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Here are a few more gems from Scott Berkun’s book The Myths of Innovation. Seems I just can’t put this down.

Every great idea in history has the fat red stamp of rejection on its face.

The secret tragedy of innovators is that their desire to improve the world is rarely matched by support from people they hope to help.

No matter how amazing an idea is, until proven otherwise, its imagined benefits will pale in comparison to the real, and nonimagined , fear of change.

The future never enters the present as a finished product, but that doesn’t stop people from expecting it to arrive that way.

Talent is only as good as the environment it’s in.

Good managers of innovation recognize that they are in primary control over the environment, and it’s up to them to create a place for talented people to do their best work.

The difference betwenn success and failure is most often relentlessness, not talent or charisma. . .

And my favorite,

The best ideas don’t always win . . .

From Scott Berkun’s excellent book The Myths of Innovation:

This is the magic double-secret principle: innovative ideas are rarely rejected on their merits; they’re rejected because of how they make people feel. If you forget people’s concerns and feelings when you present an innovation or neglect to understand their perspectives in your design, you’re setting yourself up to fail.

This is a must-read.

From Freeman Dyson’s Imagined Worlds:

Successful technologies are pulled along by the needs of the buyers, and not pushed along by the ideologies of the sellers.

And this is true no matter how current, attractive or hip that ideology may be. But what about when ‘ideology’ and buyers combine forces on a technology? Is there an ideology alive and well living in the core of the Apple?

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Matthew Battles, writing on the Britannica Blog, compares the new movie WALL-E to E.M Forster’s tale “The Machine Stops” saying,

In both stories . . . humanity has grown fat and sessile thanks to automated systems that serve their every need. Whisked from screen to screen in automated chairs, they’re unable to interact with the world without electronic mediation. And in both stories, the systems break down.

Sessile? I admit I had to look that one up. In biology, it refers to, say an organism, that is fixed in one place, immobile. For us internet junkies we may want to think about this a little more and spend a bit more time off the grid and go direct to the experience — whatever that may be.

Just a thought.

Well it’s over. Floyd has lost it all. The international sports court upheld the doping charges against him and that is that. I’ve hung in there for Floyd over the past two years (here, here and here) but my loyalty has now been fully and decisively exhausted. I know, maybe it was foolish and naive to hang on, but that’s in the ‘lessons learned’ column of life’s little challenges.

Floyd, Floyd . . . we hardly knew ya.

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From an excellent review of the issues by Rebecca Mackinnon at RConversation

. . . China’s wired elites are able to engage in discussions about social issues and even many policy issues. As Isaac Mao likes to say: ‘Before free speech, we need free thinking.’ The Internet is incubating a generation of Chinese free thinkers - who have got used to debating and acknowledging different points of view - who may over time help to shape a more pluralistic system for their country. But it will take time and there will be plenty of obstacles on the road ahead. Many fundamental arguments have yet to be had about precisely which road the Chinese people want to take. Until recently, those public debates were not possible thanks to media censorship. On the Internet, they are starting to happen.

One can never think of DNA in quite the same way after reading Judith Roof’s book, The Poetics of DNA. Here are a few morsels for your consideration:

. . . DNA is not simply a chemical active in biochemical processes. It stands at the tip of an iceberg of beliefs, ideas, and concepts about how life and science work, what we can do with what we know, and the forms knowledge can take.

. . . it [DNA] has become a symbolic repository of epistemological, ideological and conceptual change.

The evolution of DNA-based genetic science accompanied the development of digital computers and theories of cybernetics, and the emergence of the contemporary category of the postmodern. The correlation of thought and molecule suggests that the history of DNA has been a saga of things falling into place.

DNA’s analogies encourage a hyperbolic sense of agency and control as well as a host of Western ideologies about identity, gender and difference.

The paradox — that representations of science render scientific facts less “true” (or more culturally relative) while the figures of their representation become scientifically operative — is a paradox only within the larger realm of cultural dynamics.

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The method to much of my blogging madness has been to read widely in areas on the fringes or loosely connected to health care, and then try to think about the relevance (to health care) of the ideas, metaphors or insights the works may generate. I then take some of these conceptual rocks (or questions) and throw them into the web’s health care pond and look at the ripples. All this, I readily admit, is my personal strategy for dealing with intellectual entropy and boredom.

I believe a little redundancy will help in my effort to create bigger ripples - some of the boulders I’ve lobbed in are quite large. So here for your review are my “10 Top “Out-of-the-Box” Questions for Health Care.”

• Globalization: Why are we so insular and provincial when it comes to health care? Can health care become an important factor in re-establishing America’s ‘Soft Power’ in the world? (more..)

