Healthcare Costs

Because I'm not sure were else to save the spreadsheet I just made... Healthcare & Food Expenditures, % GDP:

2010 Healthcare Food Total 

United States: 13.9 6.8 20.7

Switzerland: 10.9 10.2 21.1

Germany: 10.8 11.4 22.2

France: 9.4 13.5 22.9

Canada: 9.4 9.1 18.5

Australia: 9.1 10.5 19.6

Belgium: 9 13 22

Average 10.35714286 10.64285714 21

The Exasperation of a Billionaire

Nice interview in the Wall Street Journal with Mortimer Zuckerman.

'It's as if he doesn't like people," says real-estate mogul and New York Daily News owner Mortimer Zuckerman of the president of the United States. Barack Obama doesn't seem to care for individuals, elaborates Mr. Zuckerman, though the president enjoys addressing millions of them on television.

Reminds me of a personally favorite line from Mad Men, when Roger Sterling says to Don Draper, "The reason you're no good at relationships is you don't value them."  Obama strikes me as one with a few (very few) but deep relationships.  The rest, he doesn't value; not in a personal way.

His narcissism is fundamentally different then that of Bill Clinton.  Clinton, genuinely, feels peoples pain.  He likes to shake hands and meet folks.  It's personal.  Of Obama I get the impression of someone who understands that folks are hurting through the lense of policy decisions.

That's the difference when Zuckerman talks about pain (people wanted costs controlled) and policy (but Obama instead made expanded coverage a priority).  Obamacare makes more sense from a policy position if you believe in healthcare as a public service; it doesn't make sense if you look at it politically or within the financial situation of 2009/2010.  When people were feeling deep and severe pain, Obama's actions were primarily in long-term policy areas -- Obamacare and supporting previous government policies that expanded state and local government by funneling "stimulus" money into preventing layoffs in areas that program costs had exceeded the ability of state and local governments to fund them.

Striking the right balance between the emotional and the rational is difficult.  A lot of people are far stronger on one then the other.  Favoring rational thought, however, can leave you blind to emotional factors that are just as critical to good leadership.

(Side note -- besides his comments directly on Obama, his real estate transactions starting in 2006 seem to be a good example of Positive / Negative Black Swan investing; by selling the buildings that would have a negative impact by a Black Swan -- the bubble bursting -- they put themselves in the position to have strong cash reserves and buy a couple premium buildings at discounts when the economy did crash.)

Lie Spotting

Nifty TED Talk by Pamela Meyer.  What I found fascinating was that contempt is the only emotion that's asymmetric -- that must have interesting implications for the left/right brain split, and also the left-gaze bias of humans and canines (looking at humans):

<iframe width="640" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/P_6vDLq64gE?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Emotion, Reason, and Obama

Nice article I just read:

Obama is, in short, a political loner who prefers policy over the people who make politics in this country work. “He likes politics,” said a Washington veteran who supports Obama, “but like a campaign manager likes politics, not a candidate.” 

The former draws energy from science and strategy, the latter from contact with people.

Which raises an odd question: Is it possible to be America’s most popular politician and not be very good at American politics?

We know Obama can connect emotionally, in a very particular way and with great preparation -- we've heard him deliver well prepared speeches. But that doesn't mean the fire is in the belly to, in the words of Martha Coakley, "stand outside of Fenway, in the cold, shaking hands."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/obama-the-loner-president/2011/10/03/gIQAHFcSTL_story.html

It's probably also the source of his faux-pas when the "technical" Obama imagining the theater of himself on the grand stage doesn't stop and think about the "personal" side of demanding to speak at the Brandenburg Gate; an honor that the Germans should extend to someone they wish to thank, not to be asked for by a candidate.

Thinking about the current uncertainty on the Republican nomination race, there's a long tradition of Republicans running more then once for the nomination. Nixon, Reagan, George H.W. Bush fit that mold. Thomas Dewey actually received the nomination twice ('44 and '48, though let's face it '44 was all about sacrificial lambs at the height of World War II), while Shrub was able to tap his father's network of relationships. Gerald Ford was the accidental President (and never ran for election), which leaves us with Eisenhower as the only "virgin" Republican nominee of the last 60 years -- but he had unbeatable name recognition and in a Republican party whose internal politics favor those who make friends the General who had to make all the other self-centered, ego filled Lieutenant Generals and higher get along in Europe he clearly had the personal diplomatic skills needed to make people feel personally valued.

