What you intend and what you are looking for shapes what you see.. David Sibbet

A maturity model for customer service

Gary Lemke, the genius behind CRM Advocate was writing a series of daily columns about whether or not we need a role of "Chief Apology Officer:.

I was struck by the idea of people creating problems so they could have more apologies to make, and therefore a long list of "accomplishments".

So Gary and I had an exchange on email, where I urged him to "go all the way" in identifying the maturity level of organizations in relationship to this topic of "apology".

To get him started, I suggested this ladder:



Level 0 - ain't no need for no stinkin' apology

Level 1 - maybe we outta start saying we're sorry

Level 2 - howsabout we think about fixin summa this stuff? we're tired of hearing complaints day in day out

Level 3 - we don'have to fix it if we don't let the bad stuff happen - what we gotta do to avoid these potholes we keep falling into

Level 4 - now its pretty boring 'cause things kinda work, maybe we could make it more fun for us and our customers, after all we deal with each other every day?

Level 5 - Business is Delovely! Delightful, delectable, delirious,
delicious, it's DELOVELY. Credit to Cole Porter.

Open call for Haikus for the 21st century soul-searcher

I was glad to speak at the Santa Cruz Women's Leadership day last month and had the pleasure of meeting Camille Smith. I ended with my poem, that starts with the first stanza quoting Edna St Vincent Millay and ends with

..." let us now conceive the loom of intention to weave wisdom into the fabric of our souls"

In response, Camille sent me her haiku on habits...finely observed and described Camille!

Thank you for writing it and sharing it with us.

Habits
Unconscious comfort
Worked fine yesterday (I think)
Tourniquets to growth.

Camille Smith, Work In Progress Coaching™
www.wipcoaching.com, camille@wipcoaching.com

One Tribe y'all - Our language is unity

The Internet brings us together - Shakespeare said it well:

There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.

let's ride this opportunity on to the voyage of our lives!

The Dilbert Paradox – "How do you develop talent in the face of the stultifying effect of the work environment?"

The Power of Pull - John Hagel talking at TEDxBayArea

Tip of the hat to Rich Reader:

The sixth proposition of the “Power of Pull” asserts that workers become stressed out and ineffective when their passions are totally disconnected from their jobs. John Hagel asks executives to think about the increasing pressures that accompany the long term shift. How do passionate workers cope with the suppression of their questing dispositions amid unexpected challenges? How do the impassionate workers rationally avoid the challenges, ignore them, paper them over, hide from them, and wish that they would just go away. Passionate workers see challenges through a different lens, as matters of intense interest for which they will stretch beyond their comfort zones, and seek out the team members who will help them to overcome said challenges. Rather than waiting for these challenges to come to them, the passionate seek out the challenges.

How to design our work environments so that people develop on the job day to day?


YES - You have to "rethink day to day operations, rethink IT" and more - and Hagel says "its off the charts for most CEO's"

That sounds like we have a fabulous opportunity to capture the most passionate, talented people in the world !

Congratulations to Tatyana Kanzaveli, my co-organizer of TEDxBayArea for pulling together and amazing event - we have John Hagel talking about the shift from knowledge stocks to knowledge flows.

Rich Reader created a capsule overview of the whole event at the link above - click on the title, and decide whether to read or view the 4 highlight video snippets.

What do YOU think?

PS Here's a preliminary look at our TEDxBayArea event December 8 2010 - in conjunction with TEDWomen - Click here to apply for a scholarship

Customer Experience in the Government sector: A Marathon not a Sprint

CEM in the Government sector...
Be prepared for a marathon, it is not a sprint

Ms. Mei Lin Fung
Chairman, www.isoe.com
G-CEM Global Advisor

Click here to read this article in Chinese


This article is exclusively written for G-CEM.

What is your experience of government? Is this familiar when you travel? "you wait in line at least twenty minutes, pushing and shoving... staff... unhappy... people miss their flights". If you travel by air, then standing in the security queue at the airport has to count as one of the most common customer experiences in the government sector. And one of the most dreadful, as Erik Pothuma recounts at www.thesocialcustomer.com

Why is it so bad? And there are few signs of progress... does no one care?

