Stuff I Have Found Interesting Today

Annals of Medicine: The Cost Conundrum

An 8 page article on helath care costs. It starts with a fact that McAllen,TX is "one of the most expensive health-care markets in the country. Only Miami—which has much higher labor and living costs—spends more per person on health care." Here are some gems:

• "So here, along the banks of the Rio Grande, in the Square Dance Capital of the World, a medical community came to treat patients the way subprime-mortgage lenders treated home buyers: as profit centers."
• "Mayo recognized that the first thing it needed to do was eliminate the financial barriers. It pooled all the money the doctors and the hospital system received and began paying everyone a salary, so that the doctors’ goal in patient care couldn’t be increasing their income. "
• “When doctors put their heads together in a room, when they share expertise, you get more thinking and less testing,”
• "The lesson of the high-quality, low-cost communities is that someone has to be accountable for the totality of care. Otherwise, you get a system that has no brakes."
• "Any plan that relies on the sheep to negotiate with the wolves is doomed to failure."
• "The decision is whether we are going to reward the leaders who are trying to build a new generation of Mayos and Grand Junctions. If we don’t, McAllen won’t be an outlier. It will be our future. "

Too big to fail? Overcoming size disadvantages - JPMorgan Chase

Some great points about the danger of keeping failed institutions afloat. Even better are the two articles linked in the post "The Need for Failure" &"Jamie Dimon's Straight Talk Has A Good Ring". Some gems from "The need for failure":

• "It encourages banks to get bigger (or more interconnected), and it subsidizes risky behavior."
• "...the solutions that have developed on the fly have done severe damage to the notion that there is a well-ordered capital structure that means something."

Went Walkabout. Brought back Google Wave.

Looks cool. More details and opinions can be found at Tech Crunch and O'Rielly.

Bing!

Microsoft is going after Google! Tech Crunch has a detailed look. Looks interesting and one has to like competition is a stale market.

Freestyling: Beating Agile, Lean And Plan-driven Hands Down

I love it and I agree. We are all looking for "The Answer" when we are it!

Challenging convention

An article that makes sense about marketing...this is rare for me.

I just heard a great quote

Great post on change without real change. Favorite quote "to paraphrase Brian Marick "Gone from 'this is the best project i've ever worked on' to 'thanks for making my job suck less." And it's hard to get excited about that.""

The Best Part of Lean

Reminder why Lean has the principle 'Respect For People'.

PTOM: Black-box analysis of legacy applications

Story of replacing an legacy system. Good story with lessons to boot.