The Colors of Well Being

Just a week ago, we went out camping and on Saturday morning, I wrote this blog post about beginning to recognize that there are so many colors for our health and well being, while we seem today to talk about this topic only in Black and White.

When I was growing up in a Chinese household in Singapore we visited my mother’s brother and sister’s homes every week or even more often. It is so different now for my daughter as my siblings and I live in 3 countries on 2 continents. The extended family support system that I grew up in  was essential for me to gain the strong sense of wanting to thrive. I sense that my feeling that I personally DESERVE to thrive, is deeply rooted in my early childhood experience where I was part of a loving extended family, a safety net in which we all rooted for each other. Today as my daughter grows up, we have an “adopted” extended family around us in the San Francisco Bay Area – our Reading Group which began in 1983 still continues to meet every 2-3 weeks to read aloud before or after dinner or occasional Sunday brunches. The sense of “belonging” to a group of people who know you over a long period, is something my husband and I wanted to be sure to give our daughter who is now heading for college this fall.

Last week, I heard a fascinating radio show about how the words for different colors might have emerged in the past. In Homer’s poems that began in the oral tradition 600BC, the Illiad and Odyssey the most frequent colors mentioned were Black and White, by far.   Read more

Wisdom - Humanity's Cut-And-Come-Again Pudding

Last night I did something which I regret - which is to stand on a soap box and deliver a polemic at the MIT club of northern california meeting where Open Courseware was seeking feedback from the alumni community.

 As part of purging myself from the excruciating feeling that I did my cause no benefit by doing that, I would like to share the thought in a less polemical way - ie what I should have said.

Background Context 

OpenCourseware (OCW)   is MIT's open source platform for sharing course materials - 2100 courses to date from MIT, 20,000 courses on the platform put on by others Tufts, CMU, etc. There are mirror sites around the world, eg Sub Saharan Africa gets the stuff on hard drives so that Internet access is not needed for local tapping of OCW, Chinese translators create Chinese language versions and post them out, under CC license. In all, current estimated audience is 125 million globally. We have just reached the 10th anniversary of OCW, and the speaker's were former Dean of engineering, Dick Yue and the Executive director of OCW, Cecelia d'Olivera. There are 30 ebooks, each MIT course is the sharing of the equivalent of 1 MIT Professor's time on average, 1 year in preparing a new course. They take sabbaticals to create new courses - at least that's what they told us last night.

90% of faculty participate - MIT being what it is, they joked that the only other thing attaining this extent of 90% of faculty participation, is in knowing where the Mens and Women's restrooms are.

MITx is the parallel effort by MIT to actually offer free courses - where you can get an MITx Certificate. 

The first course MITx on circuit design of some kind, has just completed. 150k people signed up. 9k took the mid term. 5k took the finals 7k passed (I guess you could pass without taking the finals, based on earlier work)

They asked us, several questions, the last of which What would be the impact of not moving forward boldly with OCW, they have a dream of reaching 1 billion people.

My response to this question: 

OCW is like the Gutenberg Bible of our time (yes, its possibly a little bombastic, but I do think this - also am aware I'm talking Western Europe only) - before the printing press (analogy Internet) if you wanted to learn to read and write, you had to join a monastery and become a monk. There was a priesthood. Or you had to be very wealthy, and pay monks to teach your kids. Because churches were the only place where knowledge gardens were tended in those days, and they begot the small number of universities (Paris, Bologna, Scotland) - Wikipedia: "The first institutions generally considered to be universities were established in Italy, France, Spain and En

gland in the late 11th and the 12th centuries for the study of arts, law, medicine, and theology.^[1] These univers
ities evolved from much older Christian cathedral schools and monastic schools." 

The printing press broke the monopoly of the church and began the trend of the increasing literacy of the people. Cheaper books meant that literate people could teach anyone they wanted to, wherever and not make it a condition that you would devote your life to God in order to learn to read and write.

OCW is the Gutenberg Bible, in that just like the Gutenberg Bible opened the possibility people can read for themselves, decide for themselves - no longer does God have to be interpreted for the illiterate by the literate priesthood.....

