RWL #186 - personal brand, the startup of you, nursing home tragedies, etc.
Greetings from the University of New Hampshire - Forward Operating Base Last Homely House (FOB LHH)! August is tomorrow! How did that happen?! I’m so not ready. I went out for a lovely paddle this morning with my father out of Odiorne State Park and along Newcastle. You know what’s great about kayaking? You can social distance while doing it!
You know what else is great? Roasted potatoes with eggs. My new favorite breakfast. Twenty minutes of cooking at 450. Toss the potatoes with EVOO and roast for 15 minutes on parchment paper. Then crack two eggs and put them right on the parchment paper with the potatoes. Roast five more minutes. Voila! Add some chili powder, cumin, and cayenne and you’ve got spicy goodness!
I’ve had a good summer, honestly. I’ve been working hard on several research projects that are starting to come into shape, but lately I’ve been feeling a bit burned out. A few days ago I decided to get back to basics - which for me is reading ancient philosophy. I’ve had a copy of Cicero’s On The Good Life laying around for a few months and I finally cracked it. It’s good stuff. Not a light read, but not terribly difficult. I recommend small doses - I’m trying to read about 10 pages per day. It will take me most of a month to get through it, but given he wrote it more than 2,000 years ago, I think it can wait. For me this is a way of dealing with the underlying mess we are all living through. I hope you are finding something that feeds your soul this summer.
Stay well and stay safe.
Read
What: HBR, How Women Can Develop — and Promote — Their Personal Brand
https://hbr.org/2018/03/how-women-can-develop-and-promote-their-personal-brand
Why: I officially took over the management of our undergraduate internship program this past spring (yeah, the timing couldn’t have been worse), and as part of my responsibilities I will be teaching a pre- and post-practicum (i.e., internship) course to our juniors who have yet to go out, and our seniors who (mostly) are returning from internships. This article caught my eye because I think it is an important topic for a professional to think about. I’ve been working on a study of military officers who have retired from the military health system (MHS) after 20 or more years of service and found roles in the civilian (non-federal) healthcare system. Every one of them (I’ve talked to 28, men and women from all three services) has talked about how they wished they had spent more time developing a network outside of the military. A piece of that networking skill is developing your personal brand. Most of the students in my undergraduate program are young women, so this article caught my eye.
The first criticism the article brings up is bonding and bridging capital. Bonding capital represents the investments you have made inside your organization or work group; bridging capital refers to investments you have made to connect yourself with other groups. The regret the participants in my study were expressing was that they had lots of bonding capital - they had lots of military friends - and that capital had been really useful when they wanted to get things done inside the military system. But now that they were leaving the military, they were finding none of their old connections were useful. They had a plethora of bonding capital, but very little bridging capital. I’ll be trying to teach my young scholars how to develop some bridging capital - something I had to learn myself after leaving the service.
The second criticism the article presents is “control your narrative”. This is about helping potential hiring managers see the continuity between your past and the future you are trying to create. Veterans have a terrible time explaining how their experiences translate into civilian work. Most civilians imagine day to day life in the military as being an outtake from Platoon or Full Metal Jacket. New grads don’t have much of a narrative, but they have potential, and employers have needs. How to explain how your potential meets a potential employer’s needs is controlling the narrative.
The third criticism is one that I have talked about before here is that many people aren’t public enough with their work. If people haven’t heard of you in an age of social media, you have no one to blame but yourself. LinkedIn is a great place to share these accomplishments and projects. Twitter can be useful, too, if you can find your community and not get sucked into the swamp of politics.
Good article. Sorry - my summary is almost as long as it is. But it’s a topic I’ve been thinking about for a long time.
*
What: Wired, There's No Such Thing as Family Secrets in the Age of 23andMe
https://www.wired.com/story/theres-no-such-thing-as-family-secrets-in-the-age-of-23andme/
What: This article fits in the “strange confluence of culture and technology” bucket. Here’s the defining quote:
“The notion that geneticists would learn to decode our unique genetic fingerprints, that companies would make that information accessible to millions, that vast digital networks of global interconnectivity would render the idea of anonymity quaint—all that defied imagination in 1974.
But technology has a way of creating new consequences for old decisions. Today, some 30 million people have taken consumer DNA tests, a threshold experts have called a tipping point.”
When I saw the title I thought it would be a sensational article, but it presents some interesting ethical questions about rights, and it is sensitively written for both sides. It’s a long form article, so settle in.
Watch
What: The Startup of You: Whiteboard Animation (5 min)
Why: As I mentioned above, I’ll be teaching a post-practicum (i.e., post-internship) course for our seniors this fall and I’m thinking about assigning Hoffman and Casnocha’s book, The Start-Up of You. This is a good summary of the book. I read it back in ‘14 or so, so I need to re-read it, but I think it’s a good how-to.
Listen
What: 10 Blocks podcast, Nursing Homes: The Center of the Pandemic
https://www.city-journal.org/nursing-homes-covid-19
Why: From the transcript: “According to some estimates, as much as 40% of the overall count of people who've died in America during the pandemic were nursing home residents.” 55,000 deaths in nursing homes is cited. The discussion examines why nursing homes were particularly vulnerable and why this was not a surprise. This sets aside the mis-handling of the crisis by governors (such as Cuomo of NY) and public health departments that ordered nursing homes to take patients who were discharged from hospitals who were still contagious. This one is not fun.
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
See you next Friday!
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
'It is the small things, everyday deeds of ordinary folk, that keep the darkness at bay. Simple acts of kindness and love.' - Gandalf (The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey)