It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately – the object seemed incidental to this will to give one-self away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight from exactly what? These rooms blandly filled with excrement and meat? To what purpose? This was why they started us here so young: to give ourselves away before the age when the question why and to what grow real beaks and claws. It was kind, in a way. Modern German is better equipped for combining gerundives and prepositions than its mongrel cousin. The original sense of addiction involved being bound over, dedicated, either legally or spiritually. To devote one’s life, plunge in.
–Infinite Jest p.900
I too share your (and Sports Illustrated’s) interest in noticing and understanding gender inequity. Perhaps just as fascinating, though, are instances where no such inequity exists, or the inequity is entirely reasonable, and yet a story of girls having an unfair time compared to boys is told.
Now, I had never heard of Olivia Moultrie before reading the enjoyable xxxxxxxxx So, I freely concede that you may know how Olivia and her parents face backlash in ways male childhood prodigies don’t. But judging by merely the journalism itself, I saw no such inequity and I’m curious if you reached an alternate conclusion.
This is my bias.
If you want to create a high-performing anything, freedom needs to be built into the foundation. (Those who disagree have (a) hired poorly (b) can only ever hope for solid employees (SE) and (c) their businesses will die.)
Top-down management doesn’t work well in solving the biggest problems. It can minimize errors, it can get stuff done in the short-run, but it can never fully maximize employee ability. Which, considering employees are a company’s most valuable resource, is an outcome to avoid.
Furthermore, top-down management sucks innovation out of an organization. Innovation is the ONLY medicine when markets change. And markets will change. And if the organization doesn’t also change, ideally before the external shift occurs, the organization will die. Simple, but true.
Nervousness is merely an indication that on the other side of the current confrontation is a possibility of accomplishment.
Use the feeling wisely by sharpening focus and preparation to increase the probability of reaching that desired destination.
Regardless of outcome, opting into nervousness is perhaps life’s most rapid growth mechanism.
I left that talk yesterday more pessimistic than ever about healthcare.
To think that there I was listening to decorated, allegedly innovative healthcare thinkers and all I heard were hackneyed ideas that were long ago disproven; I expect this from casual entrants in the healthcare discussion, not people running the benefits for 1.2 million people.
The natural place to start is the Enron-level accounting that miraculously hails increased spending as saving. Just think how laughable it would be in any other context to go from spending $8 in year 1 to $10 in year 2 to $11 in year three and hail this as savings because the rate of increase was lower.
Thank you for having the integrity, unlike xxxxxxxxx, to say what we all knew: you have no idea how to save money in healthcare.
Sure, you didn’t say it directly, and in fact presented yourself as some sage on the topic, but your own numbers don’t lie – the numbers that show you presiding over a positive healthcare spending trend every single year. Only in the backward world of healthcare would anyone dare to present such obvious increases in spending as savings.
I would not give this gift to just any baby. I wouldn’t because you happen to be born into a world where people have turned “taking offense” into a sport.
If playing this perverse game, you could score points by being appalled that anyone would gift a book containing ideas some people find loathsome. Depending on your competitive spirit, you’d push back on my consideration that a girl (you) might have a higher affinity for a book written by a fellow girl (Ayn Rand). Or one could take the other side and complain that Ayn Rand isn’t girly enough. To which a third person would shriek that there’s no such thing as “girly.”
Final score: we all lose.
xxxxxxxxx,
“I’ll race you and win by throwing sweet potatoes on the side of the track.”
I’ve returned back to that joke several times since learning of your departure. To think that in your last moments at Brighton you were still able to laugh. To then think that basically everyone is going through something, and that only the best among us can keep smiling in spite the pain.
Yes, I saw you as the “best among us.” Never has my ambition been lower than the moment I first comprehended the insanity of your schedule. Up early. Up late. Meeting to meeting with no time to prepare, yet audiences always expecting that you would be “on.”
I still think, for the most part, our meetings (the deal call in particular) are pretty wasteful.
Don’t get me wrong, I love talking with the team, but I think it would be better for everyone if the discussion was operating at a higher level.
Currently, the majority of meeting time is “chit-chat” about deals on the table. Problem-solving and/or strategic thinking is almost totally absent.
Now, there is value in “network updates” (a.k.a. chit-chat), but I contend that bringing everyone together for 30min+ is not the best way to disseminate that information.
I personally think written updates would be preferable. Why?