OCW opens the possibility that anyone with Internet access (big IF, but it was a big IF whether or not a Gutenberg bible was within walking distance to you) can "see, understand and learn" for themselves and decide for themselves what kind of life they might want to lead, how they might earn a living, how their community might operate. No longer does global fields of knowledge have to be interpreted by "haves" to "have nots".

Like the ABC of literacy, with OCW is the door to 21st century literacy, the genii is out of the bottle. People being people, they will get what they need and want, the most ambitious, strong minded ones first will break down the barriers for those that follow. It might take the Enlightenment, the equivalent of the American, industrial, information revolutions to occur, before all the things happen like every human having the chance to realize their potential to thrive and pursue happiness, but the dam has broke, it will not be put back again.

The next part I did not say last night, but I am sharing here: 

What brought me to Douglas Engelbart and why I worked with him for 4 years was that I recognized that he knew that it could go the way of open source and human potential, OR be hijacked by monopolists and used to "enslave" the many to benefit the few powerful. And that the angst we feel, and mirrored around the world, is because we hover in the crucible until the needle points firmly in one direction or the other.

The powerful will always gather power, and drive to feudal society - because they live in a world that is static, a pie that is not growing. 

The other view: Knowledge multiples when it is shared... a cut and come again pudding! The American experiment has shown that the opening the pursuit of happiness to all, can have generate collective knowledge with beneficial results for over 200 years. But as power entrenches, the tendency to shift back to feudal is threatening to overwhelm the American experiment (Citizens United is such an Orwellian term don't you think?)

With knowledge going global, which way will the needle go?

 

What you think and say matters: Mental Hygiene

 We can get into a reactive mode where whatever happens draws our attention, and shapes what we say, do think and feel.  In that case, there is not sense of a higher meaning for life, and we just feel helpless and resigned to live within an exhaust cloud of disappointment and frustration. OR we can be energized by a sense of hope for a better future and find those like-minded people with whom we can focus our efforts on working together for something worthwhile. And that takes relationships with others, because all of us have good days and bad days and it takes a team to keep going forward.

The illustration is by Ping of Pingart based on narrative by Jonathan Peck of the Institute of Alternative Futures. 

What Captures your Attention by Karen Anderson in the Harvard Business Review: 

"Whatever we focus upon actually wires our neurons. For example, pessimistic people see setbacks and unhappy events as Personal (It's worst for me), Pervasive (Everything is now worse) and Permanent (It will always be this way) according to Learned Optimism author Marty Seligman. Yet, with practice, he found that we can learn to focus more attention on the positive possibilities in situations to then to craft a redemptive narrative of our life story. Consciously changing what you pay attention to can rewire your brain from a negative orientation to a positive one. 

"Attention shapes the brain," Rick Hanson says in Buddha's Brain."

"Because attention is so closely connected to our brain's basic wiring, it can be difficult to recognize our own patterns of giving attention — patterns we've been absorbing since birth. Yet different cultures do allocate attention differently. For instance, psychologist Richard E. Nisbett showed an underwater scene to students in the U.S. and also to East Asians. While the Americans commented on the big fish swimming amongst smaller fish, the East Asians also discussed the overall scene, including plants and rocks. Nisbett concluded that East
Asians focus on relationships while Westerners tend to see isolated objects rather than the connections between them.

John Hagel reported on a similar experiment. "A developmental psychologist showed three pictures to children — a cow, a chicken and some grass. He asked children from America which two of the pictures belonged together. Most of them grouped the cow and chicken together because they were both objects in the same category of animals. Chinese children on the other hand tended to group the cow and grass together because 'cows eat grass' — they focused on the relationship between two objects rather than the objects themselves."

Thinking about this, its interesting that LANGUAGE itself can shape our attention. It is not just the cultural fact of living in East Asia, the Chinese character language forces paying attention to relationships.  In the written Chinese language, while words can be said to have a meaning, their meaning is not clear until the word is used within a sentence, when the relationship to the words around them then come into focus. 

Thus knowing the words in a sentence but not seeing the context in which they are invoked, means that the relationships are not clear. Thus Chinese is called a "contextual" language. This is not to say that English is not, I find it depends on who is talking and how they use the language.

I find Abraham Lincoln's use of the English language particularly compelling because he is so able to use very simple everyday language to express thoughts that are clearly stated, and in fact he uses the relationships between the simple word to get us to see things in a new and fresh way. 

