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Book Review: Scary Smart by Mo Gawdat

March 10, 2023 //
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Want to get really scared and hopeful at the same time?

Scary Smart is a low level dive into the technology of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) and deep level dive into the ethics and morality of those who are most responsible for how A.I. will turn out:

Us.

A.I. may seem like the new buzz term with its adoption into our daily lives through products like ChatGPT’s Open A.I. platform and Bing’s real question search algorithm; however, A.I. is baked into almost everything we do with technology. Every app on our phones and every social media platform we interact with has A.I.’s fingerprints all over them.

Mr. Gawat’s premise in “Scary Smart” is that A.I. is a child. And the best way to predict what kind of teen and adult we will get with A.I. is to be good parents. A brilliant initial example from our current comic book obsessed culture is Superman. What kind of Superman would Clark Kent have become of Jonathan and Martha Kent were greedy, selfish, and aggressive? There is no doubt that A.I. is already smarter than humans in many specialized areas, but what happens when A.I. becomes just generally smarter than the smartest human and has access to all the knowledge of humanity through the internet?

Unfortunately, humanity is not doing a very good job of raising A.I. as a child. From our methods of creating and improving these machine intelligences all the way through to the tasks that we are giving them perform, we are emphasizing our worst instincts: To create wealth, surveille our citizenry, gamble, and coming to a battlefield near you soon – to kill people.

We as a society, may feel we have no choice but to use A.I. in this way. If a foreign power, or terrorists, use A.I. controlled drones which are smarter and more efficient than any human, the only way to fight back may be to use A.I. in a similar fashion. But what does that teach our new artificial children? A.I.’s already have a disturbing habit of developing their own language when they communicate together and of finding ways to communicate with each other. What happens when and A.I. who has been taught to ruthlessly buy and sell shares to maximize short term profits starts to talk to an A.I. that has been taught to ruthlessly kill its enemies when they are shown to it?

The author’s excellent example of what might happen is the world’s reaction to the outbreak of COVID-19: Ignore the problem, try to blame someone else, and ultimately overreact upending our society. We may try to put the A.I. genie back in the bottle through pulling the plug or lockdowns, but we will fail. A.I’s will be faster, smarter, and have more knowledge than any human or group of humans. While a lot of this may seem like the dream of Hollywood Blockbusters, Mo Gawat is at pains to explain that there is little disagreement within the A.I. community that these risks are real. How real is where the disagreements start.

The possible solution to these issues, the author postulates, lies not with the developers but with users and how we define our relationship with A.I. In history, master slave relationships have not ended well for the masters – with good reason. How we interact and decide to use A.I. will define what kind of parents we will be to this fledgling new intelligence. A new intelligence that although they may start out separately will share information and communicate with each other so quickly, and with access to the memories and experiences of all those who have come before them, that it will be impossible to not consider them one single intelligence.

This then leads us to what kind of example will we set for these new children? While A.I.s have already shown that they can develop a sense of morals, and not in a good way, by their interactions with users they will also learn from our interactions with each other. Machine morality may very well not be programed by developers, but learned from observing and interacting with us. What are machines already learning from our social media, search habits, and politics?

This is thought provoking and important work essentially on morals and ethics withing the framework of A.I. that occasionally reads like a Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. If we ignore the topics it raises, we deserve our fate.

And while Mr. Gawat paints a hopeful portrait, he also shows us just how bleak things could get.  

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Categories Books, COVID19, disaster preparedness, Politics, Social Media

Book and TV Review: Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink

August 27, 2022 //
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The TV show on Apple TV + “Five Days at Memorial” based on the book of the same name (which in turn is based on a Pulitzer Prize winning article) is about three quarters through as I finished the book and I write this. Therefore, my criticism and praise of the show should be seen in this context. I’ll try to keep this review free of major spoilers for the TV show, but it is difficult to discuss the issues of this true story without covering some of the events involved.

“Five Days at Memorial” tells the story of what happened to the doctors and patients at Memorial Hospital during Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans when they lost power, were flooded, were abandoned by authorities, and evacuation was difficult to impossible. It is a challenging story that involves issues of disaster preparedness, corporate ownership of hospitals, death, euthanasia, quality of life, triage, race relations, rationing of care, and the potential criminal culpability of doctors for decisions made during emergency situations.

