The Network Garden - Mark Sigal's Blog

The Goodness of Artificial Milestones

A friend of mine in startup-land had a really important meeting with a prospective investor, partner, customer (read: any and/or all of the above).

Knowing the one-shot nature of these things, he literally moved mountains in just a few days, achieving a transformational milestone for his fledgling, early-stage company.

How Did He Do It?

He re-framed his story and made it more crisp.  He zeroed in on the experience that he's delivering to customers.

He took an earnest swag at better codifying the financial inputs and outputs of the specific type of business that he is pursuing (which, at the early stage is often the best that you can do).

What dazzled, though, was that he did a live demo that showed that this stuff actually works, including a couple of "AHA" moments that spotlighted how it would delight customers. 

As a result, he passed the sniff test with a choice mix of "steak" and "sizzle." 

Looked at from on high, the event of a big meeting had resulted in a whole bunch of things coming together simultaneously and equally important, very rapidly; all in the name of a great cause (securing a great and game-changing partnership).

That's a snapshot of the power of coalescing around an "artificial" milestone.

What's An Artificial Milestone?

An artificial milestone, unlike a schedule-driven milestone, uses an external event as the driver for an orchestrated sprint by the team to reach a specific plateau.

Because the milestone is driven towards a specific target audience within a fairly short time frame, it tends to force a team to simultaneously: re-think the definition of the situation; look at the problem holistically; and (equally important), functionally collapse the traditional boundaries between sales, marketing, development and operations (at least until the event milestone is reached).

In other words, it's a great driver of out-of-the-box thinking that is nonetheless highly targeted at achieving a specific outcome.

With that as a backdrop, consider leveraging the following artificial milestones, which are jam-packed with affirmational and transformational goodness potential:

• Meeting with a key strategic business prospect, like a sales channel, technology partner or a conduit into an existing installed customer base
• Pitching a specific customer (or type of customer) why they should embrace your product or service
• Presenting to an investor and showing them a compelling reason to invest
• Selling your vision/strategy to a "reach" hire (i.e., an "A" player whose signing on would signify that you have reached the next level)
• Doing a marketing or training seminar with your constituency base (customers, VARs, ISVs)
• Exhibiting or presenting at a trade show or other industry event

Action Item: Really ponder, then document, your answer to the following; If you fully concentrated your efforts in a relatively short sprint based upon one of the above-referenced artificial milestones, what might your outcome look like at the finish line?

Related Posts:

1. Innovation, Inevitability and Why R&D is So Hard
2. The Pitchman: Must Read for "Product Nuts"
3. Metrics of Success: You can't improve what you don't measure
4. The Paradox of Developing New Products and Services
5. Product Sanity Check: Vitamin, Aspirin or Penicillin?

Apple Quarterly Earnings Call: When No News is GREAT News

“We are extremely pleased to report the best non-holiday quarter revenue and earnings in our history,” said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple's CFO.

So much for the recession prompting consumers to stampede away from Apple’s "high-end" products, as the prognosticators predicted (and the stock market priced into Apple’s stock).

For a company that only surprises when it delivers less than good news, no news is GREAT news.

And Apple’s earnings (you can read the full detail dump HERE) don’t event reflect the $900M of quarterly non-GAAP revenue that fails to show up due to Apple’s highly conservative subscription-based accounting model, which, were it to be counted, would drop an incremental $460M to the adjusted net income line.

So what’s the moral of the story here, other than no news is great news?

