City of Paris

There are many reminders in the media that the anticipated defeat of the current healthcare reform bill is nothing but history replaying itself, and 75 years of history at that. But it’s easy to forget how similar the issues are. In 1994, when all the buzz was around Hillary Clinton’s efforts, my agency, Lena Chow Advertising, worked with the team at Syva Company (today a part of Siemens Healthcare through multiple iterations of acquisitions) to conduct a healthcare reform survey as part of a promotion. A preshow mailer drew hundreds of attendees to Syva’s booth on the exhibit floor of the annual meeting of the American Association of Clinical Chemistry. We then published the results in a journal ad. The bottom line: 80.3 percent of those surveyed agreed that “the cost of doing nothing far outweighs the cost of reform.”

Now I want to go back and read, one more time, the last chapter of The Heart of Power: Health and Politics in the Oval Office, where authors David Blumenthal and James Morone highlight the critical steps required for passage of healthcare reform. Obviously, every president since Roosevelt has managed to skip one or more steps, leading to the demise of the aspired-to reform.

Roger Martin, the dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, must be engaged in some publicity program for his school. He appeared in an article in Sunday’s New York Times and wrote an editorial in today’s Financial Times. Both articles argue for the importance of critical and creative thinking, and lament the inability of today’s MBA programs to provide the necessary training. “True value in business comes not from applying quantitative analytical techniques to choose from among existing options but from creating options that do not yet exist,” writes Martin. He points to a major barrier to critical, creative thinking: the overreliance on theories and models that are seldom multidisciplinary, and advocates a more “liberal arts” (interdisciplinary, cross-cultural) approach to business school curriculum.

For those of us who are marketing and communication practitioners, our MBAs behind us, what can we do to improve our critical and creative thinking skills? In this time of New Year’s resolutions, I can think of three things I want to do or do more of. First, I plan on reading more—not just more business books, but more reading, in general. Being an immigrant, I have become, belatedly, very interested in politics and history. And, these days, healthcare is inextricably linked to politics. Second, I am going to look for the right venue for developing my thinking skills—a workshop or some other form of professional or personal development, or participating in a novel project. Third, I want to spend more time with my clients and my creative teams, working with them to look at problems and issues from different perspectives, writing tighter briefs, asking the creative teams more questions (and in turn giving more ideas the benefit of the doubt).

The dawn of the new millennium doesn’t feel like that long ago. Remember the days when the Y2K bug was our primary concern? A look at the lists of “10 best” and “10 most” of the year—or the decade—is telling of our times and the choices we face.

On energy, Financial Times posed two lists of questions to consider:
Top 10 energy questions for 2010 - Hydrocarbons edition
Top 10 questions for 2010 - Climate change and clean tech edition

For a quick recap, here is a comic strip to take us through the history of finance of the past decade.

Where do we begin on healthcare? For those of us who are still undecided, here are 10 reasons to support the healthcare reform bills.

Or vote on the healthcare deal of the year.

Everyone is writing about social media. Here are two that may interest healthcare marketers. Top 50 Twitter Topics of the Year and the Top Viral Videos of 2009.

And finally, lest we forget: Top 10 Worst Humanitarian Crises.

Earlier this year, March 4 to be exact, I opened a Twitter account, out of curiosity about what it could do and wanting to learn more about social media. I had a few friends who were on Twitter and I started off having one-on-one exchanges with them. Then I began tweeting to let people know when I posted a new blog. Slowly but surely, Twitter has become one of the first sites I visit in the morning when I sit down at my desk. I made a number of new friends, and many of the people I follow have become one of my primary sources of information about healthcare, marketing, communications, ethics, business policy—all the things that I need to stay relevant in my work. I am not a “high profile” user with hundreds and thousands of followers, but perhaps next year I’ll aspire to becoming a Brand or Maven or Mensch as described by Guy Kawasaki.

