Modesty and Self

David Brooks wrote an interesting Op-Ed article in the NYTimes today. Here is the link to the article.

My takeaway from reading this article is that by emphasizing too much on "self" and "self accomplishment", we may lose an importance of collectives and the meaning of our lives and values towards making progress at the collective level.

Here are some quotes from the article:

• Brooks questioned whether there is a link between a magnification of self and a declining saliency of the virtues associated with citizenship. He argued: "Citizenship, after all, is built on an awareness that we are not all that special but are, instead, enmeshed in a common enterprise, Our lives are given meaning by the service we supply to the nation."
  

Evidence-based health vs. Evidence-based medicine

The article in the Times on the quest to find appropriate medical care to achieve quality patient care is fascinating. Here is the link to the article.

• Chen, a medical doctor, who wrote the article suggests that the evidence-based medicine that focuses on patient care at the clinical premise only is not good enough to promote quality health care. We need a more integrated approach that takes a special care of a patient's life as a whole (at home, at office, etc.).
• It refers to an article in the Journal of General Internal Medicine that espouses the concept of evidence-based health.
  
• So, what is evidence-based health? It is an idea that "primary care providers and community and public health workers would no longer work alone but together in a coordinated efforts that would extend from the exam room to the home."
  
• The journal article discusses the initiative in Vermont called "the Blueprint for Health" that has successfully coordinated the care of 60,000 patients.
• Here are some excerpts of how this initiative works and some proof of success: "Community health teams that include nurses, social workers and behavioral health counselors spend time both within doctors' practices and out in the community, tackling care-related obstacles like transportation, insurance applications and even housing and unemployment. While the program is still relatively young, hospital admissions and emergency department visits have dropped, resulting in lower monthly costs per person."
• This holistic perspective towards health care looks very promising. It will be interesting to see if it can be scalable and achievable in other locations.
  

Nothingness

Nothingness .... Emptiness?

Nothingness ... Being free?

Nothingness ... Hopeless?

Nothingness ... Meaningless?

Nothingness ... Impermanence?

Nothingness ... Absolute truth?

Measure of human character

"The difference between how a person treats the powerless versus the powerful is as good a measure of human character as I know.", said Robert I. Sutton in his book "The No Asshole Rule"

Driving by wire

What do you want from a car? This question seems to have been in the mind of car companies lately. Maureen Dowd, a columnist at the New York Times, has a very interesting article on this topic. Her title is pretty provocative: Have you driven a smartphone lately?

It seems that car companies want us to have fully immersive technology-driven car driving experience. Here is a set of evidence from Dowd's article:

• Ford Sync lets you sync up to apps, reading Tweeter feeds to you
• MyFord Touch plays your iPod on demand and reads your texts to you including emoticons
• Ford is working on an avatar Eva with a face, yes a face, and voice of a woman on the dashboard who can us e-mail, update our schedule, recite articles from newspapers, guide us to the restaurant and recommend selection from iPod

Do we want all these technology driven experience while driving a car? Or do we just want to arrive safely at the destination, wherever that may be?

Organizational development and quality of work life

What are important elements needed for organizational development and high quality of work life for employees?

• Strong leadership. Here is a link to a thought provoking article in the American Scholar on solitude and leadership.
  
• Shared collective purpose and goals
• Good management of "assholes" ( a term used by Dr. Sutton from Stanford)
  
• Prevention of "organizational silence"
  

Climate of silence

• Climate of silence is detrimental to organizations' ability to change and develop in the context of pluralism.

• Climate of silence also has destructive outcomes on employees:

1. Employees' feelings of not being valued
2. Employees' perceived lack of control
3. Employees' cognitive dissonance
   

• If you experience fear every day, it drags you down and you become cowardly.
• After my suggestions were ignored, the quality of my work was still there, but I wasn't.
• See the Figure from Morrison and Milliken's (2000) article below on the negative effects of organizational silence on organizational decision making, organizational change, employees' feelings, cognition, etc.

From Organizational Silence: A Barrier to Change and Development in a Pluralistic World,
Morrison and Milliken, Academy of Management Review, 25( 4), pp. 706-725