1. Apple’s supposed Achilles heel of consumer orientation has proven to be (once again) its strong suit.  In fact, interim chief Tim Cook explicitly affirmed that consumer spending is actually holding up better for Apple than the business and education segments.  This is great news, inasmuch as recent history shows not only that it’s consumers – not businesses and schools – who are willing to pay a premium for differentiated products, but innovation increasingly flows from the consumer segment to the enterprise, and not the other way around, as was the case before the dotcom bubble.
2. The best way to navigate a downturn is not to head for the bunkers, but rather, to innovate.  Nowhere was this truth more evident than when Cook noted that in 17 out of the last 18 quarters Apple has exceeded the market rate of growth, adding that Apple’s product pipeline is fantastic.  While the call offered nothing provocative (read: new) in terms of what they are baking, know that the forthcoming iPhone 3.0 OS is a big deal, something that I blogged about HERE (analysis of OS 3.0 developer preview) and HERE (3rd party hardware accessories impact).
3. Apple’s platform/ecosystem play underlying iPhone/iPod touch is materially ahead of the competition.  Not only are the “show me” numbers the crap your pants, “YOWZA” variety (installed base of 37M combined iPhone/iPod touch units, 1B app downloads, 35K apps released vs. 15K just one quarter ago), but the company is light years ahead of the competition.  Don’t be fooled by the me-too storylines on Google Android, Palm Pre, MS Mobile and RIM Blackberry.  Apple is rocketing into the stratosphere while the competition is still (mostly) in diapers in this all important differentiation area, something that I blogged about in, ‘iPhones, App Stores, Ecosystems.’
4. Having a Diversified Channel Strategy is as Important as having Great Products.  We all know the potency of iTunes and App Store as virtual sales channels, and the call underlined yet another great quarter delivered through those channels.  But Apple now has 50K retail storefronts pushing its gear across the planet, including Wal-Mart, third-party retailers, mobile partners’ retail storefronts and their own 252 Apple Stores (the touch point from which 50% of the Mac sales are first time Mac owners). The only potentially negative data point captured from the detail here is that “same store” year-over-year sales numbers in Apple Stores dropped from $7.1M (in the year ago quarter) to $5.9M this quarter.  Apple explained this as a hybrid of weak economy + third-party channel expansion but it certainly bears watching, as having your own retail stores is “game changer” when it works and a “costly albatross” when it doesn’t.
5. There is no substitute for good old fashioned “boring” execution.  One thing is clear from Apple’s earnings calls, their product planning, roll outs, marketing events and the sheer audacity of pursuing a platform play that marries hardware, software, service, media and developer tools.  These guys sweat the details, walking the talk as well as they talk the talk, down to the level of sound commodity component sourcing controls, operating margins, cash, inventory management and conservative financial accounting. They are the exact opposite of the analog of not wanting to know “how sausage is made.”

So what else stood out (by not standing out)?

1. Steve Jobs Pledged End of June Return: To the question of whether Steve Jobs is returning as CEO at the end of June, as pledged, Cook and Oppenheimer were evasive, but when pressed, Cooked turned to Oppenheimer who stated, “We look forward to Steve returning to Apple at the end of June.”  What RETURNING means, and whether it is permanent remains to be seen (I am a skeptic).
2. Apple and Netbooks: While Tim Cook took this question head-on, me smells a wordsmithing exercise. What he essentially stated was that the space is not something that Apple would deem worthy of putting the MAC BRAND ON, alluding that they somewhat play in the space vis-à-vis iPod touch.  The addition by subtraction means that when they role out a device targeted at web browsing on steroids, it will be derived from iPod touch/iPhone, not the Mac.  Count on it.
3. A Verizon iPhone Future? Cook put the kibosh on this big time, saying that Apple’s strategy is to have one phone for the whole of the world and that means GSM, NOT CDMA, which Verizon's network is based upon.  As a Verizon customer (and a happy one at that), I am bummed but it speaks well to Apple’s understanding of the power of a unified platform versus a fragmented one.  This is a company all about raising the bar versus achieving ubiquity by lowering it.
4. Better App Discovery Tools with App Store:  One analyst asked whether Apple has plans to improve the discovery mechanisms within App Store along the lines of Genius Bar or something similar.  Oppenheimer deflected, saying that they have great tools like categories, popular, recommended, etc.  This one is enough of a "YEAH BUT" that I am dropping some detail below. 

Specifically, I would argue that while things look beyond rosy for Apple with App Store, the risk is that all of those roses can start leading to thorny situations.

Case in point, the low-pricing drivers within the App Store app visibility model (i.e., you pretty much need to be free, free-mium or 99 cents to gain Top 100 status) combined with an unpredictable app approval model/timeframe, combined with a lack of tools within App Store for vendors to communicate things like pending bug fixes to consumers combined with a lack of ‘review filtration’ tools (akin to the more utilitarian Amazon model - read four star reviews, read most helpful reviews, people who liked this, like that) creates a vicious cycle that is prompting some developers to conclude that “Apple is creating an ecosystem of the kind of customers I don’t want.” (read excellent post by iPhone app developer Garrett Murray on this topic HERE).

