Aggie Gund saw @ava DuVernay’s “13TH” and decided to do something about mass incarceration. To the tune of $100M. https://t.co/TEB8n9hGCq
— Jonathan Capehart (@CapehartJ) October 11, 2017
Four Georgia Tech biomedical engineering students behind CauteryGuard “redesigned an electrocautery device by adding a retractable tip.” It eliminates cautery based fires and burns in the surgery room when the device isn’t in use. Reportedly by surgeons who have used the prototype the retraction feature actually enhances manual surgical dexerity vs. the opposite. The team nicely quantified the frequency of cauterization in hospitals and also dental practices, and statistics on injury and fires from equipment burns.
This is one for doing good and well. This quickly growing Nigerian-based startup captures value from waste. Its young CEO who I first met in the US explains the opportunity she saw and the value-creating practicality of its incentive-driven and low-cost operations. Billikiss Adebiyi is one who struck me from the start as more than managerially thoughtful or entrepreneurially talented, but flat out smart and humane, with profound emotional intelligence. She can read scenarios for genuine upsides, and people–even off-beat characters like me–and finish their thoughts better than they would have.
Regularly, start-up CEOs with some success are praised for their smarts or vision or brands, or for “break things” mantras or disrupt coefficients, while being prickly or not too likable is virtual cache. This is a solid and refreshing counterexample: Supreme talent + likability.
Here is a cutting solution from the Parisian technology firm Lectra. Intriguing about Lectra is its simultaneous service to niche and highly differentiated customers—as featured here, for example, in a small Italian leather goods firm—alongside its industrial grade technology solutions. Lectra really has to understand the custom fashion and design customer as well as premium engineering. The physicality of soft material design is formidable: Soft materials are organically and synthetically cultivated, extracted, processed, woven, dyed, and eventually sized and cut for end design. Just considering the number of soft materials with which we come into contact daily is sober perspective on the amount of cutting involved to continuously support standard wares, soft surfaces and the most design rich fashion. This interview with the Italian firm is their testimony to their valuation of Lectra’s Versalis solution.
An Australian-based friend recently tweeted a news knowledge test.
Pew’s latest ‘do you know more than the average American’ test. 12/13 for me. http://t.co/D7cYGlxxgB
— Lance Wiggs (@lancewiggs) September 6, 2013
Some of the questions are interesting. After taking it you can see your ranking vs. Joe Q. America’s. I scored 12/13.
LinkedIn is a lagging indicator of real connectivity—if it’s an indicator. Warm-blooded action-generative connections humanly come first. And the most humanly connected people have less time, incentive and pretense to shepherd real connections on a virtual platform. They particularly don’t need assurance: If you have the relationship you may not need the link.
It means something that many highly successful business people I know have minimalist, outdated, and abandoned LinkedIn profiles—some bordering on piteous—and were never active users. Some literally seem to have set up the account and never returned. Profiles systematically lack their biggest accomplishments, board appointments, launches, exits, and multiple roles and titles they have held; and the people they built companies with, were voted to boards by, and team with to procure their main deal flow are nowhere in their connections.
A sibling to whom I’m not connected and whose business success exactly facilitated her entertainment of a dozen people on excursion to another country at her expense this spring, forgot she had a LinkedIn account, my review of which (LinkedIn suggested maybe we should connect) prompted the observation that it was at least 4 positions and 1 M&A out of date. This drew the highly contemplative reply “Oh, I don’t know—probably is”, in revelation of an attendant serious attention to all things LinkedIn for the span of a full microsecond. In double underscore of point 1, most of the dozen globe trotters (all women) aren’t LinkedIn connections and don’t actively use it either. Knowing them as I do, the majority are highly socially and professionally connected, however.
That my sibling or her professionalism afforded these connections isn’t noteworthy. That she’s one for whom both connecting and professionalism are ultra high priorities—while LinkedIn resides terribly outside her consciousness all the while—is.
(I have wondered if women, who can be highly relational, find less utility in platforms like LinkedIn to make important connections.)
Anymore than a shy soul is cured by a dating site. Social media can’t stand in for warm-blooded powerful relationships. There’s no proxy for earned intimacy. And that’s the glue that keeps people close and gives rise to stakes in their affairs.
