. In comparison, managers tended to use primarily the left sides of the frontal part of their brains. This is an important difference, as the right side of the pre-frontal cortex is associated with creative functions involving high-level thinking (like poetry, arts, etc.), whereas the left side is associated with rational decision-making and logical thinking.

But I still don’t agree.

Zollo isn’t sure either, but thinks that it has to do with the willingness to take risks.

People who just reason with the rational and logical part of the brain might be a bit more risk averse.

Or perhaps that’s more Pavlov’s dog and a conditioned response.

I’d like to see the right/left brain activity of managers at companies known for innovation, such as 3M, Google, and Jeff Immelt’s GE, as opposed to Jack Welch’s.

That would be much better comparison of apples with apples instead of with oranges.

Companies that focus on metrics often lose their innovation mojo.

Managers who work for companies that focus on innovation, have done away with fear and celebrate failure think differently.

Flickr image credit: Nathanial Burton-Bradford

Innovation is often a direct result of research, but they both depend on a willingness to look at the tangible and intangible in new ways and healthcare and medicine (not the same thing) are starting to benefit. Here are a few things that caught my interest.

The Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, which has long been a medical innovator, has turned its attention to better ways to use IT to improve patient outcomes. (For many years the Clinic has had its own company formed specifically to commercialize its discoveries, leading to conflict-of-interest accusations.)

The clinic is a pioneer in providing information to patients and linking patient involvement with medical records and healthcare practice improvement. It is also vigorously experimenting with medical IT in new forms of patient engagement and education, including social media.

Startup Healthy Labs is creating social websites that target specific chronic medical conditions, such as Crohn’s Disease and Colitis, which are verifiably for patients.

…patient-only networks — people have to be verified as actually being diagnosed with the relevant issues before they can join. This is meant to keep out people shilling for pharmaceuticals and certain holistic “cures,” and keep the community centered around the real folks who are dealing with chronic diseases at hand.

Practice Fusion is for the rest of us, providing the kind of central medical repository that has been talked about for years, but doing it cost effectively.

… a massive database of information for medical professionals and patients that includes everything from records and vitals to doctor reviews, has data for more than 50 million patients. More than 150,000 medical professionals use it to keep track of patient data.

Experts researching the outlandish rising costs of US Healthcare are finally focusing on a major cause—the American attitude of ‘more is better’.

But an epidemic of overtreatment — too many scans, too many blood tests, too many procedures — is costing the nation’s health care system at least $210 billion a year, according to the Institute of Medicine, and taking a human toll in pain, emotional suffering, severe complications and even death.

Thanks to false information that vaccinations are the cause of autism many childhood illnesses that were seen as vanquished have made a comeback. Multiple studies have found that autism is securely tied to the world of auto immune diseases and the problems start in the womb—but the information has not been popularized.

Danish study, which included nearly 700,000 births over a decade, found that a mother’s rheumatoid arthritis, a degenerative disease of the joints, elevated a child’s risk of autism by 80 percent. Her celiac disease, an inflammatory disease prompted by proteins in wheat and other grains, increased it 350 percent.

Finally, did you know that low sperm count is a global problem? And that it is worst in Israel.

… that his stable of superior donors includes only tall, twentysomething ex-soldiers whose sperm has passed rigorous genetic testing. But finding such super sperm isn’t as easy as it used to be. Only 1 in 100 donors makes the cut. A decade ago, it was 1 in 10.

Flickr image credit: pedroelcarvalho

Everywhere you turn these days you see ‘entrepreneurs’, whether it’s the kid on the corner with a lemonade stand, the owner of the new cupcake shop or Mark Zuckerberg—they are all entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurs aren’t a new phenomenon, some five centuries ago Niccolo Machiavelli offered a definition that still holds true, “Entrepreneurs are simply those who understand that there is little difference between obstacle and opportunity and are able to turn both to their advantage.”

Victoria Claflin Woodhull put it a bit differently, “Entrepreneurs are risk takers, willing to roll the dice with their money or reputations on the line in support of an idea or enterprise.”

Roy Ash offers a shorter, pithier description, “An entrepreneur tends to bite off a little more than he can chew hoping he’ll quickly learn how to chew it.”

