Category: Opinion

The purpose of this section is intended for opinion, blogging on general topics/issues and features of FOCM members.

Basic Principles for Success

I saw this article published by Brent Beshore, Founder and CEO at Permanent Equity. I thought it was worth sharing for wider distribution and may help others be more successful.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140106160108-21597783-16-basic-principles-for-avoiding-stupidity/

Consistently practicing the 16 principles below is a path to success.

1. Follow Through: Just do what you said you were going to do when you said you were going to do it. If you promised something, deliver.

2. Say “Thank You”: The world doesn’t owe you anything, so don’t act like it does. If you receive a compliment, thank the person who told you. If you’re pleased with someone’s performance tell them.

3. Be On Time:  As the saying goes, “Five minutes early is on time, on time is late, and late is unacceptable.”

4. Use Impeccable Grammar: If someone can’t properly spell, punctuate, or structure a sentence, chances are he/she a) lacks attention to detail and/or  b) doesn’t care.

5. Say “Sorry”: Being wrong is being human. Just own up to it, and everyone will move on. Apologizing says that you a) care, b) are humble, and c) are self-aware.

6. Be Intentional: We all have the same amount of time. You can choose to randomly stumble around or you can be intentional. It’s your choice, every single day.

7. Question Why: The smartest people in the world know what they don’t know, and they aren’t afraid to ask why. If you don’t understand, ask why until you get it.

8. Default to Silence: There’s a reason you have two ears and only one mouth. If you don’t have something meaningful to say, keep your mouth shut.

9. Set Expectations: The formula is simple: Happiness = Reality — Expectations. Changing reality is hard. Setting expectations is easy. Under-promise and fill reality with happiness.

10. Take Responsibility: We love to rationalize blame. While it feels good to play the victim, it’s destructive, leading to a cynical and jaded life. The far better approach is to say, “It’s all my fault.” It gives you control to change yourself and your circumstances.

11. Say “No”: Life is a game of opportunity costs. If you say “yes,” you’re saying “no” to something else. Have clear priorities, pursue opportunities that align, and say “no” to everything else.

12. Continuously Learn: If you wake up each day trying to get a little better, before long, you’ll find yourself ahead. Read, ask, and listen. If something conflicts with your view, dig deeper and determine whether you should embrace it or discard it.

13. Embrace Simplicity: Small bits of complexity add up quickly and exponentially. A little white lie can get you fired. A little gossip can ruin a friendship. Enough small splurges can lead to bankruptcy. Given a choice, always choose simplicity.

14. Gain Perspective: We measure ourselves by our intentions, but others by their actions. Everyone else, regardless of how convinced you are that they’re “doing fine,” is struggling with something. Remember that to have some perspective.

15. Check Yourself: As Warren Buffett says, “Negotiating with one’s self seldom produces a barroom brawl.” Surround yourself with people who will a) call you on your BS, b) thoughtfully help you reason, and c) genuinely understand your weaknesses.

16. Avoid Eating Crap: You were given exactly one container for this life, and the quickest way to damage it is by consistently eating lab-concocted, food-like substances pumped full of chemicals, hormones, and fake nutrition. Simply eat real food that came from something previously living in a recognizable form.

The truth is that 100 percent consistency is impossible, and I’m certainly no exception. In the past two weeks, I’ve been late to a meeting, parroted some gossip, and failed to say “sorry” to two people who deserved to hear it — and that’s just what I can recall. But I’m constantly striving to walk the talk, and I encourage you to do the same. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.”

Personal improvement is ongoing, I hope some of this article I shared spoke to you and may increase your happiness and success.

Government-Run Healthcare is Sub-Standard

So it turns out that Government-run healthcare (most European countries have this model) comes in far ahead of the US method of healthcare delivery in one category: patients are much more likely to die in the hospital.
“A recent report from Channel 4 News in the U.K. revealed figures showing that National Health Service (NHS) hospitals (the government run health program) have death rates “among the worst” compared to other countries. In fact, Channel 4 found that NHS patients are 45% more likely to die in a hospital than the United States. Due to privacy, the article was not able to reveal the other five countries.”
Is it the profit motive that is embedded in US healthcare delivery that provides us better healthcare or is it the American culture of competitiveness (also driven by/supported from a capitalist system)? For example: Mayo Clinic wants to be better than Banner Health so as to make claims that their patients do better.  Maybe it is America’s history of entrepreneurism and attention to continuous improvement (also a straight line tied capitalism). If Mayo puts in place higher staff to patient ratios and spends more on training, it increases the price of healthcare but to the gain of better quality of life and longer life. And as Professor Richard Zimmerman, a neurosurgeon at the Mayo Clinic Hospital, points out that while this can be labor intensive with a dozen or more people involved in each round for each patient, but he said it is cost efficient in the end. He noted that “It is less expensive than having a lot of deaths and having admissions that last longer because you don’t do it right the first time.”
Although other health economists have pointed out that more and quicker deaths in the hospital actually use less resources and saves money.
So what is the goal of socialized healthcare –
  • reduce the amount spent on healthcare
  • give access of affordable healthcare to more people
  • improve population health
The conundrum is you can’t achieve the first and second without a decrease in the quality of healthcare that is provided.