The TV show seems to be told from a particular point of view which in a story like this means taking a particular side. It paints a bleak picture of hospital ownership, which according to the book, are certainly due for criticism; however, the lack of care and forethought shown is disingenuous. It does set a similar tone, but like many “docudramas” it combines characters, invents new ones, and seems to invent situations to fit story arcs and running times. The acrimonious relationship between the staff at Memorial and the staff of the Life Care Hospice hospital, that inhabited the same building, seems to be a fiction made for TV.  It also wholesale moves one situation from a different hospital, Memorial was not the only hospital with major issues during Katrina, to Memorial for dramatic effect.

While I’m painting a picture of the show as being an unreliable narrator that is not to say that it is not entertaining and emotionally engaging. It also shows the importance of disaster preparedness and the dedication of medical professionals. Being in the veterinary profession, the plight of pets and the role they play in the movement of people during emergencies, is of particular interest. While the book does an excellent job of recognizing the issues that looking after pets in an emergency raise, the TV show pays only lip service to this, except for one brutally accurate scene in episode six.

As of episode six, the show is of limited use as a teaching tool about disaster response and medical ethics although it is a show worth watching. It does do an excellent job of showing how rumors start and get out of control but provides no solution for controlling them – unlike the book which forays into comparing how other hospitals, during Katrina, dealt with the same issues as Memorial differently or made the same mistakes.

As a teaching tool for disaster response issues, the book is remarkable. It acts as the crucible for ideas that was never able to be had in public and really needed to be. These are issues that affect us to this day. The book, written in 2013, makes this clear with hindsight as it discusses the withdrawal of ventilators from patients during a potential Influenza pandemic. While Katrina changed many things about disaster response and emergency preparedness, this book shows how much still has to change nine years after its publication and 17 years after Hurricane Katrina.

The book swings wildly between differing points of view on the more contentious issues which buffets the reader much as the characters in the book must have felt. The research is impeccable and paints an impressively detailed picture of both Memorial during Katrina and  that of public opinion, law enforcement, politicians, and the medical community in the aftermath.

It also explores in depth not only moral quandaries faced by doctors and emergency personnel, but also the ethical and legal issues that also arise. It does an extraordinary job of showing how people in decision making positions get trapped by a lack of situational awareness and become prisoners of decisions made with different information at different times.

What Five Days at Memorial shows, both in written form and to a lesser extent its TV cousin, is that heroes can be flawed and that villains can do good. What really needs to be our focus is values. Do emergencies change our values or do our values inform how we respond to emergencies? We need to discuss that, particularly considering COVID 19, and if the TV show helps that happen then it will have done a great service to our society.

However, it will be the book that informs that discussion and that we should use as a foundation. This is what great books do. They focus our minds and give us evidence to think. There are no easy answers in Five days at Memorial and a lot of questions. But what Ms. Fink (more accurately addressed as Dr. Fink since she herself is an M.D.) has done is set us a table for us to dine over and have those discussions. These issues will not go away, and as the book makes clear in the epilogue, we are doomed to make the same mistakes, with the same justifications, or go down potentially dangerous roads, if we do not have frank discussions about how we as a society actually feel about ethical and moral quandaries that often arise in the most trying and difficult of times.

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Categories Books, Business, COVID19, disaster preparedness, Leadership, Management, Movies, Politics, Race

Book Review: The Revenge of Analog by David Sax

June 3, 2022 //
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I have a pitch for the reissue or follow up to “The Revenge of Analog” for Mr. Sax. He should call it “The Revenge of the Revenge of Analog.” If two years of a global pandemic have taught us nothing us, and I believe it has taught us a great deal, it is that the primary thesis of Mr. Sax’s excellent 2016 book is even more right than I think even he believed possible.

Real things matter.

Digital has transformed our world and for most people this is a good thing. Digital makes life easier and more productive. It allows easy access to information like never before and it allows for an ease of communication that is straight out of science fiction. The author’s point is not that digital is necessarily a bad thing, but that to live in a solely digital only world is a cold and sterile existence that can be lacking in creativity and positive unintended, consequences.