Romney is very good at the science of management, though he's "flexible" to be kind on policy -- call it cold calculus, when one policy is politically dead he replaces...Obama may accept healthcare without a public option, but Romney is a chameleon who can change from pro-choice to pro-life as it suits political expediency. He's not charismatic in exuding an authentic charm, I'm certain he'd admit it himself.

Herman Cain, guy got game. The least qualified of the major candidates (though I reserve "worse" as a tie to the two psychological basket cases of Bachman and Gingrich), he can connect emotionally. I've heard some of the most genuine sounding soundbites I've ever heard from a politician listening to radio stories that included a Cain quote. Cain being the current front runner by the polls is I'm sure a shock even to him, since I don't think he ever thought of himself as an actually serious candidate. (Huntsman by the way tops the list to me as the best qualified in the range of his experience, but I have the impression he's running this time mainly with an eye on future campaigns)

Connecticut's internecine war continues...

My last post had the comments from Edith Prague, a state Senator.

Here's comments from one of the Correction Officer's union officials:

[Kevin Brace, the steward at the Northern Correctional Institute, wrote a letter to Moises Padilla, an outspoken union leader in Cheshire], "I am pleading with you to please stop talking to the press about SEBAC, and to let things work themselves out. I am not censoring your right to free speech. I am just pointing out to you that sometimes the best intentions don't always produce the best results.

Fair enough -- controlling the message is important. There is balance to be struck, and frankly messages often need to be tailored to different groups. Tailoring can make very different suits out of the same cloth, without changing the cloth and keeping the suit functional.

But then Brace himself falls completely down:

"I believe our union made a huge mistake by voting the SEBAC agreement down,'' Brace wrote. "It was our members' self-imposed ignorance that kept them away from the informational meetings that we held. Meetings that if you had attended might have put your apprehensions to rest.''

I'm pretty certain, however, going on to call your own membership stupid and lazy is not an effective way to influence people towards adopting your position.

Is Brace representing the interests of his members?

Or did he just throw them under the bus so he could curry favor with state political leaders, "Look, it wasn't us (your friends), it was those darn dumb members of ours! We can't control what they do when they won't listen!"

With friends, and leaders, like this who needs enemies?

From what I was reading in the paper and listening to on the radio before the deal was officially voted down, I had a feeling it was going to be defeated because the rank and file was feeling their leadership had abandoned them. The leaders' actions since then certainly reinforce that narrative.

And the way not to approach things...

If these are your friends -- and Edith Prague is one of the most liberal, pro-labor members in the already left leaning Connecticut General Assembly -- I really hate to think of what your enemy thinks of you:

Sen. Edith Prague, a Columbia Democrat, said she cannot understand the voting trend.

"It's a nightmare. It is a nightmare to think these folks don't understand that there are dire consequences of them not accepting the SEBAC agreement,'' Prague said. "It is a good agreement. They are lucky to have these benefits. Nobody in their right mind, under these circumstances, would turn down that agreement. It's just got to be that they are believing this horrible, horrible information that is being put out there on their health plan. They think they are going to be put into the HUSKY plan? Give me a break. They are getting misinformation. They just don't understand what is real and what is garbage.''

She added, "I can't explain it. It is a disaster. Don't they realize it is a disaster to vote this agreement down. They could be part of the layoffs. Don't they know that? That's a real possibility that they could be voting to lay themselves off. ... I actually called Sal Luciano and said, Can I do something? He said, Edith, I've tried everything.''

"If they don't care about their fellow employees, they better start caring about themselves. If they think that, they are stupid. ... I can't imagine them being so stupid.''

Concerning the purported role of the Yankee Institute in spreading disinformation to tank the deal, Prague said, "I wouldn't be surprised. As a matter of fact, I think they want Malloy to fail. ... They're a mighty force. They get their message out there. I heard Jim Vicevich, who I never listen to, and he was blasting the deal. Those state employees ought to listen to their union leaders like Sal Luciano. ... I'm hoping there's some way that SEBAC can make an adjustment and ask for a re-vote of those units that voted it down. I don't know if that's possible.''

