unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

The word “creativity” as we understand it today didn’t become popular until the mid-20th century. So, what changed around 1950 that led to this mainstreaming of creative thought? And how was creativity described before that?  Samuel Franklin at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands charts the recent history of creativity in his book, The Cult of Creativity.  He and Greg discuss how the meaning of the word “creativity” has shifted over time, the invention of brainstorming, and why engineers and scientists of the mid-20th century were drawn to creative thinking. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Creativity as a cognitive ability and natural human process 11:48: When we want a creative job, it's often because it's something that we think is going to allow us to become our truest selves but also make a living creating economically valuable novelty. It was this thing that allowed people to have it both ways, to see economic and psychological goods as being aligned. Creativity's constellation of concepts 03:32: Creativity isn't necessarily a totally new concept. It's a new term that allows us to pull together a constellation of different concepts, connotations, and vibes that allow us to say new things. So in that sense, it is a new concept because it's a new handle. So I think what it does is allow us to name some theoretical attribute that is a human attribute. On individualism versus group work  26:41: The debate in business seemed to be: when you're trying to come up with something new or trying to solve a problem, should you get people together to do it? Or should you send people off on their own to do it? This is a debate that is perennial. It goes on to this day. There are people who have methods that are elaborations of brainstorming, improvements to brainstorming that they swear are good for group work, and I'm sure they do serve their purposes quite well, given the right context. And then there's people who just swear that there's no way to do it. I don't think we'll ever resolve it. I think that it's probably all about context. Changing the way we view creativity 47:55: We see creativity as a psychological thing—something that happens in the realm of brain work. And so I think that when we say that we should all be teaching our kids creativity, maybe that could be a good thing. It could result in educational policies that I like. But what it also does is it expects all of those kids to go on and be entrepreneurs and tech people. And I don't necessarily think that's what we should be training our kids from. Not because I want them all to be working in factories, but because I think that's not the role that education should serve. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Joseph Schumpeter William White Harry Braverman Scientific management and Taylorism Applied Imagination: Principles and Procedures of Creative Thinking by Alex Osborn Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking Abraham Maslow Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at Delft University Samuel W. Franklin on LinkedIn Samuel W. Franklin on X His Work: The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The financial world has to grapple with the complexities of climate change just like everyone else.  Bob Litterman is an esteemed figure in risk management and investment and the author of the book Modern Investment Management: An Equilibrium Approach. Bob and Greg discuss the dawn of quantitative finance and the integration of academic theory into the bustling trading desks of Wall Street. Bob sheds light on the intricate dance between market intuition and the precision of quantitative models, with the pivotal Black-Litterman model's influence on investment decisions. Bob helps peel back the layers of asset allocation conundrums, correlated assets, and financial forecasts. The conversation takes a deep look at the potential of carbon pricing, the inertia in climate policy, and the financial sector's crucial role in a sustainable future, highlighting the nuances of navigating investment strategies amidst these global challenges. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Why everybody hates taxes, but love subsidies 52:12: Incentives come in all different forms, and the IRA is a bunch of subsidies. People do love, and it is creating a lot of movement and a lot of investment. But, we just can't afford it. Like the subsidy to fossil fuel in the U.S. is an order of magnitude bigger than our piddling subsidies to low-carbon investments. And then you say, "Well, why don't we do more?" It's because who's going to pay for it? Ultimately, it's the taxpayers. And so that's why people don't like taxes. And that's why we can't subsidize our way out of this. We've just got to create the incentives. If you ask people, "Should polluters pay?" You know, it gets an 80% or 90%  approval rating. So, I'm sure we're going to get there. But, it's a tough political hurdle to get over; that's the problem. Risk is covariance with marginal utility 21:57: Most people think about risk as volatility…We think of risk as covariance with marginal utility. I've probably lost half the people out there, but it means that money in good times is not as valuable as money in bad times. How can we get the price of carbon tax right? 26:41: We don't have good models, and those models have a lot of uncertainty as to what the right parameters are and so on. I think we just have to buy into that and recognize that we aren't going to have the right answer. There is no right answer. And so the uncertainty means you have to err on the side of caution. We have to have a price that's high enough today that we react very strongly, and then we have to respond to new information. We shall see if things are worse than we expect and have to raise that price. The price should be high enough, though, right today, that we expect to solve the problem. And we expect the price to come down as the uncertainty is resolved over time. That's how high it should be, that we expect it to come down over time.  