Rip Van Winkle aka Advances in Technology

Maybe the title of this should be “the pace of change”.  Recently while starting a company with people much younger than me, I felt like I had missed several years of involvement in the world.

With the accelerating pace of technological change, many of us find ourselves behind in keeping up with new software, programs, and technological processes implemented in the workplace.

A critical part of adapting to the digital advancements is learning and training. Implementing various types of training systems, such as written instructions and live video training to accommodate different work styles and preferences may be helpful.
In order to be effective, we need to identify the technological changes that will enable us to attain the goals of our future projects and avoid those that could jeopardize their completion.

How can we adapt to the rapid, sometimes unpredictable digital advancements? How do we prepare ourselves for the new technology processes? How do you know if you indirectly resist the changes and how can you solve that?

The Uncertainty about future or current technologies might have nothing to do with the technology itself, but instead with how we respond to the changes.

I don’t know if kids still read Washington Irving’s story of Rip Van Winkle.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rip_Van_Winkle  It’s about a man who fell asleep and woke up 20 years later and it was hard to accept all that had changed.  Well, lately, I feel like I’ve been asleep for 10 years and have completely missed some of the digital advances and even the more mundane.

Let’s address the mundane one first, so tonight I stop in at Staples because I’m all out of “business” envelopes – you know  the type, the long envelope that if you wanted to mail an 8.5 x 11 inch letter to someone, you’d fold it in thirds-ish and put it in this envelope. So I confidently stride to the aisle labeled Envelopes and begin looking for business envelopes.  No such thing to be found.  They had boxes of an envelope with the wording Number 10.  So I look at the dimensions and it seems that they would work.  At check out, to confirm I was buying what I needed, I ask the two 20-30 year olds – one was a manager –  at check out, “are these envelopes the same as what I know as “business envelopes”? They, of course, had never heard that term.  So I explained that I was looking for what I know as business envelopes, they said, well, yeah it looks like that would fit as this is 9 and a half inches wide.

Now  to the digital world – so a client of ours texts us to say he’ll be texting us an image that we’re to take a picture of and save for later use in demo’ing his product at a conference. Those simple 6 words: “take a picture of and save”. So that I know what I’m to do I reply with: “just to confirm – by take a picture of and save – do you mean that I’m to use my iPhone and when I see the image I’m to do that iphone thing where I push a button on the side of the phone and at the same time push the round home button such that it takes a screen shot and then once that’s done I click on the screen shot and select “save to pictures”?  He replied, “yes”.  So you see what’s happening here? 59 words of explanation are needed for me to understand, interpret and act on his 6 words.

You should pray for my colleagues, this type of thing happens nearly weekly.    Quite simple really isn’t it: “take a picture and save it.” *%$”(#*%4”@$(*$*(#@$*(@#)

Single payer government run healthcare

Here’s why I am not in favor of government run healthcare.

https://www.policymed.com/2013/10/uk-hospitals-post-excessively-high-death-rates.html?sthash.fGHzbjOl.mjjo#

In addition to worse care and higher death rates for hospitalized patients, just think of your experience at the DMV – government employees who get their salary and their two breakshttps://www.policymed.com/2013/10/uk-hospitals-post-excessively-high-death-rates.html?sthash.fGHzbjOl.mjjo# and a lunch who don’t care how long you wait, have no motivation to improve the process or the quality and if they did, there’s not budget for improvements.

To my friends who say “we need single payer healthcare” – I am astonished.  Sure it makes it equally accessible to all – an equally frustrating, inefficient and uncaring experience. Competition among physician practices to earn more money drives improvements in customer service, quality and improved outcomes.

Maybe politicians want single-payer to lower the average life span in order to improve Social Security’s solvency and remove people from city,  state and federal pension rolls. Much like Governor Cuomo did in NY by sending the elderly with Covid to nursing homes.

FOCM Networking Person of the Year for 2020

Without a doubt the work done by the pharmaceutical, biotech, clinical research, drug development industry and the Food and Drug Administration is worthy of this distinction for 2020. What was accomplished is just short of miraculous.

The federal government (FDA) and the corporations cut no corners. I have no doubt that everything was done according to established good clinical principles. What was done was the speeding up of the regulatory processes; decreasing the workflow processing time. Turn around time on data review and decision making was the focus. The researchers and the reviewers of the data had Covid-19 treatments and vaccines at the forefront of their priorities.

The typical time for vaccine development to get approved is 4 years. The first two approved were done within 12 months!! There are several more in development.

We are now beginning to see the impact the vaccine is having in the decline of daily new cases. Many people have now received their second dose.

The United Kingdom began vaccinating their population one week earlier than the US and you can see the impact to their daily new cases as well. This has me very encouraged. I’m hopeful that by Memorial Day, we’ll be back to dining out and meeting in person, traveling to conferences, vacations, etc.