As a native Singaporean I have been studying eGov or electronic Government in Singapore since 2002. Then, as I live in the Silicon Valley, USA, I have been able to take an inside look at the Federal Government particularly in the Health sector. And in both Singapore and the USA I have met many smart and caring people in the Civil Service of both countries. I know thousands are working very hard to make things better, to take advantage of the Internet and new technologies: People who are passionate, committed and very dedicated to public service. What I have found is that it is difficult to change the practices of decades especially when, as in most governments, huge networks of businesses are intertwined with government in the delivery of government services. In the practice of CEM in Government, Inertia and Vested interests are the biggest enemy and we must properly prepare ourselves for how difficult the task will be.

The other day, I was working in my garden, where I planted some black bamboo about 15 years ago. If you are familiar with bamboo, you know that their roots are VERY persistent, very strong, and difficult to remove. So when I wanted to tidy up the garden and get rid of the roots that had grown in the wrong place, it took a very long time, not just hours, it took days. Roots had grown over each other in layers - each had to be removed one by one. It took a great deal of time, patience and energy. This reminded me a lot about the work I have seen underway in Singapore and the US as people went about transforming government to better serve citizens. The old ways were very entrenched, just like those bamboo roots. It was not possible to make one change, many things had to be changed all at the same time in order for new technologies to make a positive difference for the customer.

Singapore is currently on its 3rd decade of eGovernment initiatives, starting the next 5 year plan 2011 to 2015 for being a world class citizen centric government. Ranked top in the world in information-communications development and usage by the Waseda University World eGov ranking, and number one by IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook - a significant shift has been made, to go away from the earlier "Government Knows Best" approach to a new "Gov-With-You" in which the government is harnessing social network technologies to improve services and lower costs. A key strategy is to use the video channels like www.YouTube.com, social networks like www.Facebook.com and messaging channels like www.Twitter.com to engage with the citizens to shape government services that deliver value to the citizens. What is clear is the new hardwon maturity emerging in the Singapore eGov leadership, with sophisticated policy makers realizing that CEM can be designed best "in-conjunction" with the citizen/customer.

A thorough review of the practical aspects of Singapore eGov strengths and weaknesses has been written by Australian researchers at Monash University, Houng Ha and Ken Coghill. "the Singaporean government has changed the ways it looks, thinks and acts"..."The government has had to challenge itself and change the ways it thinks and operates in order to continually develop, sustain and improve the operational processes of the public services". From 2002 to 2005, the Singapore government invested approximately US $1Billion or $250 per head of population. If China had spent the equivalent amount per person, this would be $350 billion. If the US had spent this amount per person, they would have spent $75 billion. Thus the lessons from Singapore are useful pointers to other governments in improving customer experience, because of the amount invested already and the depth of commitment that shows to the goal of government serving the people with technology.



This framework has lead to the successful growth of eGovernment by motivating and providing incentives for all stakeholders to use and improve online Services. A key point to note that eGovernment success in Singapore has been achieved primarily by human capital development and capacity building.

Let's apply this framework to some recent examples. The European Union recognized the 2009 winners of the eGovernment Awards. Out of the 5 winners, Genvej in Denmark topped the category of eGovernment empowering citizens, and a MEPA, the Public Administration eMarketplace in Italy won the category of egovernment empowering business. We'll briefly describe each.

Genvej - Denmark

A small town near the Danish capital of Copenhagen developed an online self-service application to provide citizens access to information and all public sector services. These services include:
- Identification: Find the name, social security number, age, address
- Real estate services: Utilities, municipality plans, and registration tests.
- Information, photos: Their children's school and day care institution.
- Exchange information: E.g. with day care institutions e.g. about sickness, who's picking up the child, permissions to drive in bus or car
- Enrolment: for children to a school, library services
- Order a Danish Health Security card and change their house doctor



Genvej points out key implementation guidelines for CEM success in Government:

1. DEDICATION: Genvey had three fulltime employees developing Genvej, providing user/citizen support and teaching the rest of the organization all about the digital universe.
2. STRUCTURE: Digital projects need structured work frames, Genvej used MSP/Prince2 that provided overview, control and generated energy and momentum through setting intermediate milestones and achieving progress.
3. TIME: Often it is necessary to collaborate with several partners/vendors using different terminology and jargon, misunderstanding is normal when there is diversity in the IT-systems, data and workflows.
4. PROMOTION: Promotion, talking, advertising, an over-all PR strategy including citizens and staff is necessary.