Ted Turner, a successful entrepreneur himself, offers a slightly cynical take on the current love affair with entrepreneurs, “My son is now an “entrepreneur.” That’s what you’re called when you don’t have a job.”

Pete du Pont points out something of which many people aren’t aware, i.e., the entrepreneurial path is rarely straight line, “That’s the way it is with entrepreneurial people. You try one thing, it doesn’t work, you try another.”

Nolan Bushnell doesn’t mince words in stating the most important entrepreneurial trait, “The critical ingredient is getting off your butt and doing something. It’s as simple as that. A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today. The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer.”

Most people enjoy stories about accidental entrepreneurs, but few realize that Richard Branson is one of them, “I wanted to be an editor or a journalist, I wasn’t really interested in being an entrepreneur, but I soon found I had to become an entrepreneur in order to keep my magazine going.”

That’s all for today; be sure to join me tomorrow to hear about a universal truth that might surprise you.

Image credit:Amber Strocel

People who invent things are endlessly fascinating. To see around corners; to conceive of something where there was nothing is an amazing act.

Inventors are also been known to stick both feet in their mouth for real, not as an urban legend.

DEC (it built minicomputers) founder Ken Olson said, There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home. Obviously, he was a little shortsighted.

Another technologist, Robert Metcalfe (co-inventor of Ethernet), missed the mark by eons when he said, The internet will catastrophically collapse in 1996. Well, nobody’s right all the time.

Beyond inventing stuff, inventors often have excellent insights on people and the act of living.

Erno (the cube) Rubik said, Our whole life is solving puzzles. Which, most people will agree, makes him a master of understatement.

Edwin Armstrong (invented FM) shows both his insight and sense of humor in this observation, It ain’t ignorance that causes all the trouble in this world. It’s the things people know that ain’t so.

However, if you believe Dean Kamen (think Segway) it doesn’t matter anyway, If history is any indication, all truths will eventually turn out to be false.

Here’s a great sound bite from David Sarnoff (RCA and NBC) that should be embedded in every manager’s brain, Competition brings out the best in products and the worst in people.

Right alongside this one from Edwin (Polaroid) Land, The most important thing about power is to make sure you don’t have to use it.

Flickr image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bojo/4503374874/

Today’s post will be relatively short, because I want you to take time to read a NY Times article called Building a Better Teacher.

Education is an industry and from any viewpoint, it’s obvious that American education is in trouble—poor quality, low productivity, enormous turnover and bad press.

There is a raging argument about who are responsible—politicos (who hold the purse strings), administrators or frontline workers, i.e., teachers.

There is a move to shutdown underperforming plants and fire those frontline workers en masse.

Out with the old ad in with the new; the assumption being that “new” always means “better.”

In education as in any industry there are innovators and traditionalists—think Steve Jobs and the executives of the music industry.

Innovators: Deborah Loewenberg Ball, Michigan State’s school of education assistant professor, part time math teacher and originator of Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching, and Doug Lemov, teacher, principal, charter-school founder and author of Lemov’s Taxonomy. (The official title, attached to a book version being released in April, is “Teach Like a Champion: The 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College.”)

Traditionalist: Jonah Rockoff, an economist at Columbia University, who favors policies like rewarding teachers whose students perform well and removing those who don’t but looks skeptically upon teacher training. [because]… no research he can think of has shown a teacher-training program to boost student achievement. So why invest in training when, as he told me recently, “you could be throwing your money away”?

Hmmm, there was no market research to show that a personal music player would sell before the iPod changed history.

Read the article, it points the way to changes that will affect you no matter your age or if you have kids.

Changes that will determine America’s future.

Image credit: St Boniface’s Catholic College on flickr

Two weeks ago I wrote about the M3 Foundation and its success turning around at risk black boys.

Today I have the pleasure of interviewing M3’s founder KG Charles-Harris.

Why did you start M3?
I started the M3 Foundation when I became aware of the plight of black boys in school.  In the San Francisco Bay Area, 73 percent of black boys drop out of school (nationally the average is 54%).  These statistics places one of the wealthiest areas of the world on par with war torn areas like the Congo or very impoverished nations like Laos.  The statistics, along with meeting some of these kids, shocked me into action.

Another issue was that I wanted my own children to receive a good public school education.

