RWL Newsletter #150 - Ideas, Narrators, & Meetings
Greetings from the University of New Hampshire! I have just returned from the annual meeting of the Northern New England Association of Healthcare Executives (the local chapter of ACHE). I brought fifteen students with me (pic above is the students with Tate Curti, the president of the NNEAHE, and me). The NNEAHE is very generous to our program, allowing our students to attend this professional event for free. We had Umang Desai, head of Doctors and Dentists at Amazon speak about healthcare innovation, had the presidents of the NH, VT, and ME hospital associations give a legislative update, and closed with a panel on diversity from HR leaders from three systems from each state. It was a fantastic opportunity for the students to network and participate in professional development with senior leaders. And now I will spend the weekend grading because it’s that time of the semester. Sigh.
On to the links!
Read
What: The New Yorker, The Myth and Magic of Generating New Ideas
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/the-myth-and-magic-of-generating-new-ideas
Why: I’m teaching a class on creativity in my management class next week. One of the questions when we talk about creativity from a management perspective is how do you push on creative insights? Obviously we want more creativity, but how do we get more creativity? Problems require creativity, by definition. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be problems, they would be processes. (A process is a problem that has already been solved in this definition.) This essay is about a mathematician who uses exercise to jar loose his creative insights. In my reading on increasing creativity, there are two important inputs. One is the Gladwell 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. The other is diversifying the inputs that exercise your mind. Sometimes the latter is literal exercise, which does in fact exercise the mind. Think about the act of trail running - it requires the mind to process a whole series of problems that would be entirely different from solving a mathematical equation. My creative hero, Leonardo da Vinci, engaged in multiple projects with different types of problems and inputs constantly, and I think the diversity of his projects fed his productivity and ability to break through barriers in art and science.
Watch
What: TEDTalk, Lori Gottlieb, How changing your story can change your life
https://www.ted.com/talks/lori_gottlieb_how_changing_your_story_can_change_your_life
Why: I’ve heard Gottlieb interviewed a couple of times, and she is such an interesting and entertaining speaker, I decided to start reading her book (which I am actually listening to on audio). She is a therapist and journalist, which makes for an interesting combination, and I’ve heard her talk about that in other venues. Here she talks mostly about how we are unreliable narrators of our own lives. I love her idea that we are all unreliable narrators, and that the therapist is meant to be a mirror that helps us see the rest of the story. In this video she says, “Stories are the way we make sense of our lives”, which I believe is true. And I think it is true not only of our lives, but of reality. The thing that really differentiates us from the rest of the animal kingdom is our ability to tell stories.
Listen
What: HBR IdeaCast, Why Meetings Go Wrong (And How to Fix Them)
https://hbr.org/ideacast/2019/11/why-meetings-go-wrong-and-how-to-fix-them.html
Why: It’s hard for me to believe, but I left my last job in administration more than a decade ago. Nevertheless, I still have nightmares about being trapped in endless meetings where very little gets accomplished. I really dread most meetings precisely because they are usually time wasters. I was a little skeptical about this interview at first, but as I listened, I thought wow, I wish not only that my previous bosses had paid attention to this, but I wish I had thought about organizing meetings with this advice, too. There is solid advice here - definitely check it out if you are a people manager.
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