Category: Service

Inequity Aversion, Relativity, and Envy

Try this at home. You need two pets of the same species.

Give one of them a tasty treat.

Give the other regular food.

What happens?

Dr. Frans de Waal did this with Capuchin monkeys. His 2 minute video went viral.

Inequity activists love to show it at conferences:

Animal Extrapolation

Apparently, monkeys love fairness: Capuchin’s possess “inequity aversion.”

Monkeys value equal pay for equal work. Furthermore, monkeys teach us that it is normal for mammals to express outrage at inequity. Throwing things and rattling cages are the direct result of inequity. The animal kingdom proves it.

I assume de Waal’s comment about Occupy Wall Street, at the end of the video, was a joke.

Anyone who knows animals knows that animals do not value equity. Monkeys do not have an aversion to inequity any more than they have an aversion to pay gaps, glass ceilings, or the top 1%.

Monkeys cannot identify inequity. Humans identify inequity. Animals see something they want and then they try to get it.

Attributing human characteristics to animals is called anthropomorphism. It is irresistible and wrong. Disney made a fortune with it. Continue reading “Inequity Aversion, Relativity, and Envy”

Medicare and Baking — Why Passion Matters

Professor Umbridge

Are doctors who complain about medicare just whiners?

We all know that society needs good government.

Government maintains order, protects private property, and wins wars.

Shouldn’t it also manage and distribute something as precious as health care?

Many people think that single payer health care is the only moral and just way to provide care.

If we judge society by how it treats its most vulnerable citizens, then we must have government play a central role in providing care.

Medicare and Baking

We can capture single payer health care with two analogies: baking a cake and raising a child. People might recognize cakes and kids from complexity theory, and they would be wrong. This is different.

Baking With Passion

Imagine you are born foodie. You have a passion for the smell, taste, and preparation of food. You take courses and perform at the top of your class.

Eventually, you travel to a distant land, learn from the best bakers, and return home as a certified doctor of bakery (with huge student debts of course).

A small town in Iceland needs cakes desperately. So you start a bakery there.  The government provides all the ingredients. You just bake and serve cakes to the community.

You bake like mad: late at night, all weekend, and on holidays. People love your cakes, and you love baking. Your baking improves as you adjust cakes based on the needs of your community.

After 10 months, a woman with a suit and clipboard shows up. She reminds you of Professor Umbridge, from Hogwarts. She has come from the government and is there to help. Continue reading “Medicare and Baking — Why Passion Matters”

Why the OMA Failed and How It Could Fail Again

Forgetting the past.

The OMA failed in 2016-17.  Doctors will talk about it for decades. If the OMA were a country, it would build a memorial.

The crisis forced the OMA to do what consultants had been telling it to do for decades.

The OMA changed course, rebuilt, and is better now. But the change is new and precarious. Without holding to a deep, direction-changing understanding of why it failed, the OMA could fail again.

1st Reason the OMA Failed

“The OMA forgot to represent members.”

But what does that mean? As the OMA was sinking, everyone thought they were representing members. Everyone believed they had doctors’ best interests in mind. Good intentions and better knowledge guaranteed great outcomes.

Just because we know more does not mean we know best. The OMA knows many things. But it had lost sight of the one thing a membership organization must know.

Service organizations survive on a paradox: The customer knows best. Even junior service reps at Apple know more about computers than most customers.

Superior knowledge must never usurp the mandate to serve. Service means an unshakable belief that the customer knows best.

No One’s Smart Enough

A group of really smart service reps will never know all that individual customers know about their own needs and preferences. Continue reading “Why the OMA Failed and How It Could Fail Again”