LinkedIn rewards convention. You succeed by being average and showing up in a search. If you off-ramp for any reason as do many women, caregivers, disproportionate minorities, 2nd acts, and career changers—or frankly somebody who decided to ski continuously for 6 months in 2009, or explore textiles in Turkey for 3 in 2007, LinkedIn doesn’t mediate your journey. It raises more questions than it answers, obscures your story more than reveals it, and won’t present differentiating nuance even as well as a conventional paper resume or coffee. It means you lack incentive to use it: It can’t tell your story.
On the other hand if you never leave the track but switch lanes or change industries—fearlessness and versatility evidence—looking nonthematic is penalized. If LinkedIn was music it would be a classical genre. But the professional world is— like life itself—jazz: Rough, beautiful, improvisational and jagged. LinkedIn penalizes unconventional careerists with scrappy creative periods of non-compensated work, parenting, or anything other than recognizably linear and continuous treks along regular courses. The penalty manifests as a discount of your real narrative which can be both irregular and compelling–if it gets a real hearing.
LinkedIn is safe. It’s stainless steel. It’s sure to disturb nothing and offend nobody and too little gets revealed or passed on, but your name, a nice conference, your company’s business and a terribly safe post you referenced on a noncontroversial topic like the downside of show-rooming.
LinkedIn is a 2nd rate resume dump, of which there’s no shortage. Maybe it’s good for recruiters—which would work if most LinkedIn users were recruiters. And “2nd rate” is right, as any viable job seeker doing thoughtful targeted hunting is doing so with hot, strategic, personal introductions, and a current tailored narrative vs. the generic profiles on LinkedIn.
Talent today is a commodity. I don’t need another platform to list commodities. I need a route to something special. In the algorithmic be-average space that is LinkedIn, it’s not in the offer. Indeed, it’s not even the point.
Many came to LinkedIn because they were pulled. A warm-blooded relation invited them. Others insured against the party train leaving the station without their own seat to glory. Still others joined to check a box somewhere.
There’s a sea of abandoned social media accounts. However, abandoned LinkedIn accounts appear the most ironic: A bunch are of the most professionally connected.
16:01:
“My professional experiences…If you read who I was in LinkedIn and you never met me, never saw my photo, never shook my hand, never got a fist pump, never had me poke you in the side…never saw my smile… it [LinkedIn] defines me in a certain way—it’s a part of me…[but it’s not who I am].”
15:17:
“Google algorithms should not define me. That should not be the starting point for somebody to get to know you… I don’t buy that. I don’t want that.”
At best LinkedIn is a green rolodex. The funnest parts are where you actually connect with others: Discussions and active groups, however rarely, that manage to go real. It’s where people slip up and say what they really think or feel. And that’s what can make you care about their profile, not the other way around. Outside those moments and human revelations, I precisely don’t feel “linked” to a thing.
back-of-napkin:
• Text = alcohol/solvent delivery vehicle; citations = active ingredient. (Text was tool to lift citation findings from research/intellectual province into conscious pop working managerial province. Possibly interesting exercise is comparison of citation authority/frequency in Lean In with that of other business texts: The citation count alone exceeds the number of books read by many.)
• Book is parlay of Sandberg’s privileged stage into broadly held (unprivileged) permission slip to expand/redefine polite business conversation.
• Modern professionals/firms uninformed by research, enterprise with the attendant risks.
As Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse teaches us, they clearly have them. It’s hard out here for a duke. This is a glorious dramatization (and not just for the dashing Britain-meets-Harlem jazz scenes) and American and British clash of adventures of famed duo, Jeeves and Wooster. Entertainingly here: Inheritances and revocations; start-ups and austerity; novelists and chicken farms; deathbeds and reverses; boarding houses and Stuyvesant flats; pinstripes and pajamas; pay-to-play and beat police; and the inimitably curative and world’s finest manservant.
Here are some fixes I offer for pricey B-school forays. ( The problem is widely reported. Widely. No really: Widely.)
Shorter: B-schools do as you say, and not as you do.
While preparing this post I learned of the following by a B-school. I was surprised at the circled part for its candor and deviance from how admissions directors talk at an outreach level. Worst case, they’re filling seats. Best case, it’s a shift.
What Amazon can’t sell me: In a picture, these. These are books I bought at a brick and mortar. I wasn’t looking for them. Amazon can’t sell them to me because its algorithm doesn’t know I want them and can’t learn it. I didn’t know either until I saw them in a store. Every one excites me.
