RWL Newsletter #110
Greetings from the University of New Hampshire! What a week - TGIF. Mostly because Saturday and Sunday I can work without interruption. It’s one of those weeks. I was supposed to teach a four hour finance seminar in a physician leadership program, but because of snow, I wound up trying to work with about 90 minutes. Needless to say, we didn’t get through all my material. As a result, I’m planning to post some videos going through a real (though anonymous) organization’s income statement and balance sheet, as well as discussing some basic financial ratios and what they mean. I’ll post the links to those later, as I’ve had some interest in my other finance videos.
As a result of some other craziness we call life, one of the student groups that was scheduled to present in my OB class this week had to be moved and I suddenly had to gin up a talk to fill the session. Since this class is topics-based, I decided to talk about work-life balance, or my preference for work-life integration. I’ve given a similar talk before, but updated it with some new thoughts. The image above was meant to summarize how I think about the evolution of work. Starting about 10,000 years ago, we saw the emergence of agriculture. My argument is the subsistence farmer was a self-determined generalist. Even living serfdom, the level of supervision from the landlord was usually to demand a hefty tax, not to tell the farmer how to go about his business. In the early 19th century we had the industrial revolution and everything changed. We became much more specialized and dependent on market exchange, but sacrificed much of our self-determination as we became human components of manufacturing organizations. Then as we moved into the latter half of the 20th century, we saw the rise of knowledge workers, even greater specialization, but also a return to more self-determination. It’s very hard to supervise how someone thinks, and it’s not terribly efficient to try to do so. We’re moving now into something else that’s new. I’ve heard a lot about the Gig Economy, where everyone is a freelancer, doing random things and piecing together a portfolio career. I’ve included an article about Gig Workers below. That would imply both a return to generalist producers and a higher level of self-determination. But also we are hearing about the advent of analytics, AI, and machine learning. Tyler Cowen has a nice book called Average is Over that talks about how the economy of the future will bifurcate between people who are able to work with these new technologies, and those who can’t. The people who can will be very successful economically with high pay and high status jobs. The people who cannot/do not will be trapped in low paying jobs. It’s an interesting thesis. Clearly the people who can work with and integrate with this technology are going to be winners in a cybernetic economy, characterized by even more specialization and more self-determination. This week’s listen is my Health Leader Forge interview with Heather S. Lavoie, the President of Geneia, a healthcare analytics company. Honestly, I’m not sure which outcome will dominate in the future: the Gig Economy where we are all micro-entrepreneurs, or the Cybernetic Economy, where most of the meaningful work is with advanced machines. (BTW, these points on the graph are meant to show the dominant work form for each economy, not the only work form - even in ancient Mesopotamia there were craft specialists.) As you can see, I had fun talking about this topic. It’s something I think about all the time. Maybe I’ll video the lecture and post it at some point.
Anyway, plugged in between the read and listen is the usual watch, which this week has to do with a different sort of quality of life issue - it’s a nice video produced by a Boston TV news station about Portugal’s reforms around drug decriminalization.
I hope you enjoy this week’s links - let me know if you do!
Read
What: SHRM, Gig Workers Challenge Old Order
https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/all-things-work/pages/gig-workers-challenge-old-order.aspx
Why: A nice article on gig workers from the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM), the ACHE of the human resource world. Some people want to be gig workers because they want the autonomy and self-direction, others do it because it’s all they can get. Clearly the happiness of these two groups is going to be quite different. I think there is a political movement to make gig work harder because there is a perception that the fact that some people can’t find work other than in the gig economy is unjust, and therefore there is a belief that shutting down firms that are dependent on gig workers will fix this. I don’t think making it harder to be an Uber driver (or making it harder on Uber to work with drivers) will fix the fact that people don’t have the skills to earn good wages in the evolving economy. Uber is a symptom, not a cause in this case. In some cases, being a gig worker is just a way to convert idle time into cash.
Gig work isn’t all marginal employment, of course. There have always been skilled free-lancers who can command large fees for their work. The healthcare field makes extensive use of locums, which is gig work by another name.
Watch
What: Boston 25 News, Ending the Epidemic: The Portugal Solution (20 minutes)
Why: A powerful story about Portugal’s public health success in dealing with the opioid epidemic. Portugal has a population of about 10M, which is about the same as the population of Northern New England. Last year they only had about 100 opioid deaths in their country whereas Massachusetts alone had more than 2,000. Portugal decriminalized heroin, which does not mean legalization, and switched to providing methadone and other treatments to addicts who are trying to get clean. This is a very well done story.
Listen
What: Health Leader Forge, Heather Staples Lavoie, President of Geneia (77 minutes)
https://healthleaderforge.blogspot.com/2019/02/heather-staples-lavoie-president-of.html
Why: Very excited to share my latest Health Leader Forge interview. This month I talk with Heather Staples Lavoie, the President of Geneia, a healthcare analytics company headquartered in Manchester, NH. Heather is a serial entrepreneur, and we talk about her career in analytics, working in start-ups, and how Geneia is trying to change the experience of healthcare for patients and providers. I’m convinced this is the future of healthcare, and companies like Geneia are at the cutting edge. Check it out!
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 by e-mail, 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