Book Club
Book Club: Think Again
You have to read Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know by Adam Grant. We all think our minds are open, but we’re wrong. Intelligence is nice, but the critical skills are rethinking, relearning, and the courage to dump baggage. The Dunning-Kruger effect is real – the people with the most confidence…
Read MoreBook Club: The Long Fix
I’ve been avoiding reading The Long Fix: Solving America’s Health Crisis with Strategies that Work for Everyone by Vivian Lee. But this semester, one of my students asked if she could read it for her Book Review assignment. I couldn’t really refuse, so I had to read it too. The author, a physician and healthcare…
Read MoreBook Club: The Premonition — A Pandemic Story
Michael Lewis’s latest book, The Premonition – A Pandemic Story, dives deep into an untold story of how COVID crept up on the US healthcare system, particularly the state and federal agencies that were supposed to be watching and to know what to do. It’s a story of bureaucrats playing it safe while sacrificing our…
Read MoreBook Club — How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information
Data visualization is trendy for a reason. How Charts Lie by Alberto Cairo describes how well-designed charts and graphs can help make numbers clear, especially as competition for readers’ attention grows. But badly designed charts can confuse or even lie to the reader. Healthcare is more confusing than most areas so deceptive charts are more…
Read MoreBook Club — You Have More Influence Than You Think
By Vanessa Bohns I want to send every advocate a copy of this book. You Have More Influence Than You Think: How We Underestimate our Power of Persuasion, and Why it Matters uses research to make the counter-intuitive case that people are hearing us, even if they don’t seem to be. Well-documented, including much of…
Read MoreBook Club – In Defense of Troublemakers: The Power of Dissent in Life and Business
I’ll admit I bought In Defense of Troublemakers to find validation for advocates. Our job is to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” But the book goes much farther. It makes the case that dissent is critical to good decision-making. Our society values consensus – it makes people happy and gets to decisions far…
Read MoreBook Club: Medical Apartheid
Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present is very difficult to read. I stopped and re-started several times. You may know something about the Tuskegee syphilis project, but the wanton use and abuse of Black Americans as medical subjects goes much farther and continues into…
Read MoreBOOK CLUB — The Right Price: A Value-Based Prescription for Drug Costs
For your summer reading. The Right Price: A Value-Based Prescription for Drug Costs offers the best explanation I’ve found of how drug costs are set, and how they should be. Using real-life patient stories, the authors give a balanced and comprehensive look at fair and reasonable pricing for a product that epitomizes market failure. The…
Read MoreBook Club — Change: How to Make Big Things Happen
Change: How to Make Big Things Happen by Damon Centola should be required reading for advocates. How do big shifts in behavior or beliefs happen? That’s our job and we’ve been missing the most important tools (unless you are a social network scientist). We’ve learned the lessons of sticky messages and nudges that make better…
Read MoreBook Club — Counting: How We Use Numbers to Decide What Matters
I’ve never dog-eared as many pages in a book as Counting: How We Use Numbers to Decide What Matters by Deborah Stone. It’s very trendy to be “data-driven” and assert that “science matters” but what gets counted and how it’s defined make all the difference. Numbers and statistics are nice, but only if they represent…
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