MEPA - Italy

MEPA is the Italian Public Administration eMarketplace - a virtual market in which any government agency may buy online the goods and services, offered by suppliers digitally qualified according to specific selection criteria.



MEPA connects thousands of public bodies and suppliers through 2 main purchasing tools: Direct Order (DO), and Request for Quotation (RfQ). The interactivity stimulates strong competition, gathering offers from various suppliers under defined qualification requirements, terms and conditions. Monitoring is undertaken to assure transactions meet the MEPA rules.

Looking through our Capability framework, we can summarize MEPA:



MEPA allowed many to discover that the relationship between trust and good governance is circular. Good governance leads to higher trust which in turn leads to better governance.



Our last case study is in the USA which is on the bleeding edge of CEM in Government, especially in education and health where the US Federal government efforts in these two sectors are the main achievements of President Obama. The results so far have been greatly disappointing to the supporters of President Obama. I am going to make the case that it is unrealistic to expect change so fast. This is not a sprint, it is a marathon. Transformation in these sectors involves many fundamental and structural changes. It is wise to be realistic about how difficult it is to change things that have been in place for dozens of years.

To implement Customer Experience Management in health requires electronic health records. Despite law's mandating that health records be standardized and made electronic, there is still a long way to go. One might think that within the government itself it might be possible, since the government is paying for healthcare costs for government employees. Let's apply the Capability Framework and learn.



Customer Experience management in Government requires commitment, dedication and energy of a whole different order of magnitude than in the "for profit" world. I have been privileged to work with and learn from Dr. Douglas Engelbart, the inventor of the Computer Mouse and the Father of Collaborative Computing. Key insights of his have been distilled in "Improving our Ability to Improve" and in working on these issues in the US Federal Health arena, it has proved helpful to look in terms of future capabilities looking at the interaction of tools/technologies and the human systems which enable those capabilities. Engelbart's key insight is that future technologies cannot be designed and developed in isolation from the human systems. Human capital development and organizational development is required.



As we learned from the Genvej Denmark case study - it is critical to have a shared vision of the future - in all its complexities, nuances and dimensions. That vision encompassing the tool system, the human system and the new capabilities resulting from their interaction cannot be from the point of view of one powerful stakeholder, but must include all stakeholders. In order for that shared vision to come about , it is necessary that there are values and meanings that are important to the stakeholders - important enough that they commit themselves to realistically devise the roadmap required to achieve the vision. MEPA in Italy demonstrated the change in the human system that had to take place in order to enable MEPA to function - a new legal framework had to be put in place. Finally, the Singapore case study reminds us that heavy investment in human capital is required. Commitment and understanding that effective training and skill development is required to re-orient an entire population to live in a different world where new capabilities are constantly being developed.

When you think it is a sprint and it turns out to be a marathon, then you might give up. That's one reason why CEM in government is the most challenging area to drive Customer Experience. It is also the area that can be the most rewarding.

For those who are up to the challenge - the long hard work of driving CEM in Government is worthwhile when you know that millions of lives will be changed for the better through your efforts, that your passion to improve standard of living and benefit humankind is shared by many, who are waiting to hear your call to action. I urge you to rise to the extreme challenge of this most worthwhile endeavor, to join with others to leave the world a better place than you found it.