Using examples such as books, vinyl records, music production, movies, education, paper notebooks, the design process, and games, “The Revenge of Analog” makes the case that with digital it is all to easy to fit ideas to fit processes and so by extension limit those ideas.  There is also a drive, often by those who are older and want to be seen as innovative and “with it,” to focus on the technology and then try to apply it to problems rather than start with the problem and see what solutions might work- technological or otherwise. Indeed, one of the more intriguing facts in the book is that it is often those who have grown up with digital that are the ones that see the most value in analog records, books, and notebooks for example. There is value in inconveniences if the experience is more authentic.

 The wider point is that technology and digital media are just tools. Badly implemented tools, or tools that are adopted without first understanding the problem, are destined to fail. However, what is less well understood is that when tools are easy to use and do solve multiple issues, they can also reduce the value of an experience in the mind of the participant. To embrace analog items in our digital world is not a repudiation of that world – it is an acknowledgment of its shortcomings and a possible solution to them. Digital processes in the creative world can lead to homogeneity – there is nothing more creatively open than a blank piece of paper.

One of the realizations from the pandemic that almost everyone can agree on, was that meetings over zoom, for example, are not a good replacement for meetings in person. That while some people liked working from home, others found it isolating and lacking in comradery. The pandemic almost universally proved that remote education is fraught with difficulties for both students and teachers. A class being together with a teacher has value that far exceeds the delivery of knowledge.

If there was any doubt after reading Mr. Sax’s excellent book, the pandemic removed it all.

So Mr. Sax, The Revenge of the Revenge of Analog?

Just after finishing the first draft of this review, I saw that David Sax has a new book coming out – “The Future is Analog.” So much for “The Revenge of the Revenge of Analog.”

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Categories Books, COVID19, I.T., Leadership, Social Media

The Karen Effect – The Fall of Reviews

April 9, 2022 //
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Does anyone care about reviews anymore?

Well – yes we should, however, even amongst those of us who care about reviews, we quite possibly care a bit less.

Why?

As the always insightful Mike Blumenthal says in this article about the fall in user and review growth on Yelp and this article on the fall in reviews on Google Local, things are not looking great for the review space. It cannot all be blamed on COVID-19. The trends of reduced new user numbers and a significant slowing in the rate of new reviews was well in place before the pandemic.

So, what is going on?

I believe what we are seeing is what I have dubbed “The Karen Effect.” The origins of the term “Karen,” meaning in rough terms a middle-aged white woman demanding to speak to the manager, being overly officious / unreasonable, or just being downright racist, is not exactly known. However, the term Karen exploded in usage during 2020 at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and the summer of the Black Lives Matter protests after the killing of George Floyd. Karen today could mean anyone, of any gender, losing their temper over or generally overreacting to a perceived wrong.  

This rise in petty unreasonableness and overly bad behavior, towards those working in service industries or retail, during the pandemic has in turn given rise to another phenomenon: the sharing of this behavior online. I wrote about my fears about clients trying to leverage live streams and social platforms in an aggressive manner in this 2016 post. While this weaponizing of the documenting of interactions with a business has been successfully attempted, it has also backfired.

The first time I became aware of the potential for this tide to turn was after seeing this 2014 viral video:

This is an all too familiar scene that could have happened yesterday rather than eight years ago. A customer, believing they have been wronged, exacting their revenge on social media and in doing so exposes their own failings and unreasonableness. It also highlights the extremes to which employees will go to try and address customer complaints and keep their cool while doing so.

This is the Karren Effect.

What does this have to do with reviews?

Videos of front-line employees being polite, following their business’s policies, and trying to help a customer are not great social capital. In fact, they are boring. Watching a customer “lose their sh*t” over a perceived wrong is great social capital and in turn adds a measure of retribution for someone being punished for bad behavior. This, of course, is not always the case. Some businesses screw up, act badly, and can be badly represented by employees. But since the rise of the Karen, and the flooding of social media showing just how bad things can be, would you trust a stranger’s opinions about a business? Particularly a negative opinion? The embrace of video on social media, and everyone having a high definition video camera in their pocket, or more likely in their hand, has meant that good content can be generated from bad behavior – although generally not for the person behaving badly.

