The 18th Amendment - Legislation Vs Culture

I watched the PBS special on Prohibition this week and it was a great example of how NOT to affect cultural change.

"Fer it or Agin it?"

I'm not going to go into great detail about the "wets" and the "drys" however they were both passionate, both had good opinions and the drys won.

You can't legislate change

For 13 years it was illegal to make, transport or sell alcohol but it didn't stop anyone.  Those who disagreed with the law chose to ignore it because they thought it was silly. Additionally the police mostly chose not to enforce it for the same reason. 

You lead by example or you don't lead at all

Many of the drys who originally voted for prohibition continued to buy, continued to drink and continued to set a terrible example.

They didn't believe in the law so why should anyone else?

Does this sound similar to your company?

• Asked to obey rules that don't make sense
• Leadership that doesn't follow their own set of rules
• Threatened with punishment if you don't do what your told
• Nobody "rats out" anyone else
• You spend time finding loopholes in the rules

You can't demand that people do things and expect it to happen.  You need buy in, you need cultural change.

University of Michigan makes sure you can find your car!

When I went to the childrens hospital I saw that on every level of the parking lot they had these ticket dispensers just before you enter the walkway or elevator.

Each ticket has the parking lot and level your currently on.  All the tickets are different colors.

It's simple, straightforward and easy to do.

When going to the hospital the last thing on your mind is remembering where your car is at!

 Great job Univ. of Michigan!

Van Halen used Brown M&M's as a KPI for technical spec's

Let's take a trip in the Wayback machine.

Remembering back to my High School days

(yes I'm part of the over 40 crowd)

...rock stars would ask for all sorts of outlandish accommodations just because they could.

Little did I realize until years later that this one really had a purpose and it's a great story about how anything can be used as a KPI if you're creative enough.

Snopes does a great job of clarifying this rumor and it has a little lean lesson in it as well.

Explained by David Lee Roth in his autobiography (excerpt found on Snopes)

Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets.  We'd pull up with nine eighteen wheeler trucks, full of gear there the standard was three trucks, max.  And there were many, many technical errors- whether it was the girders couldn't support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren't big enough to move the gear through.

The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function. So just as a little test, in the technical aspect of the rider, it would say "Article 148:  There will be fifteen amperage voltage sockets at twenty-foot spaces, evenly, providing nineteen amperes..." This kind of thing.  And article number 126, in the middle of nowhere, was:  "There will be no brown M&M's in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation."

So, when i would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl...well, line-check the entire production.  Guaranteed you're going to arrive at a technical error.  They didn't read the contract.  Guaranteed you'd run into a problem.  Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show. Something like, literally , life-threatening.

This is a great reminder that your KPI's don't have to be complex or even related to the the actual job being done.  They just need to work.

AdeptBio is the first lean Contract Procurement Organization (CPO)

What's the heck is a Contract Procurement Organization?

Here are the basics - Pharmaceutical companies look for treatments and cures for diseases.  

To do this research they need tissues, blood and other human samples with these diseases to study. The source of these samples are patients seeking treatment at  hospitals and clinics all around the world.

A hospitals first priority is patient care and many hospitals are already stretched thin when it comes to operations and staffing.  This is where AdeptBio comes into help.

 AdeptBio's role?

We gather the Pharma's complex requirements and help them craft a biospecimen procurement plan to get the research materials they need to develop biomarkers and treatments.

We then implement this plan at several of our participating hospitals making sure to cause little to no disruption to the hospital employees and never compromising a patients health or treatment.

We do this in a lean way constantly improving our process and helping them improve theirs as well.

Is this ethical?

Absolutely.  IRB's are in place at all collection facilities and patients are fully informed of the program. They give us approval/consent for us to collect excess blood and tissue samples for research.

Patients are eager to participate in these programs to help find new treatments and cures that will benefit others in years to come.

Why did I take on a full time position

How often are you asked to help build a lean startup that fits perfectly with your expertise, doing what you love and helping others all at the same time.

I like to think I'm helping to "kick cancer's ass" but we also work with other diseases like Alzehimer's and Leukemia.  In the end...I feel like I'm making positive change....and I can't ask for more than that.

Here's a podcast where I talk about using lean in custom procurement and biobanking.  Now I'm excited to practice what I preach!

Visual controls can be more memorable with a little humor added in

On a recent trip overseas I saw this posted over the bathroom toilet and had a good chuckle.  

While I can't read what it says, I'm certain that I now know the proper procedure for using the toilet brush.