About the Author

Mei Lin Fung works with Oklahoma State University's Spears Business School to offer certificate and performance management programs in business-customer relations. She recently assisted communications firm Avaya in developing an innovative public and private customer relations partnership, honored with the American Society of Competitiveness' Phillip B. Crosby Golden Medallion. Fung was an early pioneer in CRM, having worked with both Tom Siebel, founder of Siebel Systems, and Marc Benioff, founder of salesforce.com in 1988 at Oracle at the very beginning of the CRM industry. Blog: Professionals Earn Customer Trust

“Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it. Action has magic, grace and power in it.”

In the middle of a recession in the US, it is all too easy to hark back to those "good old days" when jobs were more plentiful and going out for dinner was the highlight of the week.

Sometimes, it takes a JOLT to make us raise our eyes to aspire higher.

If he had never become a double amputee, Liu would never have learned to "keyboard" with his toes. At the age of 19, when he decided to resume his dream of becoming a musician, he has astounded the world.





If we did not have the financial crisis and the mortgage crisis and the job crisis, those of us who can imagine the grace of superb service, and engaging in rewarding relationships everyday might have felt our dreams were fantasies.

If we had not experienced the disruption of information technology in re-shaping our work and lives, we might not imagine it within our power to use technology to lift the quality of our well-being. As Douglas Engelbart described in the conclusion of his seminal paper "As we may work" : Technology is like fire, it can burn us up, or it can be harnessed for great good.

At dinner tonight at Brabo's in Alexandria, VA talking about the opportunity we have to transform our health institutions into instruments of well-being, Edna St Vincent Millay supplied the first stanza, the second is inspired by the work I am doing these days

Upon this gifted age in its dark hour
Falls from the sky, a meteoric shower of facts
They lie unquestioned, uncombined
Wisdom to leech us of all our ill, is daily spun
But there is no loom to weave it into fabric

Upon our gifted age in its new awakening
Falls from the sky a meteoric shower of stories
Of acts of beauty;
Compassion that lies unremarked and unrecognized
Wisdom to nurture life, heal hurts, grow joy, is daily spun
Let us commit our loom of civilized intention
to weave wisdom into the fabric of our souls


When people are wondering what next big wave will drive our economy, NOW is the time to resume our dream of a Service Economy that puts people at the center - service that is uplifting for employees and customers alike!

Service by the people, with the people, for the people

RSA Animate - 21st century enlightenment

The question posed in this video, for me, is Empathy as important as Education in our quest for harnessing human potential?

Last night I heard Thomas Goetz at TEDxBayArea, he's the executive editor at Wired Magazine and author of "Decision Tree"

ok, ok, we are in the middle of a recession, so someone asked Thomas how he could be so optimistic (about healthcare in the US)

His answer basically was "what's the alternative?" if we stop caring, its only going to get worse, and this is too important a topic (health) to let that happen to

I was struck by the authentic honesty of his answer.

I am optimistic because I care. I care because I must.

So tonight, in late night trawling thru YouTube, I find RSA's animation of Matthew Taylor talking about 21st century Enlightenment, and I am enlightened and made more optimistic, so I'm sharing it with you.


For the more philosophical readers of this blog.... you will also enjoy the visualization techniques by theRSAorg

David Grady: The Conference Call

a skit for our times..... LOL

Well Being Matters - Introducing the WB Meter

I'm happy to have written the opening blogpost at Whole Life Well Being - a project of Jerry Wagner, Senior Gallup Scientist.

Check out the site, and contribute your well being meter reading to our community.

Let me know what you think of the post, good bad or otherwise.

We are made of STAR STUFF

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how
infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and
admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet,
to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

Hamlet, Shakespeare

What is this quintessense of dust?

We are made of star stuff - indeed.

When we consider how amazing and unique each human being is, why wouldn't we want to offer the most wonderful experience to each other as customers? as employees? As friends and family? As citizens of the world?


