RWL #159 - home office, transparency, & NYSE
Greetings from the University of New Hampshire! First week of classes is done - 15 weeks to go, but who’s counting? Not really - second semester is more fun for me because I meet most of my students for the first time during first semester, so seeing them come back after break is fun. We had a lot of good energy in the room for both finance and economics. We kicked off the semester in economics with a simulation to demonstrate the power of trade. Students had different utility functions based on different color and types (chocolate or peanut) of M&Ms, and had to trade to try to maximize their utility. They developed trading institutions in a short time, and they were able to more than triple the overall utility in the room by the end of the exercise. I’m going to write this game up, so if you’re interested, shoot me a note and I’ll pass it to you as soon as it’s done.
Have a great week and do amazing things!
Read
What: The New Yorker, I Work from Home
Why: This is a humor piece. I’m sharing it because I sometimes work from home, but I prefer to work in the office because, basically, this. I shared it with my wife who has worked from home for years, and she thought it had some truth, too. I think if I worked from home full-time, I would go bonkers. I know it works for some people, it just wouldn’t work for me. So this is a fun read - I hope you enjoy it.
Watch
What: TED, What if all US healthcare costs were transparent? (7 min)
https://www.ted.com/talks/jeanne_pinder_what_if_all_us_health_care_costs_were_transparent
Why: The Trump administration is pushing for price transparency, and I have thought for years that that would be a good thing. There are some reasonable economic arguments that price transparency could have unexpected, bad outcomes - for example, if all hospitals posted their prices, they would be able to tacitly collude on pricing (raising the prices together, rather than competing against each other - there’s support for this in the economics literature on oligopolies). But I think overall it would be a good thing. Personally, I’m a fan of the idea of a high deductible plan coupled with an HSA. This seems to set up the incentives correctly, and it would allow us to take advantage of price transparency. This is a short video, worth a watch.
Listen
What: This is Success, NYSE president Stacey Cunningham
https://art19.com/shows/success-how-i-did-it/episodes/5e9c87a9-c8e5-4563-afec-598494ecb24b
Why: Cunningham is the first female president of the New York Stock Exchange. That’s pretty cool, considering what an insular world finance has always been. This is a good interview to consider some of what the NYSE is, and how it has changed with technology. It’s a bit narrow of me, but I had not really thought of leadership in the IT world as particularly focused on change management, but really it’s all about redesigning business processes to take advantage of advances in technology, and fighting against just automating existing processes. Well, maybe not all about that, but a lot of it. One of my good friends is a former CIO, and he talked about the field as dealing with people problems, not tech problems. That’s what I was thinking about when I listened to this interview. Cunningham has some great comments about building teams and having an unexpected career. All good stuff.
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