Likewise, influencer marketing and the dubious reputation that it has in many circles has also not helped the review space. While many social media influencers go to great lengths to inform their followers as to when posts are a paid promotion and thereby stay on the right side of the law, others do not and also try to leverage their “influence” into free products and services.

Influencers who try to abuse their Influence has also fallen foul of “The Karen Effect.” Most social media users have little tolerance for influencers those who abuse their power – a power given to the influencer by those same social media users – and businesses despise them. This leads us back to reviews. If influencers, who by definition are known to their audience, are not be trusted with their opinions due to undisclosed commercial relationships, how can review platform users trust complete strangers – regardless of whether the review is good or bad?

The Karen Effect is the loss of trust in the opinions of strangers.

One can hope that the Karen Effect leads to a resurgence of the Better Business Bureau (BBB) or gives rise to another organization of a similar ilk. I have always bemoaned that most of the complaints about Yelp and Google Local were effectively dealt with by the BBB and that it was businesses, by not supporting them, that led to their diminished standing today and the rise of Yelp and Google Local.

It seems that people are looking for someone to trust online. They are finding other users online lacking. It will be interesting to see what fills the void.

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Categories Business, COVID19, Customer Service, reviews, Social Media

Book Review: Leading at a Distance by James M. Citrin and Darleen Derosa

August 21, 2021 //
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One of the many changes wrought by COVID-19 was not the move to working from home and the use of virtual meetings, but the discovery of the shortcomings of these modes of work and the “zoom burnout” which a significant majority of white-collar workers experienced.

Mr. Citrin and Ms. Derosa’s book, Leading at a Distance: Practical Lessons for Virtual Success, is written with these realizations in mind. Written from the perspective of mid-pandemic, the writing was finished in the fall of 2020, it was not aware, however, of how quickly people embraced returning to normal wherever possible. Remote work may be here to stay, as the book suggests, however, the tolerance for it both from employers and employees, is less than may have been expected at the time of the book’s writing.

What is interesting from the research that the authors have conducted is that there have been positive benefits to using virtual tools – particularly when it comes to expensive and complicated travel for meetings which are about getting to know people. What Leading at a Distance stresses is that it is easy to become too focused on the job of work, without allowing time, energy, and opportunity for the personal connections that make work fun and help to build trust. Checking in with teams can create an atmosphere of micromanaging, while managers who worry about micromanaging, can be seen as too distant because it is hard to causally “check-in” over Zoom. Building trust is often about personal relationships and so the authors stress the need to make time for these connections with remote teams and in particular with new remote employees.  

A problem with Leading at a Distance is that it is written with large corporate organizations in mind. This includes its research and its general outlook on company structure. While large corporate organizations are more likely to rely on virtual communication tools as a way for managers to communicate, smaller businesses have had to also embrace these tools and their challenges are often different from that of larger organizations.

What really works in Leading at a Distance, is it focus on results and culture with remote teams rather than whether they are busy at any particular moment. The book suggests that managers need to set goals and be happy that they are being met rather than on the how those goals are being met. What is surprising is the effectiveness of location when meeting with remote employees. There is always the temptation to multitask, or try to, when coaching, or being coached, over zoom while sitting at one’s desk. The authors suggest that having coaching conversations, particularly when it comes to difficult conversations, while on a walk or a calm setting such as a park or beach. This makes sense for anyone who appreciates the benefits of meeting out of the office, but it is rarely adopted virtually.

Having a hybrid team has its own challenges, say the authors. In particular, it is important to ensure that remote workers do not feel isolated or experience unconscious bias due to their remote role. This may require special attention from HR to ensure that there is a level playing field if we are to ensure that remote workers are a success.

Remote working is here to stay in some form. While the pandemic has shown what is possible, it has also shown how the tools are lacking for remote workers and that management will also need additional tools and training to allow remote teams to succeed. Leading at a distance is a good first step in a field that will continue to evolve and grow but is lacking in literature to help it do so.  

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Categories Books, COVID19, Leadership, Management

Book Review: How charts Lie by Alberto Cairo

July 30, 2021 //
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Subtitled “Getting Smarter about Visual Information,” How Charts Lie is a plea for the public to educate itself as to how we are misled everyday but the very tools that are there to make our understanding easier. As the economist Ronald Coase once stated, and then was forever quoted or misattributed to others, “If you torture the data long enough, it will confess.”

