GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

The new media game is generational stereotyping. It started with the Great Generation, those who lived through the Depression, World War II and the Great Economic Boom of the Post-war period, moved on to the Baby Boomers, the Echo Boomers, the Millenials and now Gen Z. Every article starts with the mandatory “7 Things you Need to Know about Generation__”.

Keeping track of the alphabet demographics can be confusing, so here is a guide:

As of 2019, the breakdown by age looks like this:

• Baby Boomers: Baby boomers were born between 1944 and 1964. They’re current between 55-75 years old (76 million in U.S.)
• Gen X: Gen X was born between 1965 – 1979 and are currently between 40-54 years old (82 million people in U.S.)
• Gen Y: Gen Y, or Millennials, were born between 1980 and 1994. They are currently between 25-39 years old.
• Gen Y.1 = 25-29 years old (31 million people in U.S.)
• Gen Y.2 = 29-39 (42 million people in U.S.)
• Gen Z: Gen Z is the newest generation to be named and were born between 1995 and 2015. They are currently between 4-24 years old (nearly 74 million in U.S.)

Now Millennials are blaming boomers for ruining their lives and thinks that socialism is a good idea.

Just when you got tired of hearing things about how to keep Gen X and Gen Y from leaving your company, now comes the Gen Z narrative, which is that 1) going to college is so 50’s and 2) they are not as stupid as previous generations who took on all that student loan debt and 3) they will make it in the gig economy and just be entrepreneurs.

Here’s how Gen Z differs from millennials

Building yet another co-working space is that Gen Z’s, those who were born after 1996, want private place to work.

If you listen to these folks, every generation is responsible for shaping the future of our civil society, how we work and play and how we live. They posit that each lives in its own generational cacoon, isolated from each other by ear buds. They all are supposed to have unique and ideosynchratic opinions about the size of the houses they want (tiny or micro v McMansions), the number of hours they want to work (work-life balance v live to work) and what’s important (experience v stuff, time v money).

Stereotyping generations is stupid for the same reasons any stereotyping is stupid. The bias of fundamental attribution error means that when we see behavior, we attribute it to our assumptions about the character or disposition of the person rather than thinking about the circumstances that make them behave that way.

Most of the evidence for generational differences in preferences and values suggests that differences between these groups are quite small. In fact, there is a considerable variety of preferences and values within any of these groups. For example, a thorough analysis of 20 different studies with nearly 20,000 people revealed small and inconsistent differences in job attitudes when comparing generational groups. It found that, although individual people may experience changes in their needs, interests, preferences, and strengths over the course of their careers, sweeping group differences depending on age or generation alone don’t seem to be supported. A relatively newer concept called age meta-stereotypes looks at what we think others believe about us based on our age group and can affect our behavior and attitudes much like stereotyping others, i.e what you think about others v what you think they think about you.

Yes, there are trends that may or may not have to do with generational attitudes as much as the inevitable march of time, innovation, geopolitical drivers and societal progress and challenges. But, the main reason that generational stereotyping is wrong is that the assumptions are wrong and misleading. They are myths.

For it to be useful, a segmentation scheme must meet two simple criteria: (1) It must explain the variance in the behavior of interest better than other available variables, and (2) consumers within segments should be more homogenous than those across segments.Lumping people according their date of birth does not give you the insights you need to sell them things or change their behavior.

It is also bad for your business. Jessica Kriegel works at Oracle as an organization and talent development consultant, and her new book dissecting this issue is Unfairly Labeled: How Your Workplace Can Benefit from Ditching Generational Stereotypes.

Demographic changes certainly create opportunities. But, it is short sighted to think one size fits all or they all think the same, any more than saying that all surgeons are cold fishes with no bedside manner or all Hispanics think the same.

The Millennials are defying predictions. In 2016, just 20% of 25 to 35 year olds said they changed addresses in the previous year. By contrast, in 2000, 26% of members of Generation X said they had moved in the previous year. In 1990 27% of late baby boomers said they had moved in the prior year.