Regarding Malloy, Prague said, "The guy is giving state employees the biggest deal they could ever have. ... This governor is not joking. Consequently, there are thousands of people who could lose their jobs. I don't think bumping rights should enter this picture at all. I don't know where you can find 7,000 state employees to lay off. If they vote this down, they're putting themselves in jeopardy.''

"Social workers. I can't figure it out - unless they're believing the propaganda that's out there,'' said Prague, a former social worker who holds a master's degree in the field. "I think they're out of their minds, and if I had the chance, I would tell him. ... I don't know why these people are voting down this agreement. The private sector folks would die for this kind of package. They don't have good retirement benefits. They don't have the kind of healthcare, for minimum cost, that state employees have.''

Prague, who never saw the rejection coming, says the people who vote against the agreement should be the ones who are laid off.

Let's see, you've just called the folks whose votes you really want:
-- stupid
-- selfish
-- crazy

in the course of a few paragraphs. This at a time when it's already clear (and has been for a couple weeks) to anyone following just what's been leaking out to the news and radio call-in shows that there is a gulf of distrust between union rank and file members, and their leadership (an opinion the leadership is brown-nosing the top Democratic party leaders in Connecticut and after over 20 years out of the Governors mansion were desperate to make him look good).

She also played two big concerns many folks have had (primarily) about Democrats.

The "ask for a re-vote of the units that voted it down" smacks of the Daley's famous, "Vote early and often!" big-city political shenanigans (and Malloy won office due to Connecticut's largest city putting him over the top at the end...while he would've won Bridgeport anyways, the irregularities and poorly run election there was a head shaker).

While the call for vengeance against those who voted against it -- to lay them off -- lays naked on the table the biggest single reason abolishing the secret ballot in union elections, the goal of organized labor's Card Check campaign, is such a terrible, awful idea.

The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science

The theory of motivated reasoning builds on a key insight of modern neuroscience (PDF): Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call "affect"). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds—fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before we're aware of it. That shouldn't be surprising: Evolution required us to react very quickly to stimuli in our environment. It's a "basic human survival skill," explains political scientist Arthur Lupia of the University of Michigan. We push threatening information away; we pull friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself.
...
We're not driven only by emotions, of course—we also reason, deliberate. But reasoning comes later, works slower—and even then, it doesn't take place in an emotional vacuum. Rather, our quick-fire emotions can set us on a course of thinking that's highly biased, especially on topics we care a great deal about.
...
In Kahan's research (PDF), individuals are classified, based on their cultural values, as either "individualists" or "communitarians," and as either "hierarchical" or "egalitarian" in outlook. (Somewhat oversimplifying, you can think of hierarchical individualists as akin to conservative Republicans, and egalitarian communitarians as liberal Democrats.) In one study, subjects in the different groups were asked to help a close friend determine the risks associated with climate change, sequestering nuclear waste, or concealed carry laws: "The friend tells you that he or she is planning to read a book about the issue but would like to get your opinion on whether the author seems like a knowledgeable and trustworthy expert." A subject was then presented with the résumé of a fake expert "depicted as a member of the National Academy of Sciences who had earned a Ph.D. in a pertinent field from one elite university and who was now on the faculty of another." The subject was then shown a book excerpt by that "expert," in which the risk of the issue at hand was portrayed as high or low, well-founded or speculative. The results were stark: When the scientist's position stated that global warming is real and human-caused, for instance, only 23 percent of hierarchical individualists agreed the person was a "trustworthy and knowledgeable expert." Yet 88 percent of egalitarian communitarians accepted the same scientist's expertise. Similar divides were observed on whether nuclear waste can be safely stored underground and whether letting people carry guns deters crime. (The alliances did not always hold. In another study (PDF), hierarchs and communitarians were in favor of laws that would compel the mentally ill to accept treatment, whereas individualists and egalitarians were opposed.)
...
And that undercuts the standard notion that the way to persuade people is via evidence and argument. In fact, head-on attempts to persuade can sometimes trigger a backfire effect, where people not only fail to change their minds when confronted with the facts—they may hold their wrong views more tenaciously than ever.

http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/denial-science-chris-mooney?page=1

The reader comments, following the subject of this article, are priceless.