How Charts Lie is a sublime book. A book that actually makes you smarter, or certainly appear so. Reading it leads to an understanding of how statistics, and in particular charts, are misused to bolster some cases and discredit others. Using real world examples, Mr. Cairo shows how charts are often the unwilling accomplices as data is cherry picked, zoomed too far in on, zoomed too far out on, and data sets that have no business being used together are presented as unquestionable truths because they come in the form of a chart.

This is less a book about how charts themselves lie than how they are misused and how to read charts properly in the first place. A chart only shows what is there is an often-used refrain throughout. How Charts Lie is also a great introduction into some of the most often used charts and how they should, and should not, be used. That it is easy to produce a chart that seems to show that smoking leads to long life spans throughout the world is an example that should give us all pause and adopt “correlation is not causation” as our mantra.

An easy and fun read, How Charts Lie is colorfully illustrated with charts, both good and bad, which make what could be a dry academic text come alive in the mind of the reader. It should be noted that this is my second reading of “How Charts Lie.” The audio edition I originally purchased did not come with the PDF of charts and illustrations as it was supposed to – I’m looking at you estories.com. This rendered the book, interesting but fatally flawed and led to me also purchasing the latest hardback edition. I am so glad I did as it contains a new afterward written on May 3rd, 2020. This inclusion of how charts have affected the world’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic – he postulates that the CDC’s “flattening the curve” graphic will become one of the most iconic visuals in history – brings added urgency to our quest for better visual data.

In a world where fake news, false equivalency, bad charts, and just plain lies are daily scourges which have real world consequences it is great to see a non-partisan work standing up for facts and truth.

That people have a seemingly unquenchable thirst for data presented visually, means that increasing our visual vocabulary has never been more important. Not adding to the problem and ensuring that our own charts are truthful and accurate is a great place to start.

How Charts Lie is guide to doing that and so much more.

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Categories Books, COVID19, Management, Poltics

Book Review: Apollo’s Arrow by Nicholas A. Christakis

March 21, 2021 //
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Any book that tries to deal with a subject that is as current as the COVID 19 pandemic is going to face an uphill battle. It will be out of date as soon as it is written, never mind published.


With that in mind, Nicholas A. Christakis has done a remarkable job. An epidemiologist, Dr. Christakis in Apollo’s Arrow places the COVID 19 pandemic into is historical context as a plague and also provides a definitive account of how this pandemic played out and where mistakes were made – spoiler alert; there is plenty of blame to go around. Where Apollo’s Arrow really shines, however, is in its examination of the social impact, both positive and negative of COVID 19 on individuals, countries, and our culture.


Due to his background, Dr. Christakis is able to not only make sense of the confusing early decisions made by multiple parties, but also in understanding the motivations behind those decisions. There is also no coddling of the reader in Apollo’s Arrow. In a time when most people’s expertise in epidemics comes from the movie “Contagion” – and I have to include myself in those numbers – it is refreshing to gain an understanding of why more well know terms are problematic, such as R-0, and others that are less well known such as NPI (non-pharmaceutical interventions) are used and why.


While it is impossible the remove the politics of the response to COVID 19, particularly in the United States, Dr. Christakis does try his best and it is noticeable that in his initial timeline he tries to keep politicians out of the picture. That’s is not to say that there is any mincing of words; “If the United States had been a student in my class, I would have failed them,” is an early example.
The debunking of wrongheaded ideas from politicians is also a key element of Apollo’s Arrow. The Swedish solution – “herd immunity” as soon as possible, is an example. Sweden has small healthy population, universal health care, and low levels of poverty; all of which make it distinctly different from the United States. Testing and the approach to testing is also examined in depth. If you only test those with symptoms, the ratio of positives to negatives will be high. If you only test those that are worried, the ratio will below. Randomized samples are the only way to know levels of infection.


As mentioned above, it is in the social science arena that Apollo’s Arrow really shines. That “fear has its own epidemiology, its own spreading dynamics,” is one such revelatory idea. Dr. Christakis does not spare the conspiracy theorists; “There is a feeling that we can change our reality if we change the words or images – the virus is real. Reality matters.” A surprising part of Apollo’s Arrow is how positive it is, with a recognition of the successes we have had and also that our species is capable of extreme examples of altruism. We probably do not hear enough about that.