To ensure that this happened, it was necessary to put a structure in place that enabled teachers to do what they were supposed to, i.e. teach students who were performing at or above grade level.

Sadly, most teachers and schools are unable to do this because of the significant portion of students lagging several years behind grade level; that results in remedial teaching and a lower level of education for all.

How did you come up with the approach?
The approach was based on common sense.  We cannot expect people who are lagging behind to work less and still achieve the same results as those who have worked more in preceding years. Also, we have to make a fundamental decision.  Are these boys unintelligent, or is it their environments that are affecting them negatively?

We put together a program which used sports and hip-hop as a carrot and focused on providing homework assistance, extensive mathematics tutoring and surrounded the boys with role models (UC Berkeley male students) as tutors and team leaders.

The program is intense; we work with the boys three times per week for 4 hours in the afternoon and 4-6 hours on Saturdays.  One of the keys to the program is our excursions; it is difficult to have vision and dreams when one never has been exposed to something beyond the few blocks of inner-city where one resides.

What have been the most difficult roadblocks?
We are encountering road blocks all the time.  We are still a startup, though we have proven that black low-income boys can perform well.  We now have an average GPA of above 3.0 across all the school sites where we are active.

The most difficult roadblock we encountered was being shut down by the school district because of a perception that we discriminate.  We have created a model for the most difficult student population, African American boys from low-income backgrounds, and have proven it works.  Unfortunately, due to legal restrictions, it is difficult to serve this population since we are unable to select students based on race, gender or other characteristics.

Luckily, thanks to the assistance of one of our Board members, we were able to move beyond this with the school district and are now experiencing them as good partners.

Of course, we are always experiencing challenges of hiring strong team members, retaining and motivating students, working with parents, and many other issues.

Is M3’s approach scaleable?
When I started M3, one of the goals was to create a scalable and cost-efficient model.  Because these were some of the founding thoughts, we constructed the program around these objectives and are managing to have a cost per student that is significantly lower than other programs working with these types of students.  In fact, we have lower costs and better results (in most cases).

We have managed to accomplish this by leveraging the resources we have through partnerships with other organizations and also measuring everything we are doing to ensure we get the results we desire. If we fail to achieve the results, we are able to evaluate our performance from an objective perspective.

This has been difficult to engender since most non-profit organizations are more “touchy-feely”; we want to ensure that we are both empathetic and results oriented.

A personal note from KG.
I cannot have this opportunity to speak to all of you without appealing to your generosity.

Since more than 50% of US African American males fail to graduate high school, and 64% of those who drop out end up in the penal system, one of the strongest ways to lower crime is to ensure that these boys receive a good basic education.

The absolute proof is that less than 1% of college educated black males end up in prison while 64% of drop-outs end up there.

Please feel free, whether to fight crime, enhance education or because of racial pride, to donate to M3. Please visit our website; click to donate or send a check to M3 Foundation, 832 Bancroft Way, Berkeley, CA 94710

Thank you.

KG Charles-Harris

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I have four great lessons for you today.

1. arrogance doesn’t burnish your image;
2. don’t hesitate to tell a client they’re wrong when you know they are;
3. don’t just focus on what you’re doing for customers now, but what you’ll do for them in the future; and
4. culture sells.

They’re all wrapped up in a story about Intel’s new advertising plan and Venables Bell & Partners, the agency that’s doing it.

Lesson 1: In a nutshell, Intel’s concept of the branding effort was “we’re so important to your everyday life. Imagine a world without Intel. Your lights would go out. The world would stop revolving.” That’s arrogance.

Lesson 2: In a second nutshell, “Venables Bell said, ‘You got that wrong.’” Telling an account the size of Intel they’re on the wrong track takes guts.

In Silicon Valley Intel is a cultural icon renowned for its technical brilliance, innovative R&D and decidedly quirky culture.

Lesson 3 & 4: VB did an in-depth study of the company and hung out with its engineers; you’ll be seeing the results starting next week.  The campaign’s tagline is “Sponsors of Tomorrow,” and the ads highlight achievements of Intel engineers in a humorous way.”

Share the ideas with your team; then work together and tweak them to sell your company, department or team to those for whom you perform, whether your customers are external or internal.

Your comments—priceless

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