Are economists helpful on climate risk? 26:28: I remember reading an IPCC report, probably ten years ago, that said economists aren't very helpful on climate. They tell us that the damage from another ton could be anywhere from $2 to $200 a ton. What good is that? The answer is risk management. That's risk. Yes, it could be all over the place. So the right question to ask is, "What does your model say it will be? $100 a ton." The right question is, at what price are you highly confident that we're not going to go off the cliff, run into those tipping points? And that's a different question. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Fischer Black Salomon Brothers Goldman Sachs Black–Scholes model Black-Litterman Model: Definition, Basics, and Example Capital asset pricing model Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Pigouvian tax Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIPS) Guest Profile: Wikipedia Page Profile on FIASI WWF Profile Stanford Energy Profile Climate Central Profile His Work: Modern Investment Management: An Equilibrium Approach CFTC Report Presidential Report Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In the 20th century, the multidivisional firm was born. It quickly redefined business strategy and the way our world runs. Now, as the digital age advances and AI continues to become more and more critical to the way industries operate, a new kind of firm is emerging.  Karim R. Lakhani is a professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School and co-founded the Digital, Data, and Design Institute (D^3) at Harvard. His book, co-authored with Marco Iansiti, Competing in the Age of AI: Strategy and Leadership When Algorithms and Networks Run the World, looks at the ways corporations have attempted to restructure in the digital age.  Karim and Greg discuss what it takes to adapt a business model to the age of AI successfully, some of the missteps companies have made when trying to go digital, and what should be deemed proprietary knowledge when it comes to AI.  *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Rethinking the multi-divisional model 06:02: Over the last hundred years, the multi-divisional firm has enabled this built environment that we live in, right? All the accoutrements of, I'm using such a technical term, accoutrements. All the features of the modern world, what we take for granted: the fact that our plumbing works, our electricity works, our subway systems work, our transportation systems work mostly. But the modern world we live in, the built environment that we live in, has come about because the multi-divisional firm, the firm was established; the multi-divisional firm was established, and we were able to marshal capital, technology, and people to do productive things. And so this is a massive achievement, right? And the shadow of that lives on today. Most of us live in these multi-divisional, siloed firms. Is your organization mirroring your technology? 03:21: The mistake that most incumbent companies make—the companies that aren't coming from Silicon Valley or aren't born natively digital—is that they think it's just an add-on. They just think, "We'll just sprinkle this on top, and it'll be business as usual." When, in fact, Conway's Law basically says there's a mirroring hypothesis, right? The structure of the technology mirrors the structure of the organization. And if you're going to have a new architecture for your technology, you need a new architecture for your organization. Is innovation still an afterthought? 24:31: Innovation was often an afterthought in most organizations because, once you figure it out, you've stumbled into something good and just milk the heck out of it for a while. And then you were like, okay, let's acquire something else, right? And because the rate of change was very slow, while there were lots of innovation scholars back in the fifties and sixties writing stuff, it wasn't viewed as a core strategic imperative for most organizations. Balancing openness and advantage in the data age 51:40: Now that this new tool is available, why would we stop it from being available? But you can imagine the discussions in the dean's offices, the provost's offices, and the board of directors for these presses about, oh my god, all of our knowledge is being stolen. The same dilemma is going to happen inside and outside of companies. And what is your data strategy? What will you select and reveal? What will you keep private? What will give you an advantage or not? Show Links: Recommended Resources: Conway’s Law Alfred Chandler Alfred Sloan The API Mandate from Jeff Bezos The Digital Mindset: What It Really Takes to Thrive in the Age of Data, Algorithms, and AI by Paul Leonardi and Tsedal Neeley The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset that Drives Extraordinary Results by Andrew McAfee Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at Harvard Business School  Digital, Data, and Design Institute (D^3) His Work: Competing in the Age of AI: Strategy and Leadership When Algorithms and Networks Run the World Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ever wondered why marriage, one of the most common themes  in literature, is largely ignored by philosophers? What about the complexities of present-day marriages, with political differences, and even the dynamics of arranged marriages today? Devorah Baum is a Professor of English at the University of Southampton, a filmmaker, and the author of several books. Her latest book is called, On Marriage.  