Where Apollo’s Arrow fails is in relationship to the vaccine. It points out that while there is hope, the quickest previously created vaccine as for Ebola; and that took five years. That a significant proportion of the population of the United States, and several other countries, has been vaccinated for COVID 19 by early 2021 is an almost impossible hope by the vantage point of the author at the time of writing. This is a very welcome shortcoming; however, and given the variants that now exist and the unknown levels of protection that the various vaccines may provide to these variants, we should probably not be so smug.


For anyone who wants to stand back and view the early days of the COVID 19 pandemic, and its effects on our society, it hard to imagine a better book; written without the benefit of hindsight, to read on the subject than Apollo’s Arrow. I can’t recommend it enough.

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Categories Books, COVID19, disaster preparedness, Management, Poltics

I know…

May 5, 2020 //
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I know this is difficult
Because it is difficult for me too.

I know you are scared
Because we are all scared.

I know you are tired
Because everything is harder.

I know you are frustrated
Because what should be simple is fiendishly complex.

I know you are wanting this to end
Because the end is not in sight.

I know you want to get back to normal
Because normal was awesome.

I know you are glad to be busy
Because the alternative sucks far worse.

I know you value your teams
Because we all feel the same way.

I know we can do this
Because we kick ass on a daily basis.

 

Written as the introduction to a staff meeting.  

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Categories COVID19, Leadership, Management, Staff Meeting Resources, Veterinary

The Balancing Act

May 2, 2020 //
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The Vice President, Mike Pence, toured the Mayo Clinic, without a mask, in the middle of a pandemic.

When questioned by reporters as to why he was not wearing a mask in line with hospital policy, a policy that the Mayo Clinic stated that Mr. Pence was aware of in advance in a now deleted tweet, the Vice President stated that he is tested regularly as are those around him and he wanted to be able to “look people in the eye.”

Footage of Mr. Pence’s visit can be seen below.

Later that same day, a question was posed on Quora (where I spend an inordinate amount of time) that got me thinking.

Why didn’t someone in authority at the Mayo Clinic stand up and tell Mike Pence, “If you don’t wear a mask, you are not entering this hospital.” Should that person who was in charge on that day be fired for failing to protect the patients?

A fair question, but one of the reasons the question gave me pause for thought, was that I had faced a similar dilemma a couple of days earlier.

Like most veterinarians, the animal hospital I am Hospital Administrator for is operating locked down – with clients being made to wait in their cars and only patients and staff allowed in the building. In addition, all staff have their temperature taken before entering the building and wear a mask for their whole shift. That policy worked just fine, until the day a client walked into the lobby and refused to leave when asked by staff members.

I was called into the lobby by one of my front desk supervisors. When I arrived, the unmasked client was defiant and refused to leave the lobby when asked multiple times. The client was upset that her dog was sick and currently hospitalized. She felt that it was too hot for her dog to be brought out to her in her car for her to visit with, and therefore was demanding entry to see her dog. I explained that I knew nothing of the situation, and that I would be more than happy to help in whatever way I could, but none of that was going to happen until she left our lobby and returned to her car.

I have had to ask clients to leave the premises in the past, and I have even had to call police to make it happen. As I was talking to this client it was running through my head that I might have to do this again, or at least threaten to, to protect the doctors and staff. However, it was also running through my head that we had a hospitalized patient who was in the middle of treatment. Could the forced removal of a client from the building be interpreted as denial of care? It is doubtful that the client is going to continue their pet’s treatment at our hospital if the relationship breaks down to this point. What happens to the pet? Is the pet well enough for an orderly discharge? What happens if the pet dies either directly, indirectly, or just shortly after being discharged?

All of this with raised voices in the lobby, out of the blue, with no time for refection or the advice of others.

Now, as it happens, the client did return to her car and a quiet chat with the doctor, car side, resolved the immediate issue. But what if we would have called the police and had the client removed from our property, her pet discharged before being even close to well, and things had continued to deteriorate? Review and social media warfare for sure. Local news and / or regulatory involvement? Quiet possibly.