Each was the only copy. None were on sale, promoted in the store or faced out. 7 are hardcovers. Every one is written by or is about a tier 1 leader or avant garde member in his or her craft or field, including investing, elite 20th century English comedy, Johns Hopkins chemistry, global business communications, Harvard Medical School molecular genetics, world-record-setting American music production, corporate culture anthropology, jazz, and beyond. Every author (and by extension publisher) compellingly valued this content over volume.
For comparison, the book chain said global best seller 50 Shades of Grey was ranked 18th in sales a week ago. It’s above 100 today. Regenesis which I bought is ranked 50,519th. Others above are surely ranked worse as Regenesis got both popular and unpopular press.
As physical books recede—and there’s a fair argument it was big chains that killed off indy stores where literature thrived to start—the above list will mostly vanish. There won’t be a route to them. Those who found them worth writing and publishing will fall too beyond any algorithm that tells the world not simply what literature costs and who likes it (as if it matters in discovery) but worse: What literature exists. The thing about vanishing is when it happens, the stuff that gets gone is gone so well you don’t detect it was an option. For the record, this picture, this tapestry of unique content, is the option readers like me lose in an Amazon world.
The discovery vector–massive content collisions per unit time—that is the physical bookstore, differs meaningfully from incestuous online retailer algorithms. Algorithms trade in precedent. PCR style. Not discovery. But like a math proof by deduction, under algorithms there are fewer starting points to real discovery. And none seem superior to a simple efficient 45 minute brick and mortar stroll past 10,000 to 2 million books that led me to the content above. That’s a search engine.
Related news updates:
This Japanese government promotional video is a compelling narrative on national culture and enterprise. It captures Japanese endeavor in and vision for sustainability, science, development and tourism.
To be sure, it’s not the first time the GE retired chairman and CEO has missed the glaringly obvious (and I’ll set down that this lovely title intentionally borrows from Forbes’ Jenna Goudreau’s for her article on Welch and women in business, “Why Jack Welch Is Spectacularly Stupid When It Comes To Women“).
Indulgence declared, 5 points:
(1) Conservative New York Times op-ed columnist, David Brooks, published the article, The Real Romney, reproduced below in full.
The Real Romney
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: August 27, 2012
The purpose of the Republican convention is to introduce America to the real Mitt Romney. Fortunately, I have spent hours researching this subject. I can provide you with the definitive biography and a unique look into the Byronic soul of the Republican nominee:
Mitt Romney was born on March 12, 1947, in Ohio, Florida, Michigan, Virginia and several other swing states. He emerged, hair first, believing in America, and especially its national parks. He was given the name Mitt, after the Roman god of mutual funds, and launched into the world with the lofty expectation that he would someday become the Arrow shirt man.
Romney was a precocious and gifted child. He uttered his first words (“I like to fire people”) at age 14 months, made his first gaffe at 15 months and purchased his first nursery school at 24 months. The school, highly leveraged, went under, but Romney made 24 million Jujubes on the deal.
Mitt grew up in a modest family. His father had an auto body shop called the American Motors Corporation, and his mother owned a small piece of land, Brazil. He had several boyhood friends, many of whom owned Nascar franchises, and excelled at school, where his fourth-grade project, “Inspiring Actuaries I Have Known,” was widely admired.
The Romneys had a special family tradition. The most cherished member got to spend road trips on the roof of the car. Mitt spent many happy hours up there, applying face lotion to combat windburn.
The teenage years were more turbulent. He was sent to a private school, where he was saddened to find there are people in America who summer where they winter. He developed a lifelong concern for the second homeless, and organized bake sales with proceeds going to the moderately rich.
Some people say he retreated into himself during these years. He had a pet rock, which ran away from home because it was starved of affection. He bought a mood ring, but it remained permanently transparent. His ability to turn wine into water detracted from his popularity at parties.
There was, frankly, a period of wandering. After hearing Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” Romney decided to leave Mormonism and become Amish. He left the Amish faith because of its ban on hair product, and bounced around before settling back in college. There, he majored in music, rendering Mozart’s entire oeuvre in PowerPoint.
His love affair with Ann Davies, the most impressive part of his life, restored his equilibrium. Always respectful, Mitt and Ann decided to elope with their parents. They went on a trip to Israel, where they tried and failed to introduce the concept of reticence. Romney also went on a mission to France. He spent two years knocking on doors, failing to win a single convert. This was a feat he would replicate during his 2008 presidential bid.