John Boswell is the creative artist behind www.SymphonyofScience.com

His art emerges in the form of videos celebrating science through music and voice. They have been viewed over 8 million times, and I am happy to share the video and lyrics (sung by the autotuned voices of - Richard Feynmann, Carl Sagan, DeGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye)



[deGrasse Tyson]
We are all connected;
To each other, biologically
To the earth, chemically
To the rest of the universe atomically

[Feynman]
I think nature's imagination
Is so much greater than man's
She's never going to let us relax

[Sagan]
We live in an in-between universe
Where things change all right
But according to patterns, rules,
Or as we call them, laws of nature

[Nye]
I'm this guy standing on a planet
Really I'm just a speck
Compared with a star, the planet is just another speck
To think about all of this
To think about the vast emptiness of space
There's billions and billions of stars
Billions and billions of specks

[Sagan]
The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it
But the way those atoms are put together
The cosmos is also within us
We're made of star stuff
We are a way for the cosmos to know itself

Across the sea of space
The stars are other suns
We have traveled this way before
And there is much to be learned

I find it elevating and exhilarating
To discover that we live in a universe
Which permits the evolution of molecular machines
As intricate and subtle as we

[deGrasse Tyson]
I know that the molecules in my body are traceable
To phenomena in the cosmos
That makes me want to grab people in the street
And say, have you heard this??

(Richard Feynman on hand drums and chanting)

[Feynman]
There's this tremendous mess
Of waves all over in space
Which is the light bouncing around the room
And going from one thing to the other

And it's all really there
But you gotta stop and think about it
About the complexity to really get the pleasure
And it's all really there
The inconceivable nature of nature

Choosing An Ergonomic Keyboard And Mouse - Applelinks.com

Choosing An Ergonomic Keyboard And Mouse - Applelinks.com


I've been writing about health social networks and last week, I found myself enjoying the wealth of friendship and great support and help on the Internet, there for the asking!

After seeing my doctor and having identified as having suffered Shoulder Rotator Cuff injury - the exercises he prescribed hurt and he said if the hurt continued, the next step would be an injection.

I didn't want that, so instead of going back to the doctor, I looked on the Internet. Here's what I found:

1. a helpful blog by Adin in Palo Alto - http://siliconvalleyfit.com/author/adin/ - and I signed up with his partner, Chiropractor Dominique for treatment which is slowly healing my shoulder, and put myself on a plan to get healthier all round!

In the process after a couple of visits, in discussion with Dom, I told him I was fearful of triggering off the wrist pain that had resulted in me wearing a wrist sling for 2 months.

While it was not Carpal Tunnel, it was due to a Repetitive Strain Injury, such as one might get through lots of keyboarding and mousing.

Talking this over with friends, I was encouraged to look for a more ergonomic set up for my computer. That led to the next find on the Internet.


2. Charles Moore's article in Applelinks from 2002 - about ergonomic keyboards and mice.

You can read the rest of the story in Charles latest article at Applelinks. My takeaway lessons


Lesson 1 - FACE UP TO IT

- After I stopped denying I had a problem when I looked for help I found the right kind of help I needed. when I reached out to the help I found, I put myself on the road to recovery.


Lesson 2 - TIME

- Muscle Injuries take time to understand and work out the appropriate exercise response. Doctors can only help so far when they have a short amount of time - it took the work with Adin and Dominique spending an hour or more working with what I could do, when the pain began and stopped - to work out what exercises would really help the muscles recover.

Lesson 3 - RESPONSIBILITY

- Take responsibility for my response to health issues. When I buy a printer, I take more time to research the purchase than I would when I have a health issue, because I use to do just as the doctor advised. Now I know to take more responsibility for my health and do my part in research and taking action.

Lesson 4 - There are WONDERFUL PEOPLE you can find on the Internet - whether in Nova Scotia like Charles or Adin and Dominique in Palo Alto - I am appreciative of the help they have provided me.

Jawdroppingly fun way to generate Customer Exprience! Gamestorming - How an idea ignited Starbucks

How cool is this? Just after writing about Health spaces, I find this great social network story about playing games to design new experiences that engage customers -

Watch this video - and bring innovation and fun into your workplace - AND improve your customer relationships with new ideas from the people who care - employees in your business !

Gamestorming Ignite presentation

Open Gamestorming Ignite presentation on NextSlide

Health Spaces Part 2

Another in the series of posts about Health spaces - how do we manage our time and space when it comes to health and healing.

