Greetings from the University of New Hampshire! Whew! The last few weeks have been brutal. I’ve been torturing evaluating my students with their first round of exams. Let me tell you, in case you are not a teacher, teachers do not enjoy grading. It is literally the worst part of the job. Grading papers is worse than grading exams, so I’m happy the classes I am teaching this year involve relatively few papers, but I have lots of exams. Writing an exam is exhausting. If you’ve never written one, trust me on this. It seems like the teacher just sits down and comes up with some questions based on the material. Shouldn’t it be easy? In the abstract, sure. It should take like 20 minutes. However much time it takes to type it up, right? I remember one of the first econ exams I gave - I asked what I thought was a straightforward question about the price of hotdogs at a ballpark. I started with a simple supply curve and demand curve and the students were supposed to find the equilibrium quantity and price. It was so simple I didn’t bother to check to see what the outcome of the two equations (for the demand and supply curves) actually was. It turned out the equilibrium price was $97 for a hot dog. Some of the students were sure they had gotten the problem wrong - who would write a test question with such an answer? Well… a professor who hasn’t taken adequate care in writing his exam, that’s who (hélas, c'est moi). It takes me 6-8 hours to write an exam, between the drafting and proofing, and even then there is almost always something wrong with it. Then there is the grading, once the exam is written. I shouldn’t complain, but it’s draining. No job is perfect - and evaluating students is the part of the job I would rid myself of if I could. But it’s a fundamental part of the work. If I had a TA do the grading, I wouldn’t really understand where my students are, what they are understanding and what they are not. So unfortunately, the evaluating is fundamental to the teaching. Some people might disagree with me on this, but that’s how I see it.
(pic above - last weekend I made shortbread dipped in chocolate - recipe from Ina Garten. We do one big treat on Saturdays and diet the rest of the week. This was last week’s big treat.)
Anyway, this week I started gathering my pieces to share with you and I realized I had a bunch of interesting videos, most of which connect along the theme of attention. So instead of an article, video, and podcast this week, I’ve got five videos. So I guess it’s the WWW Newsletter this week, not the RWL. Let me know what you think of this week’s newsletter. I’m leaning toward moving away from the rigidity of having a prescribed three forms of media each time - just because it’s not always convenient.
So… the first video is separate from the others, so I want to give it to you first -
What:UNH/NNEAHE COVID leadership panel
Why: I am super excited to share this with you. On Dec 11, 2020 the Department of Health Management and Policy at the University of New Hampshire (that’s my department) co-sponsored a panel with the Northern New England Association of Healthcare Executives (NNEAHE) about organizational responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. This video features three of the speakers' presentations: Eileen Keefe, Chief Nursing Officer, Parkland Medical Center, Derry, New Hampshire; Carol Majewski, Associate Chief Quality Officer for Patient Experience for the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health; and Colonel Kim Aiello, Commander, 44th Medical Brigade, Fort Bragg, North Carolina. All of the talks are fantastic and I think you will find them really valuable.
I also have an audio-only version through my podcast. See: https://healthleaderforge.blogspot.com/2021/03/covid-19-what-we-learned-staffing.html if you are interested in that.
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Now the rest of these videos were inspired by a conversation I had this week with my friends Sue Demarco and Peter Gosline. Sue and Peter are both certified executive coaches (check out their LinkedIn if you are in need of such services), and we’ve been getting together to talk about coaching and leadership for a few months. Amongst other things, Sue is trained in Appreciative Inquiry (AI) and we did an exercise together based on AI principles that I enjoyed so I dug in a little to AI and came up with this short video about the theory.
What: How to Do An Appreciative Inquiry Interview (6 min)
Why: The exercise Sue had us do was think about what our ideal lives would look like five years from now, and to paint a picture of a day, month, or year. The idea, as I understand it, is to start with the ideal, and then work backwards to think about what you have to do to reach that ideal. It’s a great exercise, and it was fun to do it with a couple of friends so they could ask questions (inquiry) and provide support. This video gives a basic introduction to AI and I think I will be spending more time looking into it.
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What: TED2013, Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking (10 min)
Why: Amanda Palmer is a little nutty - an over-the-top, this-is-what-the-Drama-Club-kids-grow-up-to-be-if-they-don’t-sell-out-and-become-stock-brokers (or healthcare administrators…). Honestly, I find her hype a bit off-putting, but I think the messages are interesting.
First of all, she talks about the value of connection. She basically sees herself as selling connection. In a sense, any job in the service sector (including healthcare) is on some level about selling connection. When you see your doctor, you want to feel truly seen and truly listened to. I’ve quoted Adam Smith before, who wrote way back in the 1750’s that the real pain of poverty is not so much material but social. The poor are not seen, and they know it.
