Happy Thanksgiving. I love the Thanksgiving holiday. Each year the celebration reminds me that practicing gratitude and believing in abundance create a more abundant life. These two concepts are at the heart of great leadership, an opportunity mindset, and building a better business model. Gratitude (versus being unappreciative) and a belief in abundance (versus scarcity) are interdependent in my life. Reflecting on what I feel grateful for changes my lens on life. I see even more things to feel thankful for, making my world feel more abundant. When I fall into the trap of being too busy for my daily practice, my frustration level starts to rise and the world can feel far more limiting. Gratitude is at the heart of great leadership. Grateful leaders are far more aware of how others are trying to advance their organization’s success. As a result, they…
Disrupt the US health insurance business model
Let Washington fight a tug-of-war over how much or how little of the recently passed federal health care legislation gets enacted. I’d like to step away from the politics and talk about the business model for the health insurance industry, why it needs disrupted and how to accomplish just that. With US health care costs far exceeding that of the rest of the world and health status outcomes mediocre at best, our health care system is ripe for disruption. The insurance industry business model is one lever for accomplishing this. I’m sharing my thoughts here hoping to get your feedback on what’s right and wrong with my thinking. (Note: I am a political independent, seeking pragmatic solutions, whichever political party provides them.) Health insurer profitability is driven by a number of factors: Accurately assessing and pricing risks of insuring a pool of people…
Asknature.org: A biomimicry business model innovation
I love when trends come together, prompting innovations that make the world a better place. Frankly, this observation helps me recover my optimism after the news of the day invokes discouragement. Three trends – crowd sourcing, greater entrepreneurship within academic scientific communities and scarcity of natural resources – have come together to create asknature.org. The website is an open source search engine of all of biology, organized by the functions that living things accomplish. At maturity, it will be a searchable on-line encyclopedia explaining how each living organism biologists have studied operates, organized by terms that describe what functions or problems an innovator/entrepreneur hopes to address. Asknature’s goal, according to the website, “is to connect innovative minds with life’s best ideas, and in the process, inspire technologies that create conditions conducive to life. To accomplish this, we’re doing something that has never been…
Innovation Makes Google a Leader
Innovation is to this century what quality and efficiency were to the second half of the last century – the dominant focus organizations adopted to improve business results. From a macroeconomic perspective, the shift is welcomed. We need new-to-market industries and jobs to replace those lost to the decades-long, relentless, job-destroying drive for reducing waste and increasing efficiency. But a commitment to innovation and successful innovation can be miles apart. How can leaders best bridge the divide? Marissa Mayer, senior leader of Google’s search business and one of the company’s longest tenured employees, shared her company’s innovation formula at the University of Wisconsin Madison’s E-Business Consortium’s 2010 Business Best Practices & Emerging Technologies Conference. Founded in 1998, the UWEBC brings together leading Wisconsin companies to focus on thought leadership, business best practices and emerging technologies related to E-commerce. Each year, the UWEBC provides…