Now, while the knee jerk is to conclude “SO WHAT,” inasmuch as that, with 35K apps, there are plenty of eager developers to replace the disgruntled ones, the truth is more complicated. 

One is that at some point, Apple needs to segment its approach between how it works with “99 Cents Only” types of developers versus how it works with “Nordstroms” type of developers. 

Why?  First, some history.  When the PC industry was still in its infancy, what distanced the Mac from its DOS-based PC cousins was the emergence of Desktop Publishing as a force that uniquely leveraged the Mac’s graphical user interface, mouse based controls and print/output functions. 

My analog here is that relative to the Mac, metaphorically speaking, no one has created the game-changing equivalent of desktop publishing for the iPhone/iPod touch, and we/Apple need them to, but such a "swing for the fences" developer needs better ways to market, update and engage their constituency base than the (somewhat) one size fits all approach of App Store.

Two is that vis-à-vis the platform/ecosystem, Apple has created incredibly fertile soil for such a revolution to occur, but a core piece of this will be developing vertical segments (medical, industrial, point-of-sale, entertainment, enterprise), and these segments have their own channels, customer engagement practices and partner/value chains, requiring more elasticity in Apple’s approach than App Store alone offers.

Putting a bow around this last point, consider this.  Love or hate Microsoft, one truth is irrefutable.  In addition to (em)powering countless thousands of tiny ISVs, tens to hundreds of billion dollar companies have been built on top of Microsoft’s platform and tools. 

Five years hence, will iPhone/IPod touch be known as the engine of growth for tiny startups, billion dollar global-reach developers, or both? 

That chapter has not been written yet, so no news is…no news.

Related Posts:

1. PC 1.0, iPhone 3.0 and the Woz: Everything Old is New Again
2. ANALYSIS - iPhone 3.0 Developer Preview: Block the Kick Strategy
3. iPhones, App Stores, Ecosystems: On Recipes for Successful Developer Platforms
4. Punishing the Wizard: On Apple and Steve Jobs
5. The Scorpion, the Frog and the iPhone SDK

Laker Thoughts: Playoff Edition (Game 2 vs. Utah Jazz)

Sloppy execution catches up with you, and the Lakers have been sloppy of late.  A more disciplined team than the Jazz, not necessarily even a better one, could have snatched Game Two from them.

The Jazz aren't that team so the Lakers won, but that’s a sub-plot that bears watching, albeit one to keep at a slow burn.

First off, Deron Williams was stellar for the Jazz.  Amazing inside and outside, scoring and facilitating.  Basketball experts have anointed Chris Paul ALL-TIME great potential, whereas Williams is regarded as merely "Top 5 NOW." 

I don’t know, but every time I see the guy (Williams), it is apparent that if the Jazz ever find someone more dominant/big-time than Boozer to complement him, the Jazz could go all the way someday.

Unfortunately, here and now, without Okur, there are just too many matchup advantages for the Lakers.

Odom, for one, just crushes the Jazz.  Similarly, when the Lakers were running with Pau and Bynum, the Jazz had no answer for the Laker “bigs,” and the Points in the Paint (and shooting percentage) advantage was terrific as a result.

In the "didn't see that one coming" bucket, Shannon Brown is an exciting story arc as far as the Lakers are concerned. He brings defensive intensity and spreads the floor, while being unafraid of the moment (he'll shoot, and he's hitting his shots).

Plus he makes good decisions (something that both Farmar and Vujacic struggle with), and allows them to play a muscle tough style, which is another dimension that they can throw out to keep the Jazz off-balance (and the competition in subsequent rounds).

I hope that he can keep it up.  It would be a nice story for the man, who was a complete throw-in in the Radmanovic deal.

Back on the court, Trevor Ariza knocks down a big three to effectively end the game, just as he hit an opening three to help get the Lakers started.  He continues to impress.

And Kobe. All-time sick jumper over Ronnie Brewer. Incredible footwork by Kobe matched by equally sound defense by Brewer, and Kobe STILL nails it.

Phil spent too much time experimenting with rotations, and somewhat took the Lakers out of the flow of their game (which he mea culpa’d to afterwards), but you start to see how a couple of more refinements, and the Unit Mixes will (hopefully) be more judiciously and consistently applied.

A final thought.  What has defined the Lakers this year has been a lock down phase of the game, when they just take over.  They become an anaconda and squeeze the life out of the competition. Didn't happen tonight, and hasn’t these last few games with the Jazz.

The Jazz won’t win this series.  The Lakers are just too much more talented, have too many mismatch advantages, are too much more battle-tested, and when they find that extra gear, as they will, it will be game over.

Related Posts:

1. Lakers-Celts and the Sporting Metaphor
2. NBA Basketball as Opera
3. Sweet and Sour Endings: Boston Crushes the Lakers

A Mantra on Illumination, Devotion and Faith

(Inspired by ‘Cynicism & Devotion’ from Crazy Wisdom - by Chogyam Trungpa.)

It is hard to earnestly pursue a path of truth; to be unflinchingly honest with one’s self and deal with the hard realities that that truth presents.

Along another vertices, we find Spiritual Materialism, a patina that obfuscates our connection with life, doing so by reducing the purity, simplicity and borderless-ness of direct experience, relegating it to a scarce, exclusive reserve designated for the anointed few. 

But the choice needn’t be as stark as choosing between dark truth and light “truth-iness.”  No. 

Having prepared the basic ground by retiring self-deception, we can now become spiritual and engaged.  We can foment a (re) birth of the romantic self, and outwardly begin (again) radiating warmth to others.

This is the path of fertile soil, where devotion and faith to others (more so than ourselves) gives rise to a harvest that is luminescent, precious and enriching.

But, more on that sentiment in a bit.

How the Bubble Burst Has Changed Us

Our balloons have popped and we are sullen.  

We have endured real confusion and personal struggle.  This is not abstract pain either.  It is the most direct kind of agony.

I don’t talk to one person who is unaffected; who doesn’t have the silent quid pro quo understanding of tangible loss; of financial freedom pretty seriously detoured. 

One foundational example: the certainty of rising markets has been shattered.  That alone represents a new road ahead for a lot of people; a road without a clear map, requiring a different vehicle and for many, a travel that begins with an empty gas tank.

Heretofore, we didn’t realize that RISK truly could be a four-letter word, but now we know...what we should have always known.

Cast in that light, The Panic was understandable.  That the ground could spontaneously come loose; that once trusted high-flying machines could – and would –  simply fall from the sky. Terrifying.

That after having come to expect the perpetuity of boom times, instead we would find ourselves infected, having been given a virus. That truth was beyond jarring.

Whether you are young, in your forties (raises hand), or in your 50s, 60s or older, you should carry in your front pocket forever more a cosmic picture of the still-shaking Earth.

Not as some vestigial organ to hinder future mobility, but rather, as a koan, so that you might better practice discriminating awareness, freed from the shadows.

What damage have we wrought upon ourselves and others? 

Picture entire geographic regions falling into a sinkhole, never to come out of that hole again (not the same, at least), as seems inevitable in much of the industrial heartland of America.

Imagine a steady parade of couples nearing retirement whose life savings were wiped out. 

Try to walk in the shoes of those that don’t have an obvious path to get back on their feet.

We have to live with that as a people.  The sustenance of the American ideal depends upon us at least owning up to this much.

Giving Rise to Devotion and Faith

Skepticism is the pragmatist’s path.  Via its abrasive qualities, we have scoured and finessed our sense of “the IT” down to its core essence (i.e., our life’s purpose, what matters, what is froth).

But skepticism is also cynicism’s cousin.  At a certain point, understanding ceases to be illuminating.  It just darkens the room and becomes heavy.

Embracing the fact that we can’t relate to life without giving more of ourselves, we therefore have a “come to Jesus” moment, where we realize that we have “no choice” but to soften our hearts and to anchor on the goodness, the preciousness of life, the fulcrum of devotion and faith.

Exhibiting a heightened state of hope and expressing warmth to others is not hokey. 