Take a look at this article about doctors who accept walk in patients as a matter of course

A shift to Just in Time Care - it takes thinking to make it work, but what benefits flow.

Design for Experience: Spaces for Health and Healing - Part 1

Last month I participated in the Institute for the Future's Health Horizon's conference at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge. Now you're talking about an amazing space to talk about health and healing.

While there, I had the pleasure of finding out about Quarantine Landscapes.

There is a lot we can learn about in designing Customer Experience from the approach being pioneered by Nicola Twilley, of Edible Geography and Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG

They brought together an eclectic group of 18 architects, designers, artists and more...showing how you can set up a

"design studio without any official institutional affiliation can manage to set itself up, using equipment as simple as cheap wine, PDFs, and Post-It notes, inside already existing spaces around the city"

Of course the city is NYC, but, for those of us who do not have the privilege of living there, we know that good things can happen outside Manhattan.

We have seen the detailed, more mechanistic approach to Customer Experience Management - mapping the moment by moment events, activities that constitute customer touchpoints - These can bring to our attention critical interactions that matter to the customer but may not be paid adequate attention by the business which the customer is patronizing.

Space design offers another approach, whose value has been shown by Apple, in the design of the successful Apple retail stores - now being copied by others. Click on the link to see the Luxotica Eyewear store - described by the NY Times as "a touch of Disney a touch of Apple"

Nicola and Greg point the way to new approaches for involving customers in designing their experience in ways that pay attention to what matters most, not to the business, but to the customer.

Managing Healthcare Through Social Networks

"In nothing do men more nearly approach the gods than in giving health to men." Cicero

Mari Carmen Domingo of the Barcelona Tech University in Spain, helps us all with a great overview of the actual practice of physician and patient social networks in the e-Health, July 2010issue of www.computer.org the magazine of the the computer society of the IEEE. Bravo to Mari Carmen. The link above gets you to the abstract and references only, so I'm distributing Domingo's contribution to the wider audience it deserves in the CRM and Health 2.0 world.

That's such a great closing quote that Domingo chose.... health is one of those things that is not just desirable, it is one of the greatest gifts that we can give ourselves or others.

"Healthcare social networks provide an active platform for sharing ideas, discussing symptoms and debating treatment options - tasks that together promise to improve patient care." Health 2.0 is a "movement" which harnesses the Internet to improve health through networks of (ideally collaborating) patients, healthcare givers, healthcare providers - professional or certified, and other stakeholders.

WHY do folks join the movement?
4 levels of engagement by US citizens were identified by the Health Engagement Barometer January 2009
1. 80% are INVOLVED in health, but don't necessarily gather or share info
2. 33% are INFORMED, gathering and sharing information more than once a week
3. 39% are ENGAGED, identifying health condition/treatment by actively gathering and sharing and advocating a point of view
4. 22% are INFO-ENTIAL - influential through information - are INVOLVED INFORMED AND ENGAGED

I remember (video link - Engelbart @ Google) learning in August 2007 that the largest category of searches at that time were related to Health. Domingo list later surveys confirming this trend of using the Internet for health

- 61% of US citizens look online for health information - Pew Internet Project Dec 2009
- 63% perform searches at least once a month - iCrossing survey Elkin 2008

Physician social networks allow doctors to "share clinical cases, images, videos and medical knowledge". 60% of US Physicians use or plan to use a Physician Social Network with 86% depend on the Internet more than any other resource to search for health, medical or prescription drug information.
Examples of physician-only communities:
Sermo - 112,000 members in 68 specialties
Ozmosis
DoctorNetworking

In the exchange by physicians on drugs, devices and treatments, they share direct experience helping each other navigate the growing oceans of medical knowledge and practice. And they can do it real time from anywhere in the world with an Internet connection, and they can do it immediately, sifting through the options with a patient, side by side.

TRUST is the major issue - are participants credentialed and how throughly is that checked? Is information reliable and can it be checked? Peer to peer ranking of the usefulness and relevance of comments has emerged as a crowd-sourcing tool to build reliability and trust, together with the building of online reputations by individual physicians as they comment and evaluate each other's comments.