After his mission, he attended Harvard, studying business, law, classics and philosophy, though intellectually his first love was always tax avoidance. After Harvard, he took his jawline to Bain Consulting, a firm with very smart people with excessive personal hygiene. While at Bain, he helped rescue many outstanding companies, like Pan Am, Eastern Airlines, Atari and DeLorean.
Romney was extremely detail oriented in his business life. He once canceled a corporate retreat at which Abba had been hired to play, saying he found the band’s music “too angry.”
Romney is also a passionately devoted family man. After streamlining his wife’s pregnancies down to six months each, Mitt helped Ann raise five perfect sons — Bip, Chip, Rip, Skip and Dip — who married identically tanned wives. Some have said that Romney’s lifestyle is overly privileged, pointing to the fact that he has an elevator for his cars in the garage of his San Diego home. This is not entirely fair. Romney owns many homes without garage elevators and the cars have to take the stairs.
After a successful stint at Bain, Romney was lured away to run the Winter Olympics, the second most Caucasian institution on earth, after the G.O.P. He then decided to run for governor of Massachusetts. His campaign slogan, “Vote Romney: More Impressive Than You’ll Ever Be,” was not a hit, but Romney won the race anyway on an environmental platform, promising to make the state safe for steeplechase.
After his governorship, Romney suffered through a midlife crisis, during which he became a social conservative. This prepared the way for his presidential run. He barely won the 2012 Republican primaries after a grueling nine-month campaign, running unopposed. At the convention, where his Secret Service nickname is Mannequin, Romney will talk about his real-life record: successful business leader, superb family man, effective governor, devoted community leader and prudent decision-maker. If elected, he promises to bring all Americans together and make them feel inferior.
Joe Nocera is off today.
(2) Jack Welch tweeted:
And a musician shall lead them.
It wasn’t supposed to happen. Adam Steltzner, that is, becoming a rocket scientist. The bass guitarist and rocker turned physicist was told he wouldn’t amount to anything. Now, as leader of JPL’s most daring and successful excursion to Mars in Curiosity, he’s a part of unmanned space exploratory history.
Value wrapped in unconventional packages isn’t always first recognized. But ultimately it’s the most interesting.
Zen warrior trial attorney, James Potts II
Carnegie Hall performing gospel singer and JP Morgan Managing Director Carla Harris
The below New England Journal of Medicine article gives succinct discussion and a summary graphic (reproduced below) of the recent SCOTUS vote upholding the Affordable Care Act, the most substantial finance legislation of a lifetime. The NEJM’s relatively circumscribed circulation means summaries like this aren’t widely read. Available for free by NEJM, it’s posted here for convenience to NEJM nonsubscribers.
Renée M. Landers, J.D.
July 2, 2012 (10.1056/NEJMp1206847)
The Supreme Court decision on June 28, 2012, in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius 1 upholding nearly all of the Affordable Care Act (ACA)2 marked the dénouement of a drama that began in March 2010, when President Barack Obama signed the law. In three lengthy, interconnected opinions, members of the Court sent the contentious debate about the ACA’s expansion of health insurance coverage from the courts back to the political process, while setting out competing philosophies on the reach of federal power and the Court’s role in policing constitutional limits on federal action. Although the decision resolves legal doubt about the challenged provisions’ constitutionality, its impact on access to health insurance and health care, state Medicaid programs, the 2012 elections, and the legal status of future congressional efforts to regulate private conduct and control states’ use of federal funds will become clear only “in the fullness of time.”1
Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinion — operating in combination with the opinion written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg or the joint opinion from Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito, depending on the issue — reflects the outcome, if not the reasoning, on all the issues (see graphic, available with the full text of this article at NEJM.org).
First, the Court determined that the penalty for failure to comply with the individual mandate to obtain health insurance coverage was not a “tax” for purposes of the Anti-Injunction Act, so review of the provision’s constitutionality need not be delayed. Only on this issue did the Court reach a unanimous result, and different justices arrived there by different routes.
Second, the Court ruled that the ACA’s minimum coverage or individual mandate provision exceeds Congress’s powers under the Commerce Clause but upheld it as a valid exercise of Congress’s power to tax. Roberts noted that “Congress has never attempted to rely on [the commerce] power to compel individuals not engaged in commerce to purchase an unwanted product.” He characterized the Court’s precedents as distinguishing between “activity” which Congress could regulate and “inactivity” which the commerce power does not reach. Because of this conclusion, Roberts and the four justices on the joint opinion also concluded that the provision was not valid under the constitutional clause permitting Congress to take actions deemed “necessary and proper” for exercising its enumerated powers.