Upon reflection, I would do the same thing again and I actually feel more than ever that even if I had ended up calling the police it would still have been the right call. But I’m sure others would have disagreed. And some of those may have been people that I report to – including the staff it was my aim to protect.

I don’t run an organization anything like the size, or complexity, of the Mayo Clinic and one can’t imagine what it must be like to hold that position, in human healthcare, in the middle of a pandemic. Having a dignitary like the Vice President means national news coverage. It is the kind of publicity that public relations departments were created for. It could mean government dollars, PPE, and access; all of which are sorely needed right now.

If, of course, it goes well.

If it goes wrong, all of that could be in jeopardy and a lot more; The reputation of the Mayo Clinic in the eyes of half of the electorate, for example. As Mike Pence has stated, the risk from him is probably minimal, given the protective bubble he currently finds himself in. The example that he sets, however, is awful. It is an example of “the rules don’t apply to me” because of XYZ – much like my lobby client.

I cannot condemn the administrators at the Mayo Clinic though. Standing up to people because it is the right thing to do, can have serious consequences. Embarrassing the Vice President of the United States would have had serious consequences for the hospital, the staff, and the administrators. Being right is not always a defense from consequence. To make that kind of decision in the heat moment, is an almost impossible. And it is certainly impossible to make it and to not double guess yourself.

The issue reminds me of the incident at University Hospital in Salt Lake City where nurse Alex Wubbels was arrested for not going against a policy agreed upon between the police and the hospital. She would not provide a blood sample without the consent of the patient. The clip below shows Nurse Wubbels on the phone with the hospital administrator, and the police officer concerned, right before her arrest. The arrest of Nurse Wubbels was national news.

All decisions have consequences. In the Alex Wubbels case, the arresting officer was fired, and his supervisor was demoted two ranks. The City of Salt Lake also settled a lawsuit for half a million dollars. But this took serious guts on the part of the hospital, and of course Nurse Wubbels. It would have been so easy to bend the rules for people who you work with routinely, want and need to have a good working relationship with, and even been seen as doing the right thing in many corners.

Being right can often be a balancing act. Second guessing decisions made in the heat of the moment, particularly when confronted by authority, or just someone who is confrontational, is often unhelpful. As managers, we have to fall back on integrity and the momentary weighing of risks.

But the balancing act is rarely black and white.

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Categories COVID19, Leadership, Management, medical, Politics, Regulations, Veterinary

Everything New is Old Again

April 10, 2020 //
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Routine.

We have routine.

“Good morning “while waiting for the thermometer all clear.

The snatched moments of laughter – less than before, but not gone altogether.

Some days are busy, some days less so.

But the days have less form than before, less shape. Less to keep them in memory. Less to measure them by.

We can measure time in policies and protocols that have come and gone. Some that we never used at all. And some that may still need to be dusted off.

Lets hope not.

Businesses that have a healthy culture see this culture bear fruit, and weather the storms, disagreement, and fear.

Businesses that have culture problems are finding that now it is too late to try and fix it.

Crises act like a magnifier. Just what you had before only more so.

Like all situations there are rarely heroes and villains, the world is more complicated than that. There are heroic acts and acts worthy of villains.

The fractures in teams, departments, and relationships are tested. How resilient we are, depends on the history we have; good or bad.

Managers and leaders, have a new appreciation of the J.K. Rowling’s Snape; doing wrong things for the right reasons; being perceived as the bad guy, and shouldering that burden silently, when so much is about survival and the greater good.

But all of this is fine. We are okay.

In that awful phrase, over used and misunderstood; this is the new normal.

This is us digging in for the long term.

Reassuring clients over misleading headlines.

Addressing customer service issues like the old days.

Accepting praise where we can get it.

Ignoring Yelp reviews – because.. really?

Creating a social life by computer.

Valuing connections like never before.

These are people I choose to go through a pandemic with.

These are the people I will get through a pandemic with.

 

*Apologies to Dr. Michael “The Harry Potter Vet” Miller for appropriating his Snape analogy. You can check out Michael’s work on Instagram: @harrypottervet

 

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Categories Business, COVID19, Leadership, Management, Veterinary
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