We can succeed only by concert. It is not "can any of us imagine better?" but, "can we all do better?" The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise -- with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.

Where others might use jargon to exclude, he uses simplicity to include. one example of this is Peter Norvig's version of the Gettysburg address which he has translated into 'powerpoint-ese"

George Orwell is one of the great 20th century proponents of clear English, following in a great tradition of Shakespeare - whose metaphors still shape our thoughts today. 

Orwell "translated" Ecclesiastes 9:

11— in Politics and the English Language - as an example of the beauty and power of language

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

—and then showed how it might be said in "modern English of the worst sort,"

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

Our human brains shape our attention, yet what we choose to pay attention to shapes our brains. For those of us who write or speak, we can pay attention ourselves to what we call other's attention to. Is it to a better future where we can all do better? 

When you communicate DO pay attention to Orwell's rules for writing and speaking English

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

"

Health as a Team Sport

As a regular author at Global Customer Experience Management (G-CEM) here is my latest contribution Voice of the Customer - Health as a Team Sport, I was interested to see how to align the leading topics of Voice of the Customer with the work I have been doing in Federal Health Futures. While much of our work is under wraps, a few us recently presented last month at SxSW, in Austin Texas and I was able to draw on that material to share with the wider world. It's great to high light the terrific work being done by Julia Hoffman and Ida Sim on WWW.OPENMHEALTH.ORG which is the new field of open source applications for mobile health applications.and also to make the case for Health by Design - using design thinking as an alternative approach to linear sequential thinking to address the challenges of living healthy and staying healthy.

10 Ways to Visualize How Americans Spend Money on Health Care - The Atlantic

10 Ways to Visualize How Americans Spend Money on Health Care - The Atlantic

For those who like graphs and charts - this shows it in many ways that how we decide to spend money individually and in the federal government, has lead to US health sitting on a lonely island outpost - of highest costs and #37 (or so) in outcomes.

Coming up in March and April - SxSW, 30 blog posts in April!

SxSW is an amazing conference that takes place in Austin Texas that brings together awesome people in Interactive Media, Film, software and all kinds of geeky fun creative and innovative talking, walking, an all-around festival for the mind and spirit. AND I'll be speaking on the Health as a Team Sport Panel on 3/13 9:30 am Classroom 204 - do you get that I would REALLY REALLY like you to come see, or listen in? 


Here's the panel description. I'll be joining Dr. Ahmed Calvo from the US Dept of Health and Human Services - HRSA  Health Resource Services Administration - he is a pioneer in thinking about Community health and the Senior Medical Officer for Disparity (reduction as in "all folks are created equal and therefore entitled to services irregardless"). Our third panelist is Dr. Michael Dineen from the US Dept of Defense - he's the director of Strategy Management for the Military Health System and he coined the term "Health as a Team Sport" , very cool notion you need to learn more about.I'll be talking about Learning and Games in service of our Health.


http://schedule.sxsw.com/2012/events/event_IAP11698?utm_source=Your+Next+Move%21+Feb.+2012&utm_campaign=YNM+0212&utm_medium=email








The Health Activist Writer's Month Challenge hosted by WEGO Health. I will be writing a post a day for all 30 days. I hope you'll join me in writing every day about health. It's going to be a lot of fun and I'd love to see what you have to say about each of the topics, too. All you have to do to join is sign up here:http://info.wegohealth.com/HAWMC2012 and you'll be able to start posting once April rolls around. Looking forward to writing with you!

A HAPPINESS CENTENNIAL

A HAPPINESS CENTENNIAL

Reflecting in the first post of the new year, I am happy to highlight John de Graaf's essay this morning as I have been spending a lot of time over the past 4 weeks thinking about how do we know how far we are in our hope to be healthy ? how do we know we are heading for happiness?

One such measurement is a survey of well-being recently introduced by The Happiness Initiative, (www.happycounts.org).

The survey measures how well we are doing in ten areas of life:

::: material well-being;

::: physical health;

::: mental health;

::: access to arts, education, recreation and culture;

::: time balance;

::: confidence in government;

::: environmental quality;

::: work satisfaction;

::: community participation

:::social support.