If anything, it’s a “survive to thrive” dominion for those who devote themselves to pursuing it.

Put another way, life is a big accident.  Fate plays its hand in the most unpredictable of ways, but we are empowered with the knowledge (if we chose to see) that within that domain, our Dharma path is specific and workable.

We have begun to come out the other side (the post-bubble US), and we must now devote ourselves to romancing earnest pursuits, nurturing them and practicing “knowing faith,” a faith that we will realize our aspirational destiny.

Rinse.  Wash.  Repeat.  It is a form of active meditation.

Related Posts:

1. Getting Real: On Doomsday, the Demise of So-Called Experts and the New Arbitrage.
2. Crazy Wisdom as Rome Burns
3. Eating Dog Food: On Safety Nets
4. Staring into the Abyss: What Really Matters
5. Getting Back Our Sense of National We-Ness: On Heroic Acts, Shape Shifting and Small Business Stimulus.

Pattern Recognition – On Conservation, Gun Nation and Risk Mitigation

 Conservation: "Do you want to see something really scary?"

“If running out of oil doesn't scare you, maybe an iceberg the size of Connecticut floating away from Antarctica and hitting the United States will get your attention…The real question is: are we going run out of the things we need before we find substitutes for them?” – Andy Rooney

Shooting Up America

When President Obama recently stated that pushing for a reinstatement of the ban on "assault weapons" (think: AK-47s) was not in the cards, it was a political acknowledgment of how completely the NRA (national rifle association) has achieved a stranglehold on congress.

To get a sense of this stranglehold in action, and the culture war that underlies it, you have to watch the 60 Minutes expose, ‘Gun Rush,’ as it does a really good job of showing how fears of Obama (in some circles), combined with a devastating economy have fueled a run on guns that is (unfortunately) uniquely American.

We see giddy retailers at a Richmond (Virginia) Gun Show, where lax to non-existent "Background Check" laws allow anyone to buy handguns, assault weapons and bullets as easily, and with as little pre-qualification, as buyers of bulk food products at Costco. 

Check that: you need a membership at Costco.

For those of us who see events like Columbine, the Virginia Tech massacre, runaway gang violence and the recent killing of four Oakland (California) police officers by a parolee armed with assault weapons as emblematic of all that is wrong with our gun culture, this program is a wake-up call as to just how outside the power centers you/we are.

Crisis Altering Wall Street as Big Banks Lose Top Talent

One of the “holy shit” moments of the banking crisis (as foretold by the collapse of Long Term Capital Management a decade earlier) was the reality that derivative and hedging strategies did not mitigate risk, but rather amplified it, not because anything endemic to the instruments themselves, but rather because such strategies lead to imitation, which in turn, fosters simultaneous mass movement of securities on a global level; by definition, systemic risk.

The good news is that if (and only if) appropriate and comprehensive regulatory and enforcement mechanisms (with some formal concept of regulatory power across national boundaries) can be put in place, this is a manageable dynamic.

Simply put, we need better governance of market underwriting control mechanisms.

And oh by the way, as to all of the indigestion by banking executives around comp package caps as the “stick” side of being bailed out and subsidized by the American people?  True, such tethering of pay schemes compromises their ability to retain top talent, but the counter is that maybe that is a good thing.

The argument here is that a winnowing of talent from the “too big to fail” entities opens the door for smaller entities to promulgate, which actually moderates volatility in the financial marketplace.

“If the risk-taking spreads out to these smaller institutions, it is no longer a systemic threat,” said Matthew Richardson, professor of finance at the Stern School of Business at New York University. “And innovation is spreading out too. This is a good thing.”

Real the full article in the New York Times HERE.

CEO as Face, Spirit AND Sweat of the Brand

In the realm of CEO as company icon, there’s “Face of the Brand,” where the CEO is celebrity spokesman (think: Lee Iacocca of Chrysler).  There’s “Spirit of the Brand,” where the CEO’s persona sets the DNA for the company (think: Donald Trump, Larry Ellison).  And then there’s “Sweat of the Brand,” where the CEO sweats the details over what is and isn’t representative of the brand, and more importantly, is the filter that extracts the granular essence of the specific products and services that the company delivers.

