99.9% of people recognize the power of WIIFM (meaning “what’s in it for me” in deference to the .01%).

Even to an early adopter/cynic like me its power can boggle the mind, especially when it moves economic behemoths to switch sides in a bitter debate like climate change.

The latest example of WIIFM in action is Coke.

Today, after a decade of increasing damage to Coke’s balance sheet as global droughts dried up the water needed to produce its soda, the company has embraced the idea of climate change as an economically disruptive force.

Ya think?

Of course, I can think of hundreds of more serious consequences from the global water shortage than a lack of soda pop.

WIIFM also fuels government fraud and, barring sales to the military, there is no fraud target more appealing than Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

This is also an area where corporate fraud transcends individual fraud by orders of magnitude.

While politicos love to point to illegal immigrants as a large source of fraud, because blame is most easily placed on those with the least lobbying power, it is, in fact, organized citizens, doctors and the corporate medical world like the HMA hospital chain, which grades its emergency room doctors based on daily hospital admissions—whether needed or not.

Physicians hitting the target to admit at least half of the patients over 65 years old who entered the emergency department were color-coded green. The names of doctors who were close were yellow. Failing physicians were red.

Never underestimate the power of WIIFM.

Flickr image credit: SueKing2011

A note from a reader posed this question.

Although I find the articles you link to interesting and probably would never see them if you didn’t I do not understand why you don’t link to more bloggers and other online stuff instead of the NY Times, Fortune, Wired, Inc, etc.

He obviously does read me, since that’s a very accurate list of media to which I frequently link, so it’s a fair question.

I partly answered it in an old post referring to what I term the games required by social media, but there are much larger reasons—facts, depth and veracity.

Let me give you an example.

On August 6^th the NYT published an article about HCA, a giant for profit hospital chain taken private by a group of private equity firms and since gone public again. HCA was involved in a Medicare fraud case and paid $1.7 billion in fines and repayments; now it’s back on the hot seat for performing unnecessary cardiac procedures to drive up profits.
(The bold is mine.)

Details about the procedures and the company’s knowledge of them are contained in thousands of pages of confidential memos, e-mail correspondence among executives, transcripts from hearings and reports from outside consultants examined by The Times, as well as interviews with doctors and others. A review of those communications reveals that rather than asking whether patients had been harmed or whether regulators needed to be contacted, hospital officials asked for information on how the physicians’ activities affected the hospitals’ bottom line.

A week later The Times followed up with another article showing how HCA has become a role model for hospital profitability; not better care, but more money.

I’m sure the blogging and commentary world that follows Medicare and healthcare in general has been weighing in, but what they don’t do is the research.

They don’t have the time, money, skill, patience and probably not the desire to wade through the paperwork.

So-called old media also seems to set the ethical bar higher and with greater consequences to those who choose to lie and cheat.

Finally, bloggers and commentators read these investigative stories and offer their opinions and spin on them just as I do.

Many of these have good value, it’s just that I would rather discuss and opine on the original than comment on the commentary.

Flickr image credit: IvanWalsh.com

So much of Twitter use in the US is banal, but the rest of the world is finding serious use for those 134 characters, like fighting crime. An administrative chief in a Kenyan village does just that using it to find stolen cows or sheep and even thwart a home invasion.

When the administrative chief of this western Kenyan village received an urgent 4 a.m. call that thieves were invading a school teacher’s home, he sent a message on Twitter. Within minutes residents in this village of stone houses gathered outside the home, and the thugs fled.

It’s fortunate that I’m extremely healthy, because I’m not a lover of the medical world. Individuals do great things, but I don’t trust the profession as a whole and those feelings have been reinforced by the secrecy surrounding the connections between doctors and pharmaceutical companies, but that’s about to change.

Under the new standards, if a company has just one product covered by Medicare or Medicaid, it will have to disclose all its payments to doctors other than its own employees. The federal government will post the payment data on a Web site where it will be available to the public.

Household vinegar has long been the go-to ingredient for a host of household cleaners and solutions to everyday problems (just ask Heloise). Now humble, cheap vinegar is saving lives (not in the US, of course).

…a remarkably simple, brief and inexpensive procedure, one with the potential to do for poor countries what the Pap smear did for rich ones: end cervical cancer’s reign as the No. 1 cancer killer of women. The magic ingredient? Household vinegar.

Crowdsourcing is making waves in many areas, from funding startups to improving government processes to jump-starting medical innovation. Who knew?

“Offering a $100,000 prize has yielded ideas in six months that would have taken four to five years to develop at ten times the cost,” said Sanofi’s Dennis Urbaniak, VP US diabetes.

If you read nothing else today I hope you read this final link and consider registering. After all, can’t hurt and could save a life.

Q: What do you get when you combine a driving entrepreneur with a mission and an algorithm?
A: The National Kidney Register and the longest domino set of transplant surgeries to date; 64 to be exact!

Chain 124, as it was labeled by the nonprofit National Kidney Registry, required lockstep coordination over four months among 17 hospitals in 11 states. It was born of innovations in computer matching, surgical technique and organ shipping, as well as the determination of a Long Island businessman named Garet Hil, who was inspired by his own daughter’s illness to supercharge the notion of “paying it forward.”

Flickr image credit: pedroelcarvalho

Sometimes it seems as if the economic crisis is acting like an earthquake that’s turning over rock after rock and all kinds of icky things are crawling out much to our dismay. A few months ago I wrote about the mindset that seems to be so prevalent these days.

“These days” aren’t all that recent whereas the executive bonuses causing so much rage are just a blip.

Enron was eight years ago as was the phen-phen settlement rip-off, although the two lawyers were only convicted this week.

For decades, the Feds have been scamster heaven and that hasn’t changed, “about 32 percent of the combined monies paid out by Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are fraudulent”—often enabled employees—and by 2007 more than $100 billion was spent on contractors for the Iraq war (you can outsource anything) and you can bet your bottom dollar there’s been plenty of fraud there. Just business as usual.

Of course lying, cheating and fraud aren’t new, but what’s depressing is that they seem to become more and more acceptable. Worse, all the signs are ignored until the situation blows up causing massive damage to thousands of people.

Maydoff and the other hedge fund scamsters operated for years with everybody ignoring the warning signs until the Wall Street bomb blew up and investors wanted their money back. At that point all those houses of cards came tumbling down.

Yet as recently as last August Congress was seriously considering turning over the private pension funds to these same people responsible for the financial crisis—even as those funds were crashing.

Remember when you were young and some boring older person told you that “if it seems too good to be true it probably is”? The problem is that as people grew up they tacked two words onto that phrase and those two words helped get us where we are today.

Do you know which two words?

But me.

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I hate leaving things on a down note, so here is something to raise your spirits and your skills.

Dan McCarthy over at Great Leadership hosts a terrific leadership carnival and the latest one just went live today. Click on over and check it out, I guarantee that there’s something there for everyone—and probably more than one something. Enjoy!

Your comments—priceless

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Image credit: flickr