Stimulating Stories

Seeking stimulation is a core part of being Human.

We evolved on the plains of Africa, as prey. Our distant ancestors were ever alert for danger.

People like stories; they get stimulation from good stories.

(I wonder if anyone has done scientific research trying to link teen's love of horror movies with those ancient genes from back when were the prey and not the alpha predator.)

But stimulation usually doesn't come from the new. Indeed, re-stimulating the existing can be very effective. Our memories depend on it to "lock" in our experiences -- whether it's repeated like a teacher drilling on the ABCs, or our dreams replaying the events. Stimulation from repeating past experience is easy stimulation. New things are complex to understand; we like stimulation, we don't like anxiety; it takes time to understand and overcome anxiety over the different. Repeating a past stimulation is a mental version of comfort food.

It doesn't have to be a story -- alcohol or potato chips or any of a myriad of other objects or actions can provide that repetitive stimulation.

And here's a problem -- the stories that resonate best with some people irritate others. Listen to Rush Limbaugh; he provides a narrative and regular reinforcement. It's stimulating. Others who haven't bought into his right-wing narrative may instead find enjoyment in a left-wing narrative they've bought into. It's not about right or wrong; it's about the storyline they've come to enjoy and how they get regular hits of stimulation again from it. Then there's the love-to-hate crowd; they're getting stimulation not from a positive emotional response but from a negative emotional response to Limbaugh.

The resonate story is one that stimulates; and good leadership involves the ability to constantly stimulate your followers -- make them keep looking towards you, knowing they'll get a bit of that stimulation people are constantly craving.

Google Analysis of Managers

Got sucked in by winter, hopefully I can get back on track with new posts here!

The New York Times this week had a fascinating article on Google using their analysis skills focused on trying to figure out what worked and didn't work for their managers -- and using the feedback to "tune up" their poorer managers.

Many organizations may not have the resources of Google, but this approach is fascinating to me if for no other reason but the intensive and effective focus on what actually works and how do you get there:

“The starting point was that our best managers have teams that perform better, are retained better, are happier — they do everything better,” Mr. Bock says. “So the biggest controllable factor that we could see was the quality of the manager, and how they sort of made things happen. The question we then asked was: What if every manager was that good? And then you start saying: Well, what makes them that good? And how do you do it?”

In Project Oxygen, the statisticians gathered more than 10,000 observations about managers — across more than 100 variables, from various performance reviews, feedback surveys and other reports. Then they spent time coding the comments in order to look for patterns.

Once they had some working theories, they figured out a system for interviewing managers to gather more data, and to look for evidence that supported their notions. The final step was to code and synthesize all those results — more than 400 pages of interview notes — and then they spent much of last year rolling out the results to employees and incorporating them into various training programs.

The process of reading and coding all the information was time-consuming. This was one area where computers couldn’t help, says Michelle Donovan, a manager of people analytics who was involved in the study.

“People say there’s software that can help you do that,” she says. “It’s been our experience that you just have to get in there and read it.”

GIVEN the familiar feel of the list of eight qualities, the project might have seemed like an exercise in reinventing the wheel. But Google generally prefers, for better or worse, to build its own wheels.

“We want to understand what works at Google rather than what worked in any other organization,” says Prasad Setty, Google’s vice president for people analytics and compensation.

Once Google had its list, the company started teaching it in training programs, as well as in coaching and performance review sessions with individual employees. It paid off quickly.

“We were able to have a statistically significant improvement in manager quality for 75 percent of our worst-performing managers,” Mr. Bock says.

He tells the story of one manager whose employees seemed to despise him. He was driving them too hard. They found him bossy, arrogant, political, secretive. They wanted to quit his team.

“He’s brilliant, but he did everything wrong when it came to leading a team,” Mr. Bock recalls.

Because of that heavy hand, this manager was denied a promotion he wanted, and was told that his style was the reason. But Google gave him one-on-one coaching — the company has coaches on staff, rather than hiring from the outside. Six months later, team members were grudgingly acknowledging in surveys that the manager had improved.

“And a year later, it’s actually quite a bit better,” Mr. Bock says. “It’s still not great. He’s nowhere near one of our best managers, but he’s not our worst anymore. And he got promoted.”