The research provides a clue to what might be driving a puzzling trend in the eighth year of an economic expansion: The share of Americans of all ages who moved in the previous year fell to an all-time low of 11.2% in 2016, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Here are more myths about Millennials

People are people and their wants and needs have stayed pretty much the same since marketeers have been measuring them. My suggestion for innovators is that they be more lumpers than splitters, targeting specific sub-segments across generations and stop trying to label everyone. Think horizontally, not vertically.You might be surprised to find out that the micro-house you are building in a innovation district sells to empty nester Baby Boomers as well as Gen Xers.

You will find unexpected surprises that are a great source of opportunity and open a bigger addressable market. One observer put it this way:

“The sum total of all of my advice is this,” she says. “You need to talk to each other and figure out what’s going on in your organization, and not apply these broad brushstrokes of millennial nonsense to the people that you’re dealing with in your world.”

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GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

It’s never easy telling truth to authority and, in many instances, it’s not only risky but can be fatal to your job or even your career. Yet, most pundits agree that great leaders should encourage truth telling, not stifle it.

Why is it so hard to do the right thing?

1. People are inherently flawed, “broken branches” and turn a blind eye to their foibles

2. The world is getting more complicated with intertwined conflicts of interest that often fall in the grey zone

3. Society has become more permissive

4. People think they can get away with it. They are often right, particularly when you have power, influence or money.

5. Rules of civility have become more lax

6. A possible decline in self-disiplinary skills and delayed gratification. More and more people choosing the one marshmellow over two later on.

7. A media and communications culture that showcases the Big Me over the Little Me.

8. Pressure from investors and shareholders at the expense of patients because the stakes are getting bigger.

9. A culture of entrepreneurship that fosters an ethos of win at all costs, short term thinking and creating shareholder value at the expense of employees.

10. The differences between the ethics of business and the ethics of medicine.

11. It could be career suicide

12. Why suffer the consequences of being a whistleblower when you really don’t care that much about your boss or oganization anyway?

Here are some things to consider before you knock on the door:

1. You probably already know whether your boss will encourage you to say the truth, or whether you are dealing with Francis Underwood.

2. It’s best to build as much personal brand equity and power as possible before putting it on the line.

3. Have Plan B. What will you do if you are ignored or, worse case, marginalized or get an adverse performance appraisal.

4. There is a difference between being a truth teller, an eminence grise and a devil’s advocate. You might have more cover being one v the other.

5. Be sure you don’t drill holes below the water line

6. Take the high ground and don’t make this about trying to upstage your boss unless you are willing to suffer the consequences

7. Find trusted partners and allies to hear your ideas in confidence before making them public.

8. If you are the leader, encourage truth telling and avoid retaliation

9. Come with solutions, not problems.

10. Find other outlets to make your ideas and feelings known that are less threatening within the organization.

Try being a good rebel instead of a bad one.

Here are some tips on not just when, but how to tell truth to authority.

Here are four other suggestions you may want to consider.

Truth telling and truth listening is a core entrepreneurial skill. However, some people “just can’t handle the truth”. Don’t be one of them or you’ll suffer the same fate as Colonel Nathan Jessup.

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GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

Rheology is the study of flow. Information rheology is the study of how information passes from the sender to the receiver, the resistance to that flow, and how to address it.

Most discussions of innovation ecosystem creation and growth focus on the anatomy i.e. the components necessary to be successful. For example, one author describes the 5P’s of human capital:pillars, patrons, pioneers, professionals and partners.

However, equally as important is the physiology of clusters -how the cluster elements work together .One of the key determinants of an innovative organization or cluster is information rheology. There are three basic elements to the equation.

The first has to do with the number of nodes in the network, both internally and externally. Network theory tells us that the more nodes, the more value. Having one fax machine in the world added nothing. It took a lot to unleash the value , as the development of social media has exemplified.

The second has to do with how the nodes are connected. Some are robust and some are not.