Devorah and Greg discuss the insights of philosophers like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche who saw marriage as an obstacle to philosophy..They also examine post-nuptial life depicted in Beckett's works and the story of Sheherezad in A Thousand and One Nights. Greg asks Devorah aboutr romcoms, the role of parenthood in marriage, and about the rise of pornography. This episode promises a wealth of insights into the institution of marriage.  *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: The hidden economics of marriage 19:31: Marriage is about marshaling a certain kind of resources. It's about orderly inheritance. It's about making sure that what the state would have to pay for, like the labor of social reproduction, is made private, brought indoors, and a lot of care work that goes on there, and so on. And then you overlay that with the language of love, altruism, and duty in the family, and you get away with stuff. So we can see that these are the conditions that have allowed. The private life of the marriage to keep the state or society well-oiled and running without having to pay some people or even recognize their labor because it's what they want to do naturally, and so on, and that's love. One of the great malaises of contemporary culture is self-righteousness 48:13:  One of the great malaises — I would even say diseases — of contemporary culture is a culture of self-righteousness, of people feeling that they have to be right all the time and about everything. And I think there's no pleasure in it. They can be reminded by these cultural productions that being in relationships with others isn't about being right all the time. In fact, you can't be, and just to be in perpetual agreement with the people you hang out with isn't to be in any relationship at all. Why do our romances imagine two against the world? 07:31: Our dream and our great romance of love is Romeo and Juliet, whose love affair is incompatible with a sanctioned, approved marriage. They marry, but the world doesn't approve of their marriage. And so they die, as though that marriage has no future, that love. And so I think something about our idea and our dream of love is distrustful of marriage because marriage, to be successful and to be sustained, is the sort of third. The world says, "Yes, you two can be together. We can get along with you." The world gives its blessing to the couple and says, "Yeah, we can work with you." So, something about that pollutes the ideal purity that the lovers imagine they have with each other, sort of two against the world. And that is our vision of romance. Why are conflicts sometimes beneficial to marriage? 40:41: In the romantic mythos, we have this idea, this dream of marriage where you can be opposite, and you can make peace with your differences. Sort of, the conclusion of a romantic comedy, ideally, or the kind of romantic comedies I have, is not one where there was a master-slave sort of battle going on, and then eventually one triumphed, and the other one said, "No, you were right all along, and I was wrong all along." What makes it feel romantic and alluring is that we imagine the argument continuing after the wedding, too, because we saw how much pleasure it brought them beforehand. So you can make peace with your differences, which isn't a piece that doesn't have conflict in it, but it's a piece in which the conflict can be not only endured but to some extent enjoyed and is a source of respect and mutual education and, indeed, edification. Show Links: Recommended Resources: One Thousand and One Nights Happy Days (play) Exhibition (film) Norman Rush Giambattista Vico Emmanuel Levinas Javier Marías Stanley Cavell Wesley Morris “Marriage is like a cage…” Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at University of Southampton Her Work: Amazon Author Page On Marriage Feeling Jewish: (A Book for Just About Anyone) The Jewish Joke: A Short History-with Punchlines IMDB Profile Husband The New Man Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Despite our culture of rugged individualism, it’s widely accepted among psychologists today that we need social connections to thrive. And neuroscience may be the key to understanding how relationships impact us on a physiological level. Amy Banks is the founding scholar at the International Center for Growth in Connection. Her book, Wired to Connect: The Surprising Link Between Brain Science and Strong, Healthy Relationships, delves into the neuroscience of social connections and provides a toolkit for bettering the relationships in our life.  Amy and Greg discuss why connection is fundamental to humans, Amy’s brain pathway acronym CARE, and how to repair relationships in your life so that they are more fulfilling.   *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Is there something that we can do to make people less anxiety inducing? 17:19: In a relationship that ranks pretty low on the Calm scale, it could be you, it could be them, and it could be some confluence of both of you. But what's important is having a snapshot of that. If it is the relationship actually that doesn't feel supportive, safe, where there's not a lot of mutuality, where there's not a lot of listening in addition to talking, when it doesn't have those qualities, then in order for your health and well-being to thrive, if you will, you got to have some other people. You got to have some other people to offset it, you know, we're heading into the holidays, and it often happens around families, right? Where you might be demanded or need to be someplace with people that maybe necessarily aren't on the same wavelength that you are, right?  How can you assess the emotions you make others feel? 13:28: When do we ever ask people, 'How do I make you feel?' That actually would be a really fruitful conversation to have with a friend or relative. Or, 'You look anxious. Do I make you anxious? Is there something I do that makes you anxious?' We don't have those kinds of relational conversations. Where did we ever get the notion that relationships were secondary?  