What I really like about Twitter is the openness. Unlike on LinkedIn or Facebook, for example, most Twitter users welcome new followers. In most cases you can start following someone right away. Out of curiosity, the people you choose to follow may follow you back, and vice versa. This is how I’ve made most of my “friends” on Twitter. Even though I’ve never met many of them, I feel like many of them are friends after seeing each person’s picture next to his or her tweet almost every day. By contrast, LinkedIn is most useful to me when I want to look up someone I know and reconnect with them. Ditto Facebook.

The catch is that some people who sign up as followers have ulterior motives. Here is what I mean. Many people consider followers on Twitter more or less as assets. The more followers you have, the broader your reach. At the very minimum I suppose it confers bragging rights. Taking this to the extreme, you can “buy” followers. (I have lost track of the link to information about how this can be done.) Another strategy sometimes used is to sign up as a follower, ostensibly, to as many different Twitter users as possible, knowing that some will reciprocate. I discovered how this worked by accident, when I observed that, at times, when a follower signs up and I don’t reciprocate, I get dropped in short order.

If you’re not already on Twitter and want to give it a try in 2010, I highly recommend it! And here are a few interesting people to consider following. Most of them are in the healthcare space.

http://twitter.com/ChristianeTrue
http://twitter.com/EdBennett
http://twitter.com/rilescat
http://twitter.com/Phrmageddon2012
http://twitter.com/kevinmd
http://twitter.com/FierceBiotech
http://twitter.com/scotthensley
http://twitter.com/pharmalot
http://twitter.com/ThisIsSethsBlog
http://twitter.com/GuyKawasaki
http://twitter.com/cityofparis (that’s me!)

While retailers lament that holiday sales are still in the doldrums, retail analysts note that, this year, the economy is not the only reason for consumers to hold back. Rather, it is a lack of innovation. Other than Zhu Zhu hamsters, there are few must haves for this holiday season. The analysts note that “Cash for Clunkers” recruited consumers for auto dealers in the midst of the recession. Likewise, iPhone sales continued strong. Meantime, the Financial Times reports on the rise and fall of MySpace, and though the settings are different (notably MySpace went through a huge culture shock with the acquisition by News Corp.), the lessons for marketers are very similar.

One, tough times are not a good reason to stop innovating, which inevitably involves taking risks and, just as important, making innovation the top priority. Typically this means putting innovation ahead of short-term profits. Zhu Zhu pets come from Cepia, a relative newcomer in the toy business. The MySpace story is more complex, but the first parallel is the focus on making numbers (revenue promised to Wall Street pushing managers to make decisions that compromise customer experience). I’ve watched and experienced this irony many times in my career. Anytime profit is put ahead of customers, customers go away and so does profit.

Two, take your eye off the ball and you can expect competition to take it away from you. In many ways, it is hard to expect innovation at a time when companies, especially the smaller and medium-sized businesses, are struggling to stay afloat. And in the case of MySpace, chairman Rupert Murdoch had a huge distraction—the all-consuming acquisition of Dow Jones, the company that owns The Wall Street Journal.

This all goes to say that in our business of marketing and communications, good ideas come first, budget cuts and poor economy notwithstanding. And if we believe that a smaller budget means doing less, which means thinking less, we are conceding to competition who are willing to think harder and work smarter to get more accomplished and make a bigger impact with less.

The Heart of Power: Health and Politics in the Oval Office by David Blumenthal and James A. Morone is probably the most important book I read this year—important because of the perspective it offers on healthcare reform through a systematic analysis of how each president since Franklin D. Roosevelt attempted and largely failed at healthcare reform.

Strength in What Remains: A journal of remembrance and forgiveness by Tracy Kidder is a moving story about Deo, a young doctor who survived his native Burundi and Rwanda, only to find himself on the streets of New York.

I don’t know why I had never read The Alchemist: A Fable About Following Your Dream by Paulo Coehlo until a good friend gave me a copy this year. It’s never too late!

Inside Steve’s Brain (Expanded Edition) by Leander Kahney is an entertaining and educational account of the ways of Steve Jobs and his innovations. Treat yourself!

And finally, an oldie but goodie that I read again this year, Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik is an engaging and delicious account of Paris (and France) from a New Yorker’s point of view.