Finally, and most importantly, the two previous parts are not nearly as important as the velocity, acceleration and lack of resistance to the flow of information from one node to the next. We usually refer to this as a cluster or innovation district being “user friendly” and is typified by the free and rapid flow of information from one place to the next. Malcolm Gladwell described facilitators in the process as mavens, experts and connectors.

There are many causes of poor information flow, but, fundamentally, they come down to :

1. The sender does not communicate effectively or in a an appropriate way

2. The receiver is unaware that the message was sent or does not understand it

3. The systems for transmitting information and verifying receipt are inadequate

4. Third party interference muddles the message

There are several kinds of intermediaries that facilitate information flow in an ecosystem.

Architects engage in strict agenda-setting and coordination activities

Gatekeepers support the knowledge extraction and dissemination of the information

Conductors take care of information acquisition, transmission, and task sharing

Developers create concrete assets for the network based on knowledge mobility

Auctioneers set the agenda and joint vision for the innovation networ

Leaders motivate and foster the voluntary collaboration and identifying roles of network members

Promoter support ecosystem members to work towards the same goal

Facilitator bring together quite different, even competing, parties to work together

Whether it is making clinical handoffs better or improving the flow of information in an ecosystem or cluster, the obstacles are substantial and the systems for preventing information flow blockage need to constantly be maintained, which can be costly and time consuming.

If you want to accelerate regional innovation clusters and communities, don’t concentrate so much on connecting the senders and receivers. Focus on removing the barriers to the flow of information and how to push and pull it through the pipes.

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GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

Mention strategic planning and the usual images are boring meetings, nothing that gets done, large notebooks that sit on the shelf, and , maybe , going to a nice place with food that’s better than pizza or what they serve in the hospital cafeteria. It does not have to be that way, and , if it is, you might be reading your own corporate obituary soon. Here are some things you should know about strategy:

1. Strategic planning (derived from the Greek work , strategos, meaning generals) is about creating a plan that asks who you are, where you are now, where you want to go and how you want to get there. In many instances, a strategic plan is neither a strategy nor a plan.
2. Strategic planning is different from strategic thinking.
3. The clinical value pathway starts with domain expertise and evolves into strategic thinking
4. Strategic thinking can be learned. Jeff Bezos explains how here. However, many are not built to do it.
5. Strategic thinking is about connecting dots in a expanding universe or ecosystems and networks.
6. Innovation starts with an entrepreneurial mindset that is, in part, fueled by creativity.
7. Strategic thinking derives from entrepreneurial habits that gets you from thought, to said to done.
8. If you want to know what’s wrong with a patient, just talk to them long enough and they will tell you. The same holds true for customers but sometimes it’s harder to get them to tell you the truth and to listen to it.
9. Intuition is part of the art of strategic thinking, just like making a diagnosis
10. Sometimes, like in clinical medicine, it is better to be lucky than good and be right for the wrong reasons.
11. Here are some ideas about how to bridge the strategy-execution gap and flipping the top down model.
12.  Industry disruption, as Accenture research has found, is reasonably predictable. And with wisdom about its predictability comes opportunity.

In her book, Learning to Think Strategically, Julia Sloan found it takes five critical attributes to think strategically:

Having an imagination

Having a broad perspective

Juggling incomplete, inaccurate and competing information

The ability to deal with things over which you have no control

The desire to win

Once you have determined these, then you can apply it to 3 horizons framework.

If you want strategy in action, the ask your people these 5 questions:

• What are you doing today? This will bring to light any significant work that you aren’t aware is being done or that’s taking much more time than it should.
• Why are you doing the work you’re doing? This allows you to gain clarity on what’s important and why it’s important from your team’s perspective.
• How does what we’re doing today align with the bigger picture? This is a discussion about gaps and outliers. If your team is working on something that doesn’t align with the broader goals of the organization, challenge the value of doing that work.
• What does success look like for our team? This allows you to hone in on what’s really driving your team’s success, in terms of activities, behaviors, relationships, and strategic outcomes.
• What else could we do to achieve more, better, faster? This is where you push your team to be innovative. If you’ve done the work to answer the preceding questions, you are well-positioned to be strategic in answering this one.