If you want someone to push a button...make it stand out!

After posting my blog about my daughter D. playing Starfall I was asked "How she learned how to operate a mouse?"

It was very simple, 100% my wife K.'s idea and made great use of some stickers.

We helped our daughter using visual controls -

It was really simple for D. to learn how to use a mouse/touchpad by showing her where to click.

K. and I originally thought about getting her a child's mouse that only has one button but we realized that wasn't going to solve the root cause.

We put a containment measure in place

Problem - D. didn't know which button she should click to make her games go.

Containment Measure - K. took one of D.'s stickers and put it on the left mouse button (see image above) and said "When you get the arrow where you want, just click the smiley face." She picked up on it almost instantaneously thus empowering her to use the mouse.

Things we did and didn't do as containment measures

Originally we enlarged the size of the arrow and slowed down the pointer speed to make it easier for her but now she can operate the system at normal speed.

We did discuss changing the pointer icon from an arrow to a smiley face or dinosaur however we wanted her to be able to use any computer anywhere so we left it as the standard "arrow shape".

D.'s current status is that she doesn't need the smiley face anymore so we've removed the stickers,  however they are really cute....I put mine back on!

I listened to the hype and got some fries from Wendy's.  Problem...they forgot to salt them.

I'm not their typical customer

I admit it...I rarely eat fast food anymore.  The movie Super Size Me really opened my eyes.

However I was in a mood for some good fries today and I keep seeing commercials about Wendy's.

Their new natural cut fries with sea salt are supposed to be better then McDonald's so  I decided to see if the product lived up to the hype.

They didn't taste bad, they just didn't taste

With my $2.32 in hand I purchased a large size at the drive-thru and while on my way home I reached into the bag and ate one.

To Wendy's credit the fries didn't taste bad...they just had no flavor  They forgot to salt them.

Here's the issue.

If marketing is going to hype it...if all the bags and containers (see pic above) are going to promote it...and they spend all this money and convince someone like me to come in and try them.  They should at least have a system in place to make sure they salted them.

Yes...I'm a little disgruntled...it's cold and rainy outside here in Michigan, I reached out for an old favorite comfort food and I was left wanting. 

Shame on you Wendy...I'm breaking up with you again.

What happens when you spend $350 million and forget to listen to your customers?

What is caBIG-

caBIG stands for the Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid and was originally started in 2004 to create a framework and standard by which everyone who is doing research can easily share information and collaborate with others.

Between 2004 - 2010 the total cost was $350 million.

What did the customers/users have to say?

In 2010 the new NCI Director asked for an independent assessment to be done on caBIG.  They basically asked the customers of caBIG what they thought of the program.  Below is an excerpt from the reported findings.

There was complete agreement that caBIG®’s original goals were worthy and remain highly relevant to the future of cancer research in the United States (U.S.). However, there was also strong consensus among those interviewed that caBIG® has expanded far beyond those goals to implement an overly complex and ambitious software enterprise of NCI-branded tools

There was strong consensus from the interviews on the following points:

• The caBIG® program management structure is overly complex and expensive.
• The contractors did not really understand the cancer research space in which
  they were operating.
• The internal processes for soliciting and evaluating proposals for subcontracts
  are not transparent.
• Participation of the same contractors in both program management and software
  development has the potential for conflict of interest and unfair competitive advantage.
• There is a perception that caBIG® favors an “in group” of participants.

There were several fundamental problems in the approaches used to implement the caBIG® program, including:

1. A “cart-before-the-horse” overly broad grand vision for the program.
2. A “build it and they will come” mentality.
3. An unfocused attempt to address all problems in clinical and basic research.
4. A “one size fits all” approach to funding and management of scientific and
   software development projects.
5. A business model that is unsustainable and not cost-effective for the NCI or
   potential users.
6. Development and management of clinical informatics and basic science discovery
   tools under one umbrella organization.
7. Lack of independent scientific oversight of goals, priorities, projects and
   evaluation of progress.

Those of us in the commercial sector are not surprised.

We saw the behemoth that caBIG was becoming.  It was trying to be everything to everybody and lost focus on who its customers were.

There are several tools that caBIG developed that work well, the problem is that there are commercial entities like LabVantage that have comparable tools that are more polished, user friendly and easier to deploy.

The biggest difference is that caBIG is free to use while LabVantage is not.  But then again I think $350 million could have purchased a lot of LabVantage licenses!

You can read the entire report here.  Download BSA caBIG Final Report - 2-24-11