Yesterday I watched the movie The Iron Lady, the interpretation by Meryl Streep of Mrs. Margaret Thatcher's life and what it was like for a woman to lead in a world of men. Then I look at these measures and think about whether she drove towards happiness for herself and as a leader for Great Britain - and I have to conclude that "by her lights, by her values" she did. While as Meryl Streep said after playing her, that it was enlightening for her to play a woman "whom we all thought was rather strange".... I find myself, unexpectedly as a result of this movie, much better able to appreciate Mrs. Thatcher's courage in her convictions and the values she learned from her father, a grocer who ran for mayor and became mayor of his town. Her political calculations are shown (whether or not true to life) as driven by an intense unbending conviction that she was doing the right thing. That basis for an extraordinary level of ambition, also allowed her to gain a level of support that kept her as a long serving leader, unmatched by any man since.

This year I am working to support a team of great leaders working toward the forming of the Asian Women's Leadership University. www.AWLUproject.org

More to come - but if you are in San Francisco, we are meeting this Quarter, let me know if you are interested in being involved in any way.

The New Journalism, The Great Transformation and the Inifinity 8

I am so happy with this work that Eileen Clegg and I designed for the Innovation Journalism conference at Stanford - See the video as journalists and others reflected and then told the story which you may have missed in the earlier blog post I made below back in May

The story continues with the recent conference I attended in Barcelona on Knowledge Federation, The New Journalism.

We developed from an iconic image, the Infinity 8, an understanding of the New Journalism - Ramon Sanguesa was able to capture our wide ranging discussion in this picture with an explanation, WOW

a) little actions bring big changes: a little story, like a butterfly, can create a positive change storm

b) People tell a what (their story) and share it with the rest in search of a why that explains how a bigger effect took (or can take) place. Different people connect in the process to do and action in the world. They see what the effect of the action (doing) was and that is the beginning of another cycle, that could expand to another (meta)level, plane or world.

c) The lower part of the vertical infinity eight hints at the process of working on scanning of potentially good pieces of knowledge (or stories) and people ("spikes") ,data gathering, knowledge creation, debate, argumentation, data and knowledge visualization,.

d) The second part of the vertical infinity eight hints at the action in the world, and the observation of its consequences.and the gathering of knowledge of this process at a different level.

d) If you think about journalism, the lower part is devoted to writing the story. The upper part with telling the story  AND creating action in the world as well. So we see the media as place to come up with solutions to questions, which include creating actions in the world to solve them.

e) If you thing about systemic innovation, then the lower part is about gathering knowledge and actors and starting a process The upper part is devoted to actually launch the process into the world and observe its consequences, and then gather new knowledge, specially knowledge about the process of ... systemic innovation.

f) The different colors refer to this different "levels", "planes" or "worlds". The main idea to convey is that the processes is the same everywhere but it creates different effects and different types of knowledge: one level is the metalevel of the other, one world can act as a metalevel for other. In the present logo I have just used the worlds of journalism, education and systemic innovation. So in has some type of fractality into it.

RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms

Watching this video is like having the sun begin to shine through the dark clouds - this is truly worth watching for insight, clarity and understanding that public education today was invented for a different time and age. What are we doing to our children? And why don't we stop a paradigm that strips away from young people the natural capacities that would allow them to rise to the challenge of the 21st century.

Health not Healthcare: The Quiet Revolution

Starting October 1, I started working full time in the Federal Health Futures Group - this experience will rate as one of my peak work opportunities

 - and I have had many highs in my life having worked with and studied under some of the best minds in the world, Turing award winner Douglas Engelbart, Finance pioneer Fisher Black, Franco Modigliani, Robert Merton, both winners of the Nobel Economics, Tom Siebel - founder of Siebel Systems, Marc Benioff - founder of SalesForce.com and many many more less well known, but no less brilliant, quirky and demanding than each of these.


 What is it that we are working on in the Federal Health Futures Group that is so invigorating ?

Well there are many facets but I like to describe what we do in terms of the classic management paper by Stephen Kerr

 We are beginning to recognize and starting the process of correcting:

 The folly of rewarding A while hoping for B Where A = health care and B = health

 The Atlantic Monthly has a prime example of the benefits that can emerge naturally when you actually begin to directly head for how to increase Health. For yourself, your family, your community, the nation, the world.