Strategy is the composite of execution steps. Today’s successful companies close the strategy-to-performance gap with a new strategy approach best described as “Decide-Do/Refine-Do”. This agile, test-and-learn approach is better suited to today’s tumultuous environment. It also helps bridge the chasms that exists at so many companies between great strategy, great execution, and great performance.

Here are five more lessons on how to to close the strategy-execution gap.

Strategic leadership is the ability to handle complex problems for which there is no obvious short-term solution, in which the stakes are high, and in which influencing others is essential. There are at least seven challenges where your choice of a High Ground or Low Ground response will help determine whether you advance as a strategic leader.

I see a lot of newcos hiring Chief Strategy Officers. It would help if some them were humanities or arts majors in college or played in a band before they went to Harvard Business School.

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GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

My definition of entrepreneurship has 5 parts:

1. The pursuit of opportunity
2. Working under conditions of uncertainty with scarce resources
3. The goal is to create multiples of user defined value when compared to a competitive offering or the status quo
4. Through the development and deployment of innovation (NB: one way is to create a company, but there are many other ways to do so)
5. Using a VAST business model

The key to innovation is delivering stakeholder value. When you do so, you have created product-market fit. All value is user defined. As Peter Drucker noted, the purpose of a business is to create a customer. If you are creating a new product or service, your estimate of its value is meaningless. The only thing that matters is how much customers or stakeholders value your product and how much they are willing to pay for it, recommend or prescribe it or use it.

There are five disciplines of creating what customers want. These techniques—determining customer and market needs, creating value, supporting innovation champions, creating innovation teams, and aligning the organization—create a total value management approach to creating an innovative organization.

There are several ways to measure value and use it as a benchmark or operational tool. For example, the value of your house or your business, in pure economic or accounting terms, is determined using valuation tools that incorporate many factors, including market comparisons. ratio multiples and cash flow techniques. Mostly it is defined by what someone is willing to pay to buy what you have for sale.

You can use value as an operational tool. For example, suppose your business is valued in the 10 percentile of similar businesses for sale. That’s a sign you have opportunities to impove operational effectiveness and efficiencies to increase its value. Or, suppose your house is for sale and you are getting offers that are lower than similar comparison houses in your neighborhood. Maybe it’s time to paint those dingy living room walls , fix the leaky faucets and get rid of that smell in the basement.

You personal or business value, or net worth, is determined but subtracting your liabilities (what you owe or debt) from your assets (what you own or equity).

Value should not be confused with your values. Hopefully, your profits, passion and purpose are aligned and create happiness.

Measuring the value of your business not only is done when you are looking for investors, but is also used in situations where there is a claim on your asset, for example as part of a buy-sell agreement with cofounders, a divorce or some other civil litigation action.

Value in sick care is defined as the quality of a particular value factor, like treatment outcomes, service, experience or convenience/price e.g value based surgical care.

Sick care stakeholdes will value your offering by doing a mental calculation that determines the difference between their defined tangible and intangible perceived benefits less the tangible and intangible perceived cost not just now, but in the future as well. Features that are not user defined benefits are costs to the producer. Take note that 1) the intangible value factors, like speed, convenience, experience, service and satisfying emotional needs usually drives the buying decision, and 2) the value is often perceived, not real, and 3) intangible assets, like intellectual property and customer lists. are increasingly driving valuations. How do you measure how something makes someone feel or aspire to be, for example, luxury items like hotels, watches and $4,000 hand bags? Usually, by how much they are willing to pay for it.

The process of analyzing value moves through several planning phases:

1. Defining value. Simply put, value is user defined quality of value factors/unit cost.

2. Identifying value factors for each customer segment. Value factors include not just quality, but elements of convenience, speed, service, and experience. Most companies must choose which value factor to dominate. You can’t dominate in all value factors to all segments.