The second interesting thing, though I have to admit I’ve heard her talk more about this in other talks, is about her voluntary financing model. She started asking her fans to voluntarily pay what they could - and as it turns out, most people will pay to support art they feel connected to. Substack, the service I am using now, has become an alternative platform for many journalists and opinion writers. They sell subscriptions directly to their readers for small sums of money, and they are finding that they can dramatically increase their personal incomes by going it alone. Not quite a voluntary funding model, but close. Many offer multiple tiers - a free tier and a paid tier. It becomes a form of mass patronage. I’ve subscribed to a couple of these newsletters that I think are doing important work, giving the writers money directly, rather than through a newspaper/magazine platform. So I think what is interesting here is a return to a patronage system and disintermediation. Palmer gets a bit at both.
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What: TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat - and the rise of bite-sized content (10 min)
Why: In this video, Qiuqing Tai talks about the “democratization” of content creation - specifically ultra short, “bite sized” content that you see on TikTok. She asserts it’s not just junk, but educational content as well. Regardless, this is another moment of disintermediation. Technology has created the ability for anyone to create content and share it instantly. Anyone can get attention now, not just those individuals who are blessed by a media organization like a TV or radio station. A bite-sized video has to have a single message and a single thought - it actually has some potential for disciplining communication. In that sense, it’s interesting.
I personally don’t have a TikTok account. My daughter shows me stuff every now and then - mostly things that she thinks are humorous. I have to admit, TikTok makes me feel really old because there is clearly a generational divide. I find most of the content just flat or not at all funny, and she is ROFL. Get off my lawn, TikTok!
Seriously, the short form video is an interesting idea. Something to think about.
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What: Joseph Gordon-Levitt | TED2019, How craving attention makes you less creative
Why: In case you don’t recognize the name (I didn’t), Joseph Gordon-Levitt played Robin in Batman: The Dark Knight. Apparently he was also on Family Ties back in the day and a bunch of other stuff. My wife is much better at identifying actors than I am.
Anyway, I provide this last video as a sort of counterpoint to TikTok video. JGL admits that he gets caught up in the attention economy - especially on Twitter. It’s easy to get hooked on getting attention rather than giving attention. He admits that he is vulnerable to the draw of likes and retweets, and even starts to think about things he is doing in terms of what attention it could get him on the socials. This loss of focus prevents him from giving attention to the things he is doing. He talks about acting as an intense form of giving attention. To act well requires giving attention intensely to a subject. I think this connects well to the Palmer video. Palmer knows she is selling attention - she is giving it and asking her patrons to pay her something for it.
JGL talks about an idea called flow , and how when you are giving a thing intense attention, you can enter a flow state, which is intensely gratifying. It is the opposite of attention seeking, attempting to get attention. This is the risk and potential poison of the bite-sized attention economy of social media. It’s sooo easy to allow yourself to be sucked into the attempts to get attention, rather than giving attention. Flow leads to happiness. Attention seeking leads to more attention seeking.
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A little more...
One further thought on the patronage, disintermediation idea. People don’t like being forced to tip. If I’m expected to tip 20% regardless of the quality of service, then it’s really an unspoken tax. I’m not tipping because there was so much excess value created. I’m tipping out of obligation.
In economics there is a concept called consumer surplus. The idea is that when you voluntarily buy something, say a new shirt, you must value it at least at the purchase price, if not more. For example, if I buy a new shirt for $20, I must have valued it for at least $20. If I would have been willing to pay $23 for the shirt, then I received $3 in consumer surplus from the transaction. This leaves me feeling like I got a good deal. I’m happy about the transaction. This is why buying a car always leaves you feeling slimy. Car salesmen exist to extract as much of your consumer surplus as possible. (This is not limited to car salesmen, of course, but any direct selling where the price is negotiable.) If I were shirt shopping in this arrangement, there would not be a price on the shirt. The shirt salesman would offer me the shirt at some outrageous starting price and work down from there until he arrived as close as possible to $23. I might wind up paying $22.50 for the shirt, leaving me with just $0.50 in consumer surplus - I feel much less excited about the transaction. This is called 1st degree price discrimination.
I think Palmer is engaging in 1st degree price discrimination, but in a voluntary form. She’s asking you to pay some portion of your consumer surplus to her. Not all of it, as a car salesman would, but some of it. It’s an interesting model. I think we are going to see more of this. It exists in many ways already in the arts. I think we will see more and in more democratized forms.
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 .
If you’re looking for a searchable archive, you can see my draft folder here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1jwGLdjsb1WKtgH_2C-_3VvrYCtqLplFO?usp=sharing
Finally, if you find these links interesting, won’t you tell a friend? They can subscribe here: https://markbonica.substack.com/welcome
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)