RWL #157 - Death, Netflix, & Problem Solving
Greetings from … Woodstock, Vermont! I’m attending a board retreat for the Northern New England Association of Healthcare Executives (the local chapter of ACHE) today. We rotate our chapter’s annual meeting between Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, so this year it is going to be in Vermont. We have the board retreat each year at the hotel where we will later in the year have the annual meeting. So we’re here in lovely Woodstock making plans for our big meeting in November. Our local chapter is a great group of leaders - they do a lot for my students. We’re very lucky to get that kind of support.
Anyway, where does the time go? Students will be back in two weeks and I still have so much work to do! I need a couple more weeks added on to break. Alas, the semester waits for no man. On to the links!
Read
What: New York Times, The Movement to Bring Death Closer
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/19/magazine/home-funeral.html
Why: If a loved one died, how much of the processing of the body would you want to be responsible for? This article is about a movement toward returning the care of the deceased’s body to the family. One of the central characters is a “home death-care guide”. This passage sums up the central theme:
“In the United States, we have come to see death as an emergency. We call the doctors, the nurses, the police, the emergency workers, the funeral staff to take over for us. They hurry corpses from hospital rooms or bedrooms into designated, chilled death spaces. They dig and fill the graves for us and drive our loved ones, alone, to the crematories. They turn on the furnace, lift the bodies, close the door. There may be no other rite of passage around which we have become more passive... If death practices reveal a culture’s values, we choose convenience, outsourcing, an aversion to knowing and seeing too much.”
I remember reading a leadership book many years ago as part of the Tripler Army Medical Center journal club, and the main insight of the book was that when you wanted to lead change, you had to give people time to accept the need for change. Most of the members of the journal club were physicians, and this idea of allowing someone time really resonated with them. Patients who were presented with life-altering news needed to be able to sit with the news for a period of time before they could move on. They asserted there was an art to knowing when the patients were ready. I didn’t particularly care for the book at the time, but I guess I wasn’t ready for its message when I read it. I’ve come to accept that you need to come to accept changes. The home death approach seems to be focused on helping people deal with death by giving them more time. Maybe there are some things that should not be (or can’t be) outsourced.
Watch
What: TED, Reed Hastings: How Netflix changed entertainment -- and where it's headed (14 min)
Why: Hastings is the co-founder, Chairman and CEO of Netflix. That should be enough to entice you to watch a 14 minute interview with him. Let me toss out a few of the nuggets I heard:
Netflix was “Born on DVD” but he never thought that was the end state. This is like Bezos - he started with books because books were easy to deal with, but Amazon was never going to be just a book store.
He talks about taking chances - especially for Netflix on becoming a content creator vs. content provider. Becoming a content creator was critical to expand the NetFlix brand. Like HBO did with Sapranos and GOT - shows Netflix developed become associated with the Netflix brand.
He talks about the famous Netflix Culture Deck . He had founded a company previously that was process obsessed - trying to prevent mistakes (makes me think of high reliability gone wrong). The goal was to dummy-proof the system - “eventually only dummies wanted to work there.” His culture goal was less process without chaos
One entertaining thing he talked about was revealed preferences - people say they want educational, high brow programming, but they actually watch lowbrow programming. When asked, we articulate the aspirational self, not actual self. So what is a business to do? He talks about trying to strike a balance - I think he realizes that he needs to have a mix because eventually people need a hit of something meaningful before they go back to their low brow. There is a discussion about whether algorithms drive people toward a lowest common denominator.
Listen
What: McKinsey Podcast, How to master the seven-step problem-solving process (26 min)
Why: In the Army, we are trained on the Military Decision Making Process (MDMP). It is a step driven process for developing recommendations and a solution to a decision maker. I taught it to my students this semester in a slightly modified format - I renamed it the Deliberate Decision Making Process (DDMP) - obviously it needed its own acronym. This podcast discusses a slightly different but related process that interested me - a problem solving process. I don’t know much about decision science, so I was a little lost with the discussion of classical problem solving vs. design thinking. I have studied design thinking a bit and it appeals to my way of thinking, but I know nothing about “classical problem solving”. The guests say that design thinking is a related skill that should be used in conjunction with classical problem solving, and that is actually what brought me around to MDMP. It seems perhaps MDMP (or DDMP) would be useful in conjunction with these other approaches (classical and design). If any of my military peeps listen to this, I’d be interested in hearing if they see a consonance between this 7-step process and MDMP. The book sounds interesting.
Thanks for reading and see you next week! If you come across any interesting stories, won't you send them my way? I'd love to hear what you think of these suggestions, and I'd love to get suggestions from you. Feel free to drop me a line at mark.bonica@unh.edu , or you can tweet to me at @mbonica .
Also, if you find these links interesting, won’t you tell a friend? They can subscribe here: https://tinyletter.com/markbonica
Have a great weekend and do amazing things!
Mark
Mark J. Bonica, Ph.D., MBA, MS
Assistant Professor
Department of Health Management and Policy
University of New Hampshire
(603) 862-0598
mark.bonica@unh.edu
Health Leader Forge Podcast: http://healthleaderforge.org
"I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor." - Henry David Thoreau