3. Doing a value factor analysis to determine whether your product or service meets or exceeds the expectations of your target segment.

Carlson and Wilmot noted that VFA consists of four variables: quality and convenience and the costs of each. In equation form this is shown as:

Value Factor = [(Quality benefits) x (Convenience benefits)] / [(Quality costs) x (Convenience costs)]Creating a VFA matrix like the one shown in this article is fast and simple. As a rough guide, a new product or service should have a Value Factor that is 2 to 10 times greater than the competition for the difference to be noticeably significant. That said, calculating a VFA is straightforward:

1) List the product’s attributes (for Quality, Convenience, and Cost) The number of product attributes will vary from product to product, but users are encouraged to write down as many as they can think of—if you write down less than 10, you’re not trying hard enough.

2) Determine the importance of each attribute to the customerTo get started, these values can be estimated by you and your team. However, you will need to show your VFA to customers to obtain more realistic values.3) Evaluate each product’s performance attribute

Evaluate how each product’s performance satisfies the identified Quality, Convenience, and Cost attributes.

4) Calculate the total scores for quality, convenience, and cost as noted in the attached example.

5) Calculate the VFA according to the equation noted above

4. Extending the analysis to your competition to see how your product stacks up against the competition and whether it fills a white space.

Productivity in the US is mysteriously dropping. Economists are also perplexed about measuring it in healthcare.

Sick care is moving towards value based care. There are many stakeholders who value one factor over another. Unlike other industries, for a product or service to be successful, it needs to satisfy the interests of not just patients, but payers, providers, sellers, suppliers, distributors and many more. Some patients will want commoditycare, others value based mass care and even others, luxury care, regardless of the cost.

Those who can deliver the most value the fastest in the shortest time through the deployment of innovation will hold the keys to new kingdom. Doing a competitive value factor analysis and executing its roll out, adoption and penetration will help you get there before the others.

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GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

Consumerization of sick care is on everyone’s lips. I think patient consumerism, i.e. the belief that if given the right information, patient-consumers will make smart sick care choices based on value , is a myth.

However, since the holy grail is changing doctor and patient behavior to move sick care to healthcare, we should learn from other industry sales professionals about the best way to sell disease prevention, chronic disease management and compliance behaviors to patients. We are rapidly moving from telling to selling patients so we need to learn the tools of the trade.

So how do we get patients to be better shoppers? How about paying them? Researchers found that while only 8 percent of enrollees used the price shopping tools, that was enough to save payers around $2.3 million in the 12 months examined in the study (equal to a 2.1 percent reduction in the average price paid for services). When factoring in administration costs, the program savings totaled around $8 per enrollee over 12 months.

If you go to the next meeting of the Sales Enablement Society, here’s what you are going to learn from people with titles that will be strange to you.

Sales enablement is the process of providing the sales organization with the information, content, and tools that help sales people sell more effectively. The foundation of sales enablement is to provide sales people with what they need to successfully engage the buyer throughout the buying process. A big part of sales enablement involves equipping sales people with information they can use in sales cycles. This information might take the form of customer-facing content, sales best practices, and tools to name just a few examples. Regardless of the form the information takes, it needs to be easy to consume and reusable across the sales organization.

One of the sickcare jobs of the future will the be Director of Sales Operations, overseeing patient sales enablement. Here are 5 sales enablement best practices. In the case of sick care. that means you will need:

1. Clearly defined KPIs e.g. better outcomes, experience and equity at less cost
2. Data and analytics to subsegment the market by demographics and psychographics
3. Improving the patient buying experience and the sales force selling experience
4. Sales force training and development
5. Creating high impact content and sales/marketing collateral
6. Better marketing-sales integration and handoffs
7. Sales operations monitoring the results and making the necessary adjustments
8. Measuring the ROI
9. Designing appropriate sales people compensation schemes
10. Creating the most appropriate sales organizational structure and deciding whether to make or buy sales people

Here are 5 other things great sales people do. Unfortunately, most doctors don’t get sales and marketing.