Next, Roberts considered whether the mandate was a valid exercise of the federal taxing power. Relying on precedents requiring the Court to give a statute an interpretation that preserves its validity, if one is possible, Roberts concluded that the mandate could reasonably be read as “establishing a condition — not owning health insurance — that triggers a tax — the required payment to the [Internal Revenue Service].” That Congress had labeled the payment a “penalty” rather than a “tax” was not determinative, he concluded, of whether it could be viewed as a tax for constitutional purposes. Rejecting the arguments of the joint opinion, he stated that Congress’s failure to use “magic words or labels” would not invalidate otherwise constitutional taxes and that unlike a penalty that punishes unlawful conduct, the payment was a tax that someone chooses to pay rather than buy health insurance. Ginsburg, who, along with Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan, would have upheld the mandate under the Commerce Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause, joined the part of Roberts’s opinion upholding it as a valid exercise of the taxing power.
Third, in a surprising alignment, Breyer and Kagan joined Roberts and the four justices on the joint opinion to rule that Congress could not condition the federal Medicaid funds that states currently receive on their agreement to participate in the ACA’s Medicaid expansion. Despite the principle that under its power to spend for the “general welfare” Congress may attach conditions to federal funds provided to the states, the seven justices concluded that by tying not only new money but also existing Medicaid payments to participation in the expansion, the policy crossed the line from encouragement to coercion, violating the 10th Amendment. Roberts further argued that the expansion made Medicaid “no longer a program to meet the health care needs of the neediest among us but an element of a national plan to provide universal health insurance coverage.” He concluded that the states had not agreed to, nor could have anticipated, such a drastic change in the Medicaid program.
Finally, regarding whether the remaining provisions should survive overruling of one provision, Roberts and the four justices on the Ginsburg opinion voted to sustain the rest of the law, reasoning that Congress would not have wanted the entire statute to fall because of a constitutional problem with the Medicaid provision.
The Court’s decision settles doubt about the ACA’s constitutionality and clears the path for implementation and innovations in care delivery and cost control. Regarding the Medicaid expansion, the decision creates uncertainty. With weakened incentives for participating in the expansion, states may opt out for ideological or financial reasons. In addition, under the ACA, some Medicaid populations are not eligible for federal subsidies to obtain health insurance on the exchanges. As the Court noted, Congress was relying on the Medicaid expansion to help reduce the numbers of uninsured Americans. Without all states participating, the ACA will fall short of its goals.
No Supreme Court decision can resolve political uncertainty about the ACA’s long-term viability. The outcome of the 2012 federal elections may determine the fate of health care reform. State leaders who oppose the ACA may decide to wait and see what the election portends.
Roberts introduced his opinion with a disquisition on “both the limits of federal power, and [the Court’s] own limited role in policing these boundaries.” Noting the broad powers that the Constitution grants the federal government for regulating commerce and accomplishing through taxation and spending what it cannot regulate directly, he stated that the Necessary and Proper Clause gives Congress “great latitude in exercising its powers.” Roberts explained this “permissive reading of these powers” as justified by a “general reticence to invalidate the acts of the Nation’s elected leaders.” The Court, he stated, “possesses neither the expertise nor the prerogative to make policy judgments,” but it could not abdicate its responsibility “to enforce the limits on federal power by striking down acts of Congress that transgress those limits.”
Despite this expression of judicial modesty, Roberts’s opinion could supply a rationale for future limitations on Congress’s regulatory ability. Ginsburg’s dissent criticized his “crabbed reading of the Commerce Clause” as evoking “the era in which the Court routinely thwarted Congress’s efforts to regulate the national economy in the interest of those who labor to sustain it.” Arguing for judicial deference to reasonable congressional regulatory judgments, she wrote that Roberts’s limited reading “should not have staying power.”
Similarly, by characterizing the Medicaid expansion as a “shift in kind, not merely degree” and outlining possible criteria for invalidating federal spending conditions as unconstitutionally coercive, the Roberts opinion could give states more leverage in resisting federal standards accompanying receipt of federal funds. Ginsburg argues that these judgments fall outside the judiciary’s competency. Only future cases will indicate whether the analysis in the ACA case marks a shift in the Supreme Court’s Commerce Clause and 10th Amendment doctrines or was a rationale specific to this case.
Disclosure forms provided by the author are available with the full text of this article at NEJM.org.
This article was published on July 2, 2012, at NEJM.org.
business commentary 