 Instead of spending so much time working out increasing the amount of healthcare to deliver, how often, and whether or not it will be reimbursed.

 There are many people who care and many of them are working to make things better - the quiet revolution is underway and I am pleased to join it. To do the best I can.

 Wangari Maathai tells a story about the humming bird who saw a fire in the forest. The humming bird, with its little beak and little wings, chose to do something about the fire. She carried water from the pond to the fire. Back and forth, again and again, she carried drop by drop of water and dropped each drop on the massive raging fire.


All the other animals had already decided that it was hopeless to put out the fire. After all, they had learned that fires burn down forests and that's how life is. They stood by, watching their world burn around them. They stood by, watching the hummingbird carry water to and fro.


They stood by, criticizing her for choosing to do something so small, while they chose to do nothing. 


The hummingbird just kept on carrying water. She did the best she could. Now, imagine how this story might continue..... While the animals stand by, they begin to turn their head, from the pond to the fire, they watch the humming bird carry the drops of water. Their heads turned, from the water to the fire. A monkey watched the hummingbird, he imagined himself carry water to and fro in a coconut shell. The elephant, turning his head to watch the hummingbird, felt the swing of his powerful trunk and thought "Well, if the hummingbird can make a difference, so can I with my big trunk".




Soon, one by one, in small groups, each animal followed the hummingbird in their own way. And other animals saw their friends carrying water, and more animals began to carry water. Drop by drop, trunk by trunk, they together put out the fire.


They did the best they could.


 Let us each have the courage to carry a drop of water.

 

Mindful Awareness – Bridge over Troubled Waters

Let me whisper in the gentle silence of reflection
Say “I pass” to pessimism on auto-pilot.
Upheaving the soul-crushing times
By purposeful intent, let me
Mindfully, feel and learn the way back to well being
MLF 9/11/11

On 9/11/11 I wrote a blog post for Whole Life Well Being... enabling me to take time to consider my response to the day, and the last decade. Thank you Gerald Wagner for giving me the opportunity to be one of the Whole Life panel of authors at www.WholeLifeWellBeing.org, which sprang out of Jerry's work as a senior scientist for Gallup on Well Being. Read it here

Mindful Awareness – Bridge over Troubled Waters

http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/

Celebrating our global connection - posting from San Francisco

Read on to learn about the weather extremes around the world from Cliff's Mass Weather Blog.




http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/


On Monday Sept 5, we had the first salon for looking at socially valuable initiatives that don't fit into the current thinking.
Just a few stalwart souls gathered to meet each other and listen to Jonathan Trent, Ph.D NASA scientist who has been working on Fuels and Tools for a Sustainable Future.

NASA, Google and the California Energy Commission have financed the research to an initial pilot.

So now, we are the support team for Jonathan's visit to Singapore this month.

In the larger context, during our discussion, we found that not everything fits into a "market" driven model, and not everything we need to survive into the far future, finds natural routes to funding.

in the end, it comes down to articulate, determined, perseverance by individuals - joining together to see something worthwhile off the ground.

Has it not been always so?

I'm driven to remind myself that innovation's true breeding ground lies in the minds and hearts of human beings. Stick-with-it ness is essential!

Keep up the good work Jonathan for the future, and Cliff for keeping us interested in the global weather.

Renaming this blog to Global Connections, Eclectic Selections

When I started the blog 6+ years ago, I was deep in the world of CRM, Customer Relationship Management - and it all seems so far away today. The world has changed so profoundly. We have moved away from the era of the Customer and Capitalism to a new one of Global Citizenship.

In the last 2 months, I have been to Singapore, Washington DC, Sydney Australia and more. I exchange email with people in Bogota Colombia, Europe, Asia and easily stay in touch with people in Wyoming and New Zealand with no more effort than the simple click of my fingers on a keyboard.

While not everyone in the world can do this, more and more each day are enabled to do so.

As communication expands, so do connections and common interests. The idea of citizenship beyond that of a nation, is becoming more and more real.

When people are in touch around the globe, it begins to make sense to talk about Global Citizenship.

My travels to Asia and Australia in the last month struck me in this way:

how much US news dominated coverage in the local papers.