While the ‘Built to Last’ crowd can find plenty not to like about companies whose competitive advantage is predicated on the continuing heart beat and engagement of “sweat the details” CEOs, the magic that they create, and the seeming uniformity in their ability to marry product marketing with product management is breathtaking to behold.

Plenty of ink has been written about the consummate “sweat the details” CEO, Steve Jobs.  And a post I wrote previously on Ron Popeil, founder of infomercial gadget maker, Ronco, plums the depths that such a CEO goes to breathe life into brand-worthy products. 

“In the valley of the blind, the one eyed man is king”

Another “sweat the details” CEO is hotelier and casino operator, Steve Wynn, who pretty much transformed Las Vegas from a bunch of worn-down casinos to a luxury resort destination, with properties such as The Mirage, Treasure Island and Bellagio (and now Wynn & Encore), in addition to bringing Siegfried and Roy, Cirque de Soleil and upper-crust retailers to Las Vegas (not to mention, setting off exploding volcanoes every 15 minutes).

60 Minutes did a recent feature on him that’s worth watching. Beyond the financial success that’s the “score” of winning in the market (he’s a billionaire), Wynn is known as being fanatical in working with his design team to the point of signing off on nearly every detail.

A couple of interesting slices from the interview:

1. Asked why he focuses so much on how things look, Wynn said, somewhat tongue in cheek, "I can't help myself. It's a sickness. My doctor says if I take my medication I'm no danger to anybody but myself. I can't help it," adding that this brings his greatest joy in life. 
2. On whether gamblers ever come out ahead in the long run: "You have never known in your entire life a gambler who comes here and wins big and…walks away?" (Charlie) Rose asked. "Never," Wynn replied.  "You know nobody that over the stretch of time is ahead?" Rose asked. "Nope," Wynn said.
3. On the irony of being hailed as visionary when he is gradually going blind with a degenerative ailment. “I've gotten too much credit for that really. If you look at Las Vegas in the 1980s, there hadn't been anything built since 1973 new. And so the city was in a time warp and as has so often been the case, in the valley of the blind, the one eyed man is king."

Ah, the vision thing when married to the “sweat the details” thing.  Very potent.

Related Posts:

1. The Pitchman: Must Read for "Product Nuts"
2. Holy Shit! Apple’s Halo Effect
3. Apple is a Great American Company Worth Celebrating

Getting Real: Sick Around America

The Path to Universal Health Care

First, I saw FRONTLINE’S phenomenal expose, ‘Sick Around America,’ which in an hour gives you a 360 degree understanding of the state of health care in America (see below).

Then, I chanced upon a 60 Minutes segment that looks at a state funded cancer clinic being shutdown, owing to the recession. 

It presents a grotesque set of choices that isn’t us.  Can't be (see way below).

The health of the nation is both a matter of national concern and a metaphor for the rigor and balance that we strive for in the wake of the collapse of our financial system.

The Birth of Pro Bono

Our great society has an implicit promise to maintain a reliable safety net system.

Exhibit A: providing universal access to health care services.

The paradox is how to do so while simultaneously embracing fiscal pragmatism and maintaining market orientation.

Pro bono publico (usually shortened to pro bono) is a phrase derived from Latin meaning "for the public good". The term is generally used to describe professional work undertaken voluntarily and without payment as a public service. 

Pro bono service, unlike traditional volunteerism, uses the specific skills of professionals to provide services to those who are unable to afford them. (FROM WIKIPEDIA)

What I am envisioning is a government-sponsored initiative to apply pro bono concepts to the health services constituency of: Doctors; Hospitals/Clinics; Insurance Providers; Pharma; and Consumers.

It is an out of the box way to instill a sense of collective ownership among the key stakeholders in the vetting, deployment and administration of a federally-backed health services safety net delivery system.

Who knows?  If it works, maybe the same concepts could be applied to evolving our educational system.

When Safety Nets Fail

God forbid any of us should find ourselves in such a horrible place. 

Sick. Desperate.  And utterly kicked to the curb.

