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5 November 2009 • 7:00 am

On Multitasking

Board-spinning-platesA brief Talk of the Town piece by Nick Paumgarten in this week’s New Yorker has finally shaken me out of my lengthy unplanned hiatus from the Tenacious Blog (a combination of an early October speaking gig followed by an extended trip to my alternative universe in the tropics had conspired to keep me from writing for several weeks now). For those of you who have waited patiently for my return, much gratitude for your loyalty. I’ll be trying to write regularly again, but am making no promises.

The New Yorker piece begins with a recollection of the news item from a few weeks ago, in which two Northwest Airlines pilots overshot their destination (Minneapolis) by over a hundred miles (the pilots claim they were engrossed in a complex work scheduling program on their laptop computers), then goes on to comment on the effect of multi-tasking on our performance. According to Paumgarten:

Studies have shown that multitasking, even of the law-abiding kind, doesn’t work. You just perform each task less efficiently. Marshall McLuhan predicted that technology would sharpen our senses, but, instead, as the writer Michael Bugeja said last week, it seems to split them. (A few years ago, Bugeja, with a colleague, started writing an article called “Media Saturation Kills,” but he got distracted by another deadline and never finished it.)

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24 June 2009 • 8:05 am

SUVs and the Law of Unintended Consequences

SUVs have become an icon for the regret some of us share for our recent history. Their inefficient use of fuel has increased U.S. dependence on foreign oil, and shrinking demand has pushed the once mighty U.S. auto industry and economy to the brink. SUVs were popular because people felt safe in them. But they were wrong.

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11 June 2009 • 6:22 pm

Required Reading in the White House

The New York Times reported this week that a recent New Yorker article on health care spending has become required reading in the White House, and that President Obama referred to the article in a briefing on health care reform with Democratic senators. The article, which is a lengthy but very worthwhile read, was written by Atul Gawande, who is both a staff writer for the New Yorker and general and endocrine surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Along with President Obama, I recommend this article to anyone interested in the likely changes to U.S. health care policy that is on the political horizon.

Gawande’s article follows his curiosity and research into regional disparities in health care spending; why some places spend far more (per Medicare enrollee, an approximation of overall spending) than others, without significant differences in overall public health or patient outcomes. His research focused on the town of McAllen, Texas, “the most expensive town in the most expensive country for health care in the world,” where annual Medicare spending per enrollee (in 2006) was around $15,000, almost twice the national average.

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8 June 2009 • 11:36 am

The Motivating Power of Measurement

Practitioners and fans of the balanced scorecard concept understand that measurement has the power to motivate behavior. The great challenge in driving change in any organization isn’t just to change the culture, but to change the behavior of individuals and groups inside the organization. Performance measurement doesn’t just tell us how well we’re doing at achieving a desired outcome, the very process of measurement and communication of measure results actually changes behavior.

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