The US Debt Crisis and the S&P downgrading of the US credit rating sent global stock markets into turmoil were unavoidable news on TV, newsprint and in conversation.

It hit home to me, how increasingly interconnected we are, how actions in one place truly affecting people in another in profound ways.

How to respond to this realization? I'm moved to invoke the idea of active global citizenship.

From Wikipedia's entry on Citizen:

"Active citizenship" is the philosophy that citizens should work towards the betterment of their community through economic participation, public, volunteer work, and other such efforts to improve life for all citizens.


“My country is the world, and my religion is to do good. ”

Thomas Paine "Rights of Man"


The renaming of the blog honors this unstoppable trend of human communication.

Customer Connections, Eclectic Selections: Rembrandt vs Vermeer - insights for CRM and the dy...

I noticed that my 3rd post was a popular read, so am highlighting it now, 6 years later! I hope it merits your consideration for reading. Pin hole perspectives have their use, but they are not the whole picture.

Art history holds some lessons for us: Artist David Hockney in "Secret Knowledge" his 2001 book credibly claims that many of the most acclaimed European artists (Vermeer Caravaggio, van Eyck) used optical projection to increase the precision of their drawing. What it gave them was a way to very accurately draw what they saw from a pinhole (because that's what the optical aids provided). These pictures provided an "optical" look at the world - a very famous Vermeer painting "The Little Street" is an acclaimed example

Here, Hockney describes this painting as a window - we are outside observers with a one point perspective.

Rembrandt shook that world - and some say the difference might be due to the influence of Chinese porcelain painting imports and exports in his hometown. Chinese paintings and scrolls are drawn from a perspective that is dynamic and changing - the world as you would see it, walking along, shifting all the time. The view from the bottom of the hill is different from the view from the top of the hill. Unless you are in a helicopter, you would never see the whole thing from one point - but from the moving series of points.

Rembrandt took the perspective of the individual one further, not just physically dynamic, but emotionally dynamic . Take a look at his sketch: Child being Taught to Walk (c) Trustees of the British Musuem (See http://people.csail.mit.edu/fredo/PUBLI/WillatsDurandAxiomathes.pdf for a picture of this amazing drawing). You can feel the anxious love of the toddler's sister, and the steady confidence of the mother, the pride and excitement of the father squating down ready to receive the tottering child.

Perspective in art is different in time and culture.

To read the rest of the article, click below.



Customer Connections, Eclectic Selections: Rembrandt vs Vermeer - insights for CRM and the dy...: "This post was inspired by reading Lawrence Weschler's article 'Vanishing Point' in the June 2005 issue of Harper's Magazine. Art history h..."

Health Care Organizational Ethics: Improving Health By Telling, and Hearing, Stories

Jim Sabin teaches at the Harvard Medical School and is a voice of reason that I appreciate.

His blog post resonates with the poem I wrote as a "cover+mashup" of Edna St Vincent Millay's poem

Upon this gifted age in its dark hour falls from the sky a meteoric shower of fact.....
There exists no loom to weave it into fabric

Mei Lin's riff quoted in this blog before but with the Stories highlighted

Upon our gifted age in our dark hour
Falls from the sky a meteoric shower of STORIES
of beauty and compassion that go unremarked and unrecognized
Wisdom enough to nurture lives and grow joy is daily spun
So let us conceive the loom to weave this wisdom into the fabric of our daily lives


Health Care Organizational Ethics: Improving Health By Telling, and Hearing, Stories: "The January issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine has a fascinating and important report of a randomized controlled trial of storytellin..."

Dan Pink's Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us

I was moved to post the RSA Animation of Dan Pink's Drive - which I have recommended countless times face to face but neglected to mention on the blog so now its here!

Why was I moved? I read the CIO article on Horrible Bosses and made the following comment today:


Great story, I wanted to respond to your clarion call:"I only wish I understood why even good employers sit idly while bad managers, festering inside organizations, shove their best and brightest out the door." Performance evaluation is more of an art than a science. In our rush to be objective, we neglect the fact that operating organizations are composed not just of processes and finance, but also intensely subjective humans. I look forward to the day when measures of emotional intelligence and social intelligence emerge in practical ways that allow joy to flourish in the environments we create for ourselves. After all, the joy of innovation and creativity is an unstoppable engine of future growth for organizations and economies.