"I don't want to die. I shouldn't have to die. This is a county hospital.  This is for people that, like me, many people have lost their insurance, have not any other resources. I mean I was a responsible person. I bought my house. I put money away. I raised my two children. And now I have nothing. You know my house isn’t worth anything. I have no money. And I said 'What do I do, but what do all these other people do after me?' 'And they said we don't know.'"

In ‘The Recession's Impact: Closing The Clinic,’ 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley, looks at the gut-wrenching impact of the recession on a once-indelible safety net: state and county medical services.

Watch the segment above, in all of its ugliness, intellectually understanding the paradox for local and state governments wrestling with horrific budget shortfalls.

Our system is defined by an asymmetry between the “guaranteed coverage” model that drives employer-based health care plans, and “medical underwriting,” a malignancy that drives the private individual market.

The awful truth is this.  Many a “poor folk” literally become poor by virtue of the great injustice of getting sick.

In what becomes the ultimate sick joke, sickness renders them unable to work, which, in turn, leads to them to lose their insurance.

Then, horrifically, they are uninsurable in the private individual market because, by definition, they have a “pre-existing condition,” which, of course, started the vicious cycle in the first place.

Getting Real: A Moral Imperative

Frank Rich, writing in The New York Times, shines a jarring light on the moral imperative of our times, saying, “This is what Obama is talking about when he insists on pushing for change simultaneously on so many fronts — green jobs, health care, education, new financial regulation, infrastructure spending and all the rest. As has been true since he promised “a new foundation for growth” at his inauguration, the most important question is not whether he will try to do too much at once but whether he will and can do enough.”

We the People. Repeat.  We the People. Repeat…

The Grim Facts on Health Care:

1. 46 million Americans are uninsured under our current health system;
   
2. 700,000 Americans go bankrupt each year, at least in part due to the cost of runaway medical bills; this fact has no parallel in other developed countries;
   
3. When you lose your job, you lose your coverage.  COBRA provides a time limited safety net but fully 90% of the people that are offered it, don’t purchase COBRA because it is expensive.  Plus, it is only available for ~18 months, meaning that the chronically ill will be subjected to the private individual market. Medical underwriting (introduced earlier) means that if you can’t secure an employer sponsored policy, you will once again, be without coverage. Finally, if your company goes broke, and the employee insurance program goes away as a result, COBRA is pretty much instantly unavailable to all (former) employees.  How about that as a double-whammy for suddenly finding yourself out of work in a bad economy?
   
4. The average premium is 3X in states that have guaranteed issue programs (i.e., can’t be denied coverage because sick or have pre-existing ailments).  Surprising? Apparently, people wait until they absolutely need coverage, resulting in under-distribution of costs across the larger network of citizens.  The most logical counter to this is to mandate that everyone buy into the system above a certain economic level and provide near-free lunch to those that truly need it (i.e., below a certain economic level).
   
5. One thing to think about in terms of the aging baby boomers – a massive demographic – is that there are large numbers that are moving into a heightened health services consumption/reliance stage, but who are either too “rich” for Medicaid or too young for Medicare.
   
6. Administrative costs in the U.S. make up 24 percent of health costs versus 12 percent in Canada.  If we could squeeze that inefficiency to make it on par (with Canada), that alone would pay for universal health care.

UPDATE 1:  Great article by Andy Kessler (one of my favorite writers) on why the medical establishment is unlikely to embrace electronic patient records with full vigor.  EXCERPT: Rather, the health-care industry's reluctance to digitize its records is rooted in a desire to keep medicine's lucrative business model hidden. Dangling $19 billion in front of a $2.4 trillion industry is not nearly enough to get it to reveal the financial secrets that electronic health records are likely to uncover--and upon which its huge profits depend. In those medical records lie the ugly truth about the business of medicine: sickness is profitable. The greater the number of treatments, procedures, and hospital stays, the larger the profit. There is little incentive for doctors and hospitals to identify or reduce wasteful spending in medicine.

Related Posts:

1. Juxtapositions: Crisis Management, Complexity and Systems Thinking for the 21st Century. 
2. Getting Real: On Doomsday, the Demise of So-Called Experts and the New Arbitrage.
3. Getting Back Our Sense of National We-Ness: On Heroic Acts, Shape Shifting and Small Business Stimulus.