Like the case in situational leadership, you need to practice situational sales enablement depending on the ability and willingness and confidence of the patient consumer.

Of course, solving every new challenge in sick care requires hiring new managers with many many multiples of the salary of those actually taking care of the patients. Thus, the rise of chief data officers and chief patient officers.

Medical marketing has grown, particularly direct to consumer pharmaceutical advertising and there are unique challenges when doctors and others stakeholders try to market to patients. Errant marketing efforts erodes trust and might run afoul of regulatory requirements and professional standards.

Patient sales will require rethinking the present structure of what we now call healthcare marketing and patient engagement. A recent add read, “If customers longer trust you, they are no longer your customers” If we are going to rename patients as customers, then we should treat them like customers and learn how to sell , instead of tell them, what’s best for them.

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GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

Employers, employees, educators, workforce development professionals and policy makers are trying to figure out the future of work and how to adjust. Megatrends such as digitization, the rise of automation, and shifting demographics are altering the way we work, and the way companies relate to workers, including sick care workers. The 4th industrial revolution is raging and we are scrambling to find the right strategy to win it. Just doing everything faster won’t work.

Here is how Tesla tries to solve the problem.

Rework America, for example, notes that we have seen this movie before when the 2nd industrial revolution, powered by electricity, railroads and mass production, forced employers to create a workplace, education, pensions and benefits systems that would train, attract and keep workers and drive productivity. That was over 100 years ago. Those legacy systems are, in many instances, outdated and need reform.

What will sick care work look like in the next 25 years? Here are some possibilities and some themes are emerging about reforming our education system and the world of work to meet the challenges and be ready for multiple scenarios:

1. Cradle to career integration
2. Emphasis on defining and measuring emotional and social skills (remember, we used to call them “soft skills”) and using people and performance analytics to determine whether and how much they have an impact on job performance and retention.
3. Exposing students to experiential work opportunities in many different forms, be they mini-internships, internships or apprenticeships
4. Addressing the needs of the 70% of US workers who do not have a college degree
5. Migrating from a 4 year degree credential based system to an alternative, more flexible and user friendly competency based system
6. Pension and benefits reforms that are not employer based
7. Accelerating the speed and lowering the costs of education and training that is personalized and market driven
8. Altering HR functions and staffing as they presently exist
9. Closing the equity, diversity and inclusion gaps
10. Bridging the digital divide so that everyone has access to the information and communications technologies and skills that pervades the workplace.
11. Solving the productivity-pay gap

12. Figuring out how to train the trainers, pay them a decent wage and return respect to the teaching profession.

13, Entrepreneurial schools and universities

14. Teaching people how to play nice with machines and vice versa

15. Creating a workforce for true healthcare instead of sick care.

16. Changing how we work as teams.

17. Agile teams

18. Virtual international teams

19. Educational informatics

20. Market based learning objectives with formative assessment

21. Rural reshoring

As NY Times columnist, David Brooks, notes, Right now, we have a one-size-fits-all education system. Everybody should go to college. The problem is that roughly one-fifth of our students fail to graduate high school in four years; roughly one-fifth take no further schooling after high school; roughly one-fifth drop out of college; roughly one-fifth get a job that doesn’t require the degree they just earned; and roughly one-fifth actually navigate the path the system is built around — from school to career.

At its core, these changes will come the way they came before-by helping those people who are willing but unable to overcome structural and societal barriers and radically altering the systems that prevent worker freedom, equity sharing and entrepreneurial success. Maybe the inmates need to not just run the asylum , but own it too.

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GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

In a previous post, I discussed the anatomy and physiology of remote sensing and wearable systems. It has an afferent, central, efferent, neuromuscular and end organ component. Unfortunately, given the evolving nature of the healthcare IT ecosystem and remote sensing in particular, we still don’t know what the HIT cyberbrain should look like, how it should work or how it should develop or evolve. In other words, we need more research about healthcare analytics processing and signaling systems and how they should develop from fertilization to birth i.e.remote sensing embryology.