Patient social networks enable direct patient support by other patients or their caregvers, sharing relevant or related knowledge about illness, healing, recovery and well-being. PatientsLikeMe has 58,000 registered participants who share how an illness affects their everyday lives, an area not often addressed by doctors. Tools for tracking medications, symptoms and health outcomes allow date to be tracked and viewed in easy to understand charts, giving patients the ability to look for others who have similar medical profiles.

Patient networks are a response to highly medicalized formal interactions about the very human essential characteristic: health. Patients are banding together to help each other out in the tough environment of today's health landscape that is impersonal, cost-bound, raining down hard- to-understand generalized abstract information, populated by severely time constrained healthcare providers.

Disaboom is a social network for people with disabilities with 100,000 members who help each other reduce their sense of isolation from general society.

CureTogether has over 7200 patients who track and compare health data, helping scientists to accelerate research into cures.

Reducing anxiety through real time interaction with people who care is a huge benefit of patient networks. The annual Health 2.0 conference held in San Francisco in 2010 is the epicenter for patient networks.

TRUST is the biggest concern in patient social networks - how much can the information there be trusted.

PRIVACY is another issue - in the US with HIPAA the law of the land, the interaction between social networks of patients and social networks of physicians is constrained due to the limits on information sharing. Some approaches www.heartpatients.com let patients control the information shared.

The challenges are formidable - four very different worlds are interacting: (leaving off the drug and medical device industries for now, but they are essential parts of the picture too)

Information Technology
Patient communities
Health Provider communities
Health research scientific communities

As Herophiles said in 300 BC (tip of the hat to Ying Mitchell of www.fitfromthecore.com)

When Health is absent
Wisdom cannot reveal itself
Art cannot become manifest
Strength cannot be exerted
Wealth is useless and Reason is powerless

We have no choice but to move forward, three steps and anticipate and prepare for the real possibility of having to fail, err and take one or two steps back.

System Design and Community Design must co-evolve.

Nothing else than our Health depends on it.

Asia Business Conf 2010: Lim Siong Guan, Govt Singapore Investment Corp ...

A hard headed skeptical view of Asia growth markets from Singapore - I think this talk touches on a broad picture of much happening around the world and puts it into an actionable narrative. I have a lot of respect for Lim Siong Guan

Re-inventing the purpose of the firm - Customer-centric Capitalism

It is wonderful and highly validating to see Irving Wladawsky-Berger write about this topic and highlighting Johnson and Johnson as a sterling example of a company that has embraced customer-centric capitalism. He even quotes the J&J credo, which readers of this blog may recognize from seeing it here a few years back.

While we have not quite reached tipping point, social media is tilting in the direction of sustainable Capitalism which Cleverly Centers on Customers....after all Capitalists without Customers are Capitalists without access to Capital! :-)

Wladawsky-Berger's whole article is well worth reading - tip of the hat to Alvis Brigis for pointing it out recently in his blog.

When Mentoring Goes Bad - Executive Adviser an MIT SMR / Wall Street Journal Collaboration - MIT Sloan Management Review

Extract of Principles for Mentoring relationships from the article

QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF
If you are mentoring someone, are you giving them enough of your time and interesting work?
Are the personality and work habits of your protégé similar to yours, and if not, are you able to make sure that doesn’t get in the way of working together?
Have you and your protégé clearly outlined his or her professional-development goals?
If you are being mentored, is the work interesting, and does your mentor give you credit for any projects you complete for him or her?
Do you feel like part of a team, and are you treated in an open, respectful manner?

When Mentoring Goes Bad - Executive Adviser an MIT SMR / Wall Street Journal Collaboration - MIT Sloan Management Review

PBS NewsHour piece on the Khan Academy and Salman Khan

Online K-12 Math and more - The Khan Academy, winner of the Tech Microsoft Education Award.

An inspiring story of how videos created for a 5th grade niece generated 1300 teaching videos now viewed by 100,000 people a month.

10 minutes at a time - a path to education, online, free and available to English speakers for now.... maybe other languages later?