Thought Streams: From the Analog to the Digital World and Back

Sometimes, the act of "seeing" requires an ability to shift modalities without missing a beat.  

In this posting of 'Thought Streams,' we move from the realm of flesh, blood and physicality to the realm of the spirit.

We then triangulate on three different instances of BEING DIGITAL:

Analog Manifestations

A juxtaposition is a multi-part overlay, an act or instance of placing items close together or side by side, esp. for comparison or contrast. 

I previously blogged about one particular juxtaposition (the one that President Obama must navigate), something that I reference here as a vehicle for grounding in the real-world the types of complex analog states that can manifest when various potentialities and actualities intersect.

Spiritual States

Someday we will have sufficient distance from this particularly chaotic point in time to appreciate the sheer wonder, confusion and terror of it all (relative to the go-go boom times that we have come to expect).

In Tibetan Buddhism, they speak of bardos, a series of transitional metaphysical states that exist between birth, life, death and re-birth. 

Before all is said and done, many of us will have experienced first-hand such bardo states, shedding skin and exposing raw nerves, knowing all to well what spiritual death feels like, albeit with the hopeful knowing that as one door closes, another (eventually) opens.

Digital Expression Engines

I have been reading an incredible book, ‘Founders at Work’ about the seminal moments of founders in the realization of their companies.  One founder featured in the book is Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple.

In a prior post, I shared my sense of how Woz’s mastery of hardware-software chemistry remains an essential part of the company’s DNA, all the more amazing since Wozniak left the company even before the Macintosh was born.

Looked at analytically, Apple’s instantiation of digital expressionism vis-à-vis iPhone and iPod touch platform is all about enabling loosely coupled hardware, software and service composites to be meaningfully coupled through systemic hybridization and highly procedural assembly call generation mechanisms.

Through such endeavors, Apple has created the first “native” mobility platform – from the tools to the hosted infrastructure layer to the core services and the device-level runtime environment. 

It’s a wonder to behold, and everyone else is in fourth place.  Seriously.

Growing Digital “Legs”

Recently, Apple announced plans to activate a third-party hardware accessory market for the iPhone/iPod touch platform.

I think that this is a BIG deal (as expounded upon in 'PC 1.0, iPhone 3.0 and the Woz: Everything Old is New Again').

Not only does it extend the capabilities of the device, but it broadens out the ecosystem and most importantly, drives focused engagement within specific market verticals (e.g., medical, sports, automobile, controller, data acquisition, playback, entertainment and finance segments).

Enlightened self-interest is an incredibly powerful driver in creating new markets, especially when you have the necessary tools to succeed within the market.

On that front, does anyone doubt that Apple has learned a thing or two about how to cultivate new markets? 

No less, they seem to still be on “offense,” driving new market innovation versus resting on their laurels.

Breadcrumbing the Digital Universe

Maybe it’s the geek in me acting out, but I think that what Apple is doing is pretty frickin cool so I blog about all of the piece parts that are coming together, and post it on the blog that I maintain at OReilly.com.

Long story short, Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly and Company, posts a tweet about my post, which leads to 15 re-tweets, and in a flash, 3500 people converge on my blog post. 

 Thinking this to be a pretty terrific example of the power of social propagation at work, I tweet the stats generated by O’Reilly’s tweet; O’Reilly sees them (the stats), re-tweets them and another 1500 people read my post.

And that my friends, is how digital sausage is made.

(Final note: I must say that in a pretty organic fashion, I have gotten a lot of love from the folks at O’Reilly; a not so subtle reminder that, digital, shmigital, it still comes back to surrounding yourself with good people.)

Related Posts:

1. Juxtapositions: Crisis Management, Complexity and Systems Thinking for the 21st Century
2. Getting Real: On Doomsday, the Demise of So-Called Experts and the New Arbitrage.
3. Crazy Wisdom as Rome Burns
4. PC 1.0, iPhone 3.0 and the Woz: Everything Old is New Again
5. ANALYSIS - iPhone 3.0 Developer Preview: Block the Kick Strategy
6. iPhones, App Stores, Ecosystems: On Recipes for Successful Developer Platforms
7. How Social Media Works: It's About Breadcrumbs and Conversations