• Privacy 2.0: Are we paying enough attention to the changing nature of health care privacy in the Web 2.0 world? (more…)

• Everyware: How do we as citizens contend with ubiquitous computing surveillance (ambient, RFID etc) when it comes to health care? (more …)

• Black Swans: Is what we don’t know about health care far more relevant than what we do know? (more…)

• Post-Genomic World: Are we really up to the increasing burden of health decisions that did not exist before? (more…)

• Transparency: Is health care more translucent than transparent ? (more…)

• The Edge of Chaos: Is health care moving closer to its own “moment of complexity” ? (more…)

• Electronic Medical Records: Are EMRs becoming more of a movie than a record? (more…)

• The New Medicine: Should we re-think who should be on our medical team? (more…)

• National Health Insurance Market: Will the corporate big dogs finally take over health care? (more…)

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(Cross posted at World Health Care Blog)

Mark C. Taylor’s intriguing book, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture, is one of those brilliant boiling pot examinations of social theories and philosophy which forces one to think and re-think where we are heading in this new flat world. Of course, when confronted with such intellectual challenges, my initial thoughts are always to line up the questions good authors generate and put them to the test in health care — my personal anchor to all things real and important.

The processes of globalization and proliferation of information technology, according to Taylor, is “creating a new network culture whose complex logic and dynamics we are only beginning to understand.”

Falling between order and chaos, the moment of complexity is the point at which self-organizing systems emerge to create new patterns of coherence and structures of relations.

Poised between too much and too little order, the moment of complexity is the medium in which network culture is emerging.

Taylor is studying that site between chaos and catastrophe, where boundaries are shifting, power relationships are becoming quite shaky, but order has not been overthrown - at least not just yet. And in theory it is never quite eliminated because “separation is always incomplete, for we remain entangled with that from which we struggle to escape” as Taylor puts it.

So a question that this theoretical assault raises for health care could be this: Will there be a “moment of complexity” where the ‘grid’ that structures health care — the systems, hierarchies, roles, science, authority and the rest of it — gets, well . . . torqued. As he describes,

Whereas walls divide and seclude in an effort to impose order and control, webs link and relate, entangling everyone in multiple, mutating, and mutually defining connections in which nobody is really in control. As connections proliferate, change accelerates, bringing everything to the edge of chaos.

One could argue that the brewing excitement in US health care — the crisis of health care costs, the catastrophe often proffered by futurists and economists, the explosion of health 2.0 and beyond, the perplexity of the public will — all speak to our hapless entry into this unnerving social space: health care’s very own ‘moment of complexity.’ The future may well indeed already be here.

One of the problems of being in this space, says Taylor, is the issue of whether the noise, the information glut, and the “confusion and debilitating sense of vertigo” it engenders will overwhelm the controls. For health care, that possibility could have both liberating and devastating consequences.

One response is to simplify and strengthen the stranglehold of the authority structures that govern and control medical practice and information distribution. Yet, if complexity is inevitable, then these attempts although well intentioned, will be more or less futile. No, the question really revolves around focusing our intellectual attention to this changing landscape, its “fluid dynamics” and how we adapt to its effects.

Taylor argues that education is the currency of the realm in network culture. If that is the case, then how we train our physicians, nurses, allied health professionals, technicians and the rest will be of critical importance in confronting this emerging challenge.

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Dr. Frank Fortin (no relation) — Communications Director, MMS — responds to my flippant jibe at their recent lawsuit against the state of Massachusetts on their physician ranking program. He writes:

The MMS lawsuit is not against transparency. We are in favor of GOOD transparency. We also are deply involved in many statewide efforts to improve quality and control health care costs.

However, the system we have sued to correct is incredibly bad, and may actually make matters worse. It defames physicians and misleads patients. We tried to work with the state for years to correct its system, but after our repeated efforts fell on deaf ears, we had to go to court.

I don’t want to get too detailed about this, but here’s our key point: The methodology of this program is so bad, a great many doctors are assigned patients they didn’t treat, and assigned procedures they didn’t perform. Simple as that. Not a small fraction of doctors - a significant portion.

We’re not making perfection the enemy of the good. But the system we have sued to stop is not anywhere near good.

As an advocate of transparency, I think you would agree that a bad system is just noise. It does not advance the goals of using transparency to improve quality and control health costs.

The doctor makes several good points and rightly takes me to task as a spectator who only has a minimal grasp of the specific situation. And if we were to meet, say at a Fortin clan gathering in Massachusetts where I am from, I’m sure we would find a way to establish reasonable middle ground. My experience has taught me, however, that going to court on these matters adds more noise, more barriers to reasonable people coming to terms, more delays and costs, and in the end does not serve the public interest. It is an alternate universe that often results in a grossly distorted representation of the problems in health care.

But that’s just my opinion.

Now let’s get to the real issue. It’s a damn small world. And blogging makes it even smaller.  How amazing is this! “Fortin” is not a common name at least in Hawaii. So maybe we are related in some distant French-Canadian sort of way. And if we eventually do disagree on these issues, let’s keep it in the family. ;>)