02:54: Our entire culture was built on this notion of separation, individuation, stand on your own two feet, and we have such a robust history, literally, politically, and psychologically, developmentally, of believing that to be the case. We've created an economic system around capitalism. That's all about competition and the survival of the fittest. There's so much that's still Darwinian in the way that we think human beings work. The untapped potential of marginal relationships 40:41: There are a lot of marginal relationships where, once you begin to understand what the qualities of a healthy relationship are, you can begin to try to have conversations that point in that direction and see who's open to trying to interact differently. There's a lot that you can do with marginal relationships that is really more out of social ignorance, not being taught, and not malevolence when I talk to people about this. And when I do my teachings, people by and large are just relieved to hear this news about relationships, and it gives them some guideposts to begin to think about how they might try to shift, change, or grow the relationships that maybe aren't as satisfying as they would like them to be. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Jean Baker Miller Stephen Porges Brain Lock, Twentieth Anniversary Edition: Free Yourself from Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior by Jeffrey M. Schwartz Guest Profile: The International Center for Growth in Connection Professional Website Her Work: Wired to Connect: The Surprising Link Between Brain Science and Strong, Healthy Relationships Fighting Time Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Why does there seem to be such a struggle to get things done in some organizations? How can you unlock the mystery behind the persistence of bad management practices? What is the problem of inaction, and how are workplaces impacted by the human tendency to add rather than subtract? Robert Sutton is a Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the author and co-author of several books, including his latest book The Asshole Survival Guide: How to Deal with People Who Treat You Like Dirt, and his upcoming book The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder. Bob and Greg discuss practical examples of organizational friction, examining the story of Larry Page and Google, observing the transformative leadership of Satya Nadella at Microsoft, and even sharing his personal triumphs and trials. Greg questions the place of assholes in positions of power and the impact they have on organizations. Bob talks about time management and its crucial role in the daily operations of organizations, sharing stories from companies that have triumphed and those who stumbled.  They also discuss the potential of AI and textual analysis in identifying bottlenecks within a company. Tune in, learn, and transform your workplace. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: What are the factors that contribute to an individual being considered a workplace jerk? 21:58: So, what are some of the characteristics that lead people to turn into jerks? One is being in a hurry. The pressure to rush, rush, rush, even when it doesn't make any sense in many organizations, has increased, or at least stayed the same. Another one is sleep deprivation. I mean, if people are exhausted, they're tired. It's not like those things have gone away. And then the other thing that happens, in the other problem with assholeness is, and these are all things that can be produced in the lab easily, and it’s very contagious. Negative behaviors are more contagious than positive behaviors. And, by the way, when there are power differences in organizations, when people are powerful, objectively powerful, or feel powerful, they focus more on their own needs. They focus less on the needs of others, and they act like the rules don't apply to them. Does being a jerk help you get ahead? 13:28:  On the whole, we can have some arguments about when being a jerk helps you get ahead. And it depends on the game: old Microsoft versus new Microsoft. I think that the jerks get ahead in the old system, but not in the new system. But when you're working for somebody like that, there's just no evidence that it helps the underlings or yelling at customers, except in some, maybe very rare, situations. Generalists vs. specialists 51:43: Everybody doesn't have to be a generalist. You just need enough generalists to glue the thing together. And actually, great specialists are absolutely fabulous, as long as there's somebody there who understands how the system fits together. So I'm not completely opposed to specialists who don't care about anybody else. I just want them to be in a system that glues their behavior together. Does gossip have a function in an organization? 55:11: Gossip actually has a function in an organization, and the function is that it brings out information that is not captured by formal systems and being in touch as a leader with the gossipers. It's Scuttlebutt. And, so one of the CEOs I know said what she used to always do—that she did somebody who did very well getting ahead in situations where women didn't always get ahead—was try to make friends with the people who were known gossips and complainers. She said it for two reasons. One, they tend to give you the negative information first, and the second one was a little bit more, maybe insidious, she said. Well, if you could give that person a different perspective that everything didn't suck that sometimes you could actually even change the gossip in the system. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Satya Nadella Edwin Catmull Larry Page Deborah H. Gruenfeld Dacher Keltner Todd Park Melissa Valentine Paul S. Adler Amy Edmondson Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at Stanford GSB Professional Profile at Stanford Bob Sutton's Website Bob Sutton on LinkedIn The Friction Podcast His Work: The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder The Asshole Survival Guide: How to Deal with People Who Treat You Like Dirt Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best... and Learn from the Worst The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't Weird Ideas That Work: How to Build a Creative Company Scaling Up Excellence Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Management oftentimes can be a difficult and precise artform. How does leadership at a company decide how the organization should be structured? What divisions should be created? And how will the inevitable problems that arise be handled?  John Roberts, a Stanford Graduate School of Business professor, is one of the leading thinkers on organizational economics and has written numerous books on the subject like The Modern Firm: Organizational Design for Performance and Growth.  John and Greg discuss how the discipline of organizational economics came to be, why some organizational structures are more effective than others, and why the transmission of knowledge from academic to management can be tricky.  *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: Is it essential for leaders to step back from the daily grind and adopt a broader perspective to effectively formulate strategy? 38:43: Opportunities for senior managers to get away from things for a while are important and underdeveloped. My guess is that classroom education isn't the right way because the tendency is to prepare for the class. You've got more time than usual, but you don't really have a chance to sit back. But it might be an element of it. So, some combination of small group class activities where there are a bunch of your peers, and you're talking about big ideas, coaching where you have somebody who asks good questions. Is culture the most important thing in an organization? 13:56: I've come to the position that probably the most important thing in an organization is the culture...If you have a strong culture that really determines the way people think, the way people interact, what things they'll do and what things they won't do, what they'll put up with, how much they focus on today versus tomorrow, and a whole range of things, that can be much more important than the formal architecture or the established routines. Differentiating information and communication technology 29:16: People didn't see communication technology and information technology as separate things. They just saw them as the internet. One of them encourages centralization. The other encourages decentralization. But that was a big part of what was going on—that we weren't asking the right questions. We were just talking about technology. We weren't talking about the specific technologies that were involved. Navigating the complexities of decentralized decision-making in a dynamic Environment 21:04: You can't run a centralized, top-down, hierarchic organization of any size. Even if the technology weren't changing on you, the environment is changing on you. Even with the best communication technology and the best information technology, you can't get the information from here to here. So you have to make a lot of decisions within the bowels of the business. And that means you have to make sure that the system is set up so that these decisions here are compatible with the other guy's making. That's a delicate thing to do.  Show Links: Recommended Resources: Ronald Coase John Browne of BP “Why Do Management Practices Differ across Firms and Countries?” by Nicholas Bloom and John Van Reenen Oliver E. Williamson “Does Management Matter? Evidence from India” by Nicholas Bloom, Benn Eifert, Aprajit Mahajan, David McKenzie & John Roberts Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at Stanford University His Work: Economics, Organization and Management The Modern Firm: Organizational Design for Performance and Growth Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How can economics shape our understanding of healthcare? How can cognitive biases lead even seasoned doctors into harmful errors, and what potential does machine learning have to mitigate these mistakes?  Anupam B. (Bapu) Jena is a professor of Health Care Policy and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Associate Physician in the Department of Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, host of the Freakonomics M.D. podcast, and the author of the book Random Acts of Medicine: The Hidden Forces That Sway Doctors, Impact Patients, and Shape Our Health. He has an MD in medicine and a PhD in economics.  Bapu and Greg discuss the impact of timing on healthcare. From the intriguing effect of birthdate on ADHD diagnosis and how patient outcomes in medical care correlate to how recently a physician was in residency to the puzzling improvement of cardiology patient outcomes when there are fewer cardiologists present. They discuss the lessons learned from Covid through both medical and economic lenses and why the effectiveness trajectory of surgeons differs from that of other physicians. This is a fascinating dive into the data side of medicine, with several surprising takeaways for any listener.   *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: On the intersection between medicine and behavioral economics 25:30: One of the things that I've thought about the intersection of behavioral economics and medicine is that it may not be surprising that the types of things that behavioral economists will often study show what they do, right? Because when the stakes are not high, it's not hard to sort of rely on that autonomous part of your brain that tells you that someone who's 40 is different than someone who's 39. Why does it matter? You go to the grocery store, something $7.99 versus $8, and yes, you're more likely to buy it when it's $7.99 versus $8. But you wouldn't think that if that applied to life-saving chemotherapy, you'd be more likely to buy the chemotherapy that's $7,999 versus $8,000. You would think, wow, life-saving chemotherapy. I'm going to figure out which therapy I need. I'm not just going to let a mind trick or heuristic move me in one way or the other. What do we need to do in order to do medicine better? 