When will we realize the folly of rewarding leaders on achieving self-fulfilling MBO's (management by objectives) while hoping for innovative and joyful workplaces?


May a new generation of leaders emerge to take this thought and run with it - you will have my whole hearted support!

It's Time to Find Your Voice

What a great experience being on the steering committee for the Triple Helix Conference at Stanford. It was great to have a chance to reflect and write about the highlights of the conference at http://www.institute-of-event-management.com/time-find-your-voice


The two panels that I felt it most important to include in the conference were:

A. Knowledge Federation lead by Dino Karabeg, Professor of Computer Science from Oslo Norway (the terrible news of the slaughter of innocents has shocked us all around the world and our hearts go out to the families and friends). Rob Stephenson (the Harvey Project), Jack Park (XML Topic Maps Editor) and John Wilbanks of Creative Commons gave fascinating talks about different approaches to interlinking knowledge for the benefit of humanity.

B. Health as a Team Sport, lead by Dr. Ahmed Calvo, Senior Medical Officer of the 8000 federally funded HRSA clinics within the Department of Health and Human Services in the USA. John Hiles who drove the application of the simulation game: SIM city for the use of technical training in Oil refineries and health policy simulation. Dr. Michael Dinneen who is the Director of Strategy Management for the US Military Health System, and Luke Hohmann, CEO of Innovation Games


I was thrilled to get such high caliber dialog and discussion in both panels. The article that is linked to talks about the Trilicious Game that Luke Hohmann invented for teams to come up with creative solutions to triple helix challenges. What fun it was to play! What great new ideas emerged, it was wonderful to watch a full conference scale collaboration with teams at each table sharing insights from their different countries, combining ideas and coming up with innovations that were novel and significant.

The Great Transformation of Journalism - Innovation Journalism emerges

Visualization Innovation - Last Tuesday we presented a workshop at Stanford's 8th Innovation Journalism conference which created a collective view of the Great Transformation of Journalism.


Eileen Clegg of www.VisualInsight.net and I conceptualized and designed a Visual Puzzle to represent the Great Transformation that Journalism is undergoing - we used the puzzle pieces to get participants to share their thoughts and together craft a sentence about the transformation from each table reflecting the future of journalism with changes in Technology, Journalism and the Knowledge Ecology. This video shows it all coming together, into a picture of re-birth and new growth. The roots are strong. Narrative will live in new ways in the Great Transformation.

Thanks to Irene Nelson for Graphic Recording and pulling the puzzle pieces together.
Credit to Bill Daul for great photography and Video animation using Animoto.

Thank you to all InJo8 participants - I hope you enjoyed it as much as we did!

Quantified Self Weight Loss Management - Social Strategies and Social Sabotage

Click on the link to get the Slideshare posting of the talk I gave on my experience as a subject within a 2 year study on Weight Loss Maintenance. This talk was given at the Quantified Self 2011 Conference at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View California.

Quantified Self Weight Loss Ignite talk ML Fung 2011

View more presentations from Institute for Service Organization Excellence www.isoe.com.

The most valuable part of participating was to learn HOW MUCH social support and social assertiveness was key to weight loss and maintenance. The world is filled with so many ways that socially sabotage us in losing weight and keeping it off. Of course will power is necessary too, but I found that the teamwork and social support of being in the program which met weekly for 6 months was essential. The other key factor was that weight loss was not the only goal. It was one of 4, the others were: Quality of Life, Active Lifestyle, Balanced Nutrition.

Creating and giving the talk brought home the importance of working to converge the Personal Science of QS'ers as the Quantified Self practitioners call ourselves, with the Professional Science that gives us treatments, devices and drugs approved by the FDA. Its not going to be easy, but lots of people are working on it.

A standout at the conference was wwww.ProjectHealthDesign.org funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation - taking everyday observations and connecting them to improve health and prevent crisis/illness. Tina Park and Patty Heronnen gave great talks on different projects within the initiative. Kudos to RWJ for being so future minded. UPDATE 9/11/11 - The community for health activists at WeGo Health TV created a video of me giving this talk - you can watch it here

Stuart Brown: Why play is vital -- no matter your age

A great video about exploring the possible through Play.