What Would Andy Taylor Do

Remember Andy Griffith’s character Sheriff Andy Taylor of Mayberry, NC. He rarely carried a gun, almost never had one in a holster on his hip. Now I know times have changed since the idyllic 1950’s, but a phone call to a radio station caught my attention. The caller said that X number of years ago, probably in the 1960’s – 1970’s, police forces began learning and training using military type tactics. The caller indicated that people at the top in US police forces all began to adopt similar training.

He stated once upon a time, police were trained and called Peace Officers. The new training teaches them to control and dominate a situation and a suspect.

The situation with Rayshard Brooks could have happened so differently with the mindset of a Peace Officer. And in my mind that’s the policing style of (I know he’s just a TV character) Andy Taylor. So ask yourself in the situation with Rayshard Brooks: what would Andy Taylor do?

The police were talking with Rayshard Brooks for about 30 minutes when they decided they had to arrest him. Rayshard tested positive for DUI with a blood alcohol level of .108. About 30 years ago a person was deemed intoxicated with a level of .10 and then I think all states lowered it to .08. Why he chose to resist arrest and fight so hard when everything was going so calmly is beyond my understanding. No doubt that he’s responsible for the escalation that took place once he resisted arrest. Current police training is to take all measures to control and arrest the individual and if fired upon, end the situation as quickly as possible.

What would Andy Taylor have done – in this case? Possibly talk to Rayshard for an hour, just chattin’ away like Andy liked to do and then re-test him, at which point, his blood alcohol could be down to or below .08. Then perhaps have him go into Wendy’s to get his dinner, eat it there and then go home, by which time he would no longer be above the limit. Another approach after talking to him for a while would be have Rayshard go in and get his dinner and then the police drive him home and Rayshard could get his car the next day. That’s thinking like Andy Taylor, Peace Officer.

And for the future of policing, why they’re not widely using the BolaWrap https://wraptechnologies.com/ boggles my mind. Had they had this when Rayshard ran away, he would have been stopped, like with a spider-man spider web, he would be alive today, his daughter would still have her dad.

I’m not in favor of defunding the police and I applaud and support them for the tough job they have. I think there is room for peace officer training. I realize they do get training in how to de-escalate, they should also have some leeway in how to handle situations like in the case of Rayshard Brooks.

COVID-19 Quarantine Update

Well, I admit it, my optimistic interpretation of the data was incorrect. I felt strongly that April 4 was the peak of new cases in the US and that stayed true until April 24 when we had a spike of 38,ooo+ new cases reported.

Perhaps that is due to broader availability of testing, which is finding more individuals who test positive for coronavirus. However, the optimist in me did find a brilliantly shining piece of good news – April 26 – the number of new cases reported was 26,509; the 4th lowest daily new cases since April 1.

But my prediction that we’d be dancing around the MayPole on May 1 will not be the case. Yes, some states will be easing restrictions on May 1, but not to the extent I’d hoped. We have to continue to be wise and listen to the scientists, review the data and go forward cautiously. 14 days from April 24 is May 8 and my new prediction (like economists know, if you keep changing your forecast, you’ll eventually be right) is that by May 8, we’ll be having 10,000 or fewer new daily cases. Be optimistic – let’s make optimism be contagious!

Quarantine Day 27

April 4 is standing tall as the peak day of new coronavirus cases in the US. We’re now 8 days since that date. Looking at data from other countries, shows that in day 10 – 14 from peak the number of new daily cases is around 20% of the peak.

With over 2,000 patients in clinical trials of drugs that have solid promise based on pre-clinical data, those patients will likely be contagious for shorter periods of time reducing the transmissibility and blunting the number of new cases. Also, the prescribing of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin in early published trials shows elimination of the virus by day 5 whereas patients with no treatment are still positive for 10-12 days. This, too is probably a significant reason for the decline since April 4.

I truly believe pharmaceutical intervention is playing a big role in flattening the curve. Let’s remember that the US pharmaceutical industry is one of America’s greatest assets and is an important part of our excellent and effective healthcare system.

COVID-19 on the ropes

Well, as you know if you keep changing your prediction you’ll eventually be correct. I had optimistically hoped that the number of new cases would have peaked by March 31; however, I missed it by 5 days. The peak, I believe, occurred on April 4 and in analyzing other countries, by day 10 from the peak, the number of new daily cases will be halved.

Call me an optimist – because I am one. With so many patients being treated in clinical trials with several drugs and vaccines and the availability of the safe (on the market since 1955, side effects well known and manageable) hydroxychloroquine, either alone or in combination with azithromycin, the duration of illness is declining in thousands of patients. This reduces the time they’re contagious. That coupled with social distancing and warmer weather will soon have us back to our new normal.

I think we can all gather around the May pole on May 1 (no one seems to do this any more, do they?) and skip around it, singing, “I’d like to buy the world a coke”. I do recall skipping around a May pole in elementary school. What was the purpose? What is a May pole? Questions for another time perhaps. Or feel free to use the comments section to post a reply.

It is now time to unquarantine all of us and move to quarantining just those who test positive, those who have symptoms or who have had recent contact with someone who tested positive.

And let’s start buying stuff so heavily from one country, maybe even make stuff in America again. I’ve been looking for a toaster oven made in any country but China – no can find!