The cyberbrain has been fertilized by the minds of technopreneurs and is developing quickly. Earlier this month, Elon Musk took the stage in a science museum in San Francisco and sketched out a bold vision of connecting a human brain to a computer.

The presentation was one of the first public unveilings of the technology behind his brain-machine interface (BMI) company Neuralink, which is trying to use robotically implanted super thin flexible “threads” in the brain to allow individuals to control computers and smartphones with their mind. An unpublished non-peer reviewed white paper credited to Musk and Neuralink lays out more of the technical details behind the technology. Others are giving chase.

Here is the research agenda:

1. What is the present state of central processing systems?

2. How did they evolve?

3. What are the evironmental and genetic factors that are at play?

4. Which ones work and which ones don’t

5. What are the causes of abnormal HIT brains?

6. Are their ways we can modify or minimize HIT dysgenetic systems?

7. What kinds of parents should produce these children and what should be their genetic make up?

8. Is there a way to do genetic testing to detect early abnormalities?

9. Should we allow HIT systems abortion and eugenics?

10. Should we pass laws and regulations protecting the HIT fetus against toxic influences?

11. What will be the unintended consequences of brain-computer driven interfaced?

12. How do we prevent brain hacking and how do we overcome the other IoMT challenges?

Intelliwebs are evolving organic interfaces between man and machine and will eventually be the central nervous system of remote sensing and the internet of things.

HIT brains are evolving every day. Our present understanding of them is rudimentary and it will take a lot more research and experimention before we understand how the HIT brain develops, evolves and functions. Until then, remote sensing and wearable embryology should be a required course.

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GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

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GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

Now that there are more and more people who are older, lonely, socially isolated and depressed, we are seeing lots of articles encouraging people to mentor or do something that “leaves a legacy”. Consequently, intergenerational websites, platforms and organizations are growing. The lost tribe of medicine is no exception.

However, there are some problems with doing things to leave a legacy:

1. Like your business strategic plan, life gets in the way and we live under conditions of uncertainty. It is impossible to predict how what you do will leave an impact, if any. Socrates said “I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think”.

1. Doing things so people will remember you once you are gone puts the focus on the future, not the present. It’s more fulfilling to live things, not leave them, and let the cards fall where they may. Plus, while you might have helped remove some people’s obstacles to success or happiness, most of their success can be attributable to them, not you. Maybe, for example, you helped awaken their innerpreneur. Truth be TOLD, most of your protege’s success probably has more to do with luck than anything you did.
2. It is unlikely that people will remember who you are 100 years from now
3. Mentoring is not always effective. Not everyone is cut out to do it and there are several reasons why mentoring fails. Sure, when it works, mentoring helps both the mentor and the mentee, like helping to soothe burnout.
4. Legacies are hard to scale. I think most are lucky if you make a difference in the lives of a handfull of people.
5. Leveraging your impact relies on someone you helped pass it forward. Many will drop the baton so it’s a numbers game. Like innovation, success in legacy leaving depends on how many times you try and that can be frustrating and disappointing.
6. Doing volunteer work to help others is admirable. However, while twenty-five percent of American adults volunteer, that number is at a 10-year low—putting extra strain on the 85 percent of nonprofits that rely exclusively on volunteer staff to manage the services constituents depend on. For this reason, it’s more important than ever that nonprofits figure out the best ways to attract and retain volunteers.Volunteers want convenience, time defined outcomes and demonstrable impact.
7. Entrepreneurial psychopaths run the risk of passing along bad behaviors instead of good ones. The result is the lonely leading the lonely
8. Dealing with narcissistic “successes” is hard. Here are some tips on technique.
9. There are few insulting or brutally truthful eulogies. They are not like failure resumes.

Helping other people is a good idea and doing well by doing good is not a sin and has a long history. When it comes to legacy leaving, focus on the now, not the next and new.

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