47:20: What you really want to train doctors to do is be able to create differential diagnoses, like clinically problem solve, and understand that when things aren't lining up the way they should, to know that they need to search further to figure out the answer. In that aspect of problem solving, I think economists do very well because the nature is, the work is different in that respect in medicine; I think we rely too much on pattern recognition to sort of help us understand answers to questions. And there's like a reasoning that is sometimes not taught. Do we demand too much from our doctors? 28:48: It's easy to miss things, right? And it's easy to not realize what's the big thing that you need to be looking for versus the small thing. And you get that with experience. I think with experience, you do better there, but it's certainly the case that even with experienced doctors, they still miss things, and I think that's where computers can be really helpful. They can be in the background, as they see. The data that is generated on a daily basis for a person, seeing what the past medical history of that person is, seeing the trajectory of all of those things, like how are the labs looking over time, what is the imaging looking like over time, what are the nurses' notes saying about delirium or agitation, are there more mentions of that as we're going on? A computer could see all that information and put it together in a way that a human being might not be able to. And at the very minimum, I think it could offer us some good insights that can help us consider things that we weren't considering. On the origins of Anupam's study 18:21: It was another data point to tell people that sometimes less is more, but what I think it did more of, and probably what most of my studies do more of, instead of moving the needle in terms of one specific clinical practice, is just getting the medical world more in tune with these ideas of natural experiments and trying to just be a little bit more curious and innovative when we come up with approaches to studying questions because a lot of what we study in medicine is critically important. I mean, it matters for our health; sometimes it matters for life and death. We have the ability to do randomized trials, and those are great, but sometimes we can't do them, or we don't do them. And we can't phone it in for those other types of analyses. We've got to be as curious, as intellectual, and as creative as we can be to try to figure out the right answer. Show Links: Recommended Resources: David O. Meltzer Development economics Randomized controlled trial When the Doctor’s Away The COURAGE Trial Daniel Kahneman Amos Tversky Left Digit Bias Marcus Welby, M.D. The Norwegian breast cancer screening program Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at Harvard Medical School Anupam B. Jena Profile on Analysis Group Anupam B. Jena on Twitter His Work: Anupam B. Jena Amazon Author Page Random Acts of Medicine: The Hidden Forces That Sway Doctors, Impact Patients, and Shape Our Health Freakonomics M.D. Podcast Google Scholar Page Articles on National Bureau of Economic Research Articles on HealthAffairs.org Anupam B. Jena Substack Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Far from just making things pretty, design has become an essential part of strategy and now has a dynamic role in organizations. It’s not just about design; it's about the transformative power of design. Vijay Kumar is Charles Owen Endowed Chair and Professor Emeritus at the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He is also the author of 101 Design Methods: A Structured Approach for Driving Innovation in Your Organization, a comprehensive toolbox that equips you with the understanding and tools to tackle your projects with a design mindset. Vijay and Greg dive into the complexities of design education, blending intuitive, collaborative, and scientific techniques, and how systems thinking is an absolute must-have for success. Vijay brings to light how top-down leadership, when married with bottom-up innovation champions, can shift mindsets towards innovation. *unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.* Episode Quotes: The levels of impact of innovation  14:04:  In my work, I think of these impacts in organizations at three levels: creating awareness, which is creating the basic awareness about how innovation happens, and looking at some examples and looking at successes and failures is good, that awareness gives you some basics to start your journey. But the next level is experience, awareness alone is not enough for you to practice. The experience level is: can we give people some experience, a hands-on experience? [15:27] Now, the next level is creating competence. Like creating competence, you have to go into a deeper level of understanding of all these methods, and it is a multi-year or perpetual activity that you need to engage and to absorb the competence of innovation methods and tools to make new things happen. Rethinking design innovation in a world of minimalism 12:48: The idea of design innovation, on a minimalistic level, loses its richness; it loses the essence of the power of design. The simplification is that the whiteboards, post-it notes, and a one-day workshop. But the fact and the impact are so minimal in my understanding. How can we encourage innovative thinking? 09:19: The executives or the leaders who have bought into the idea of the importance of innovation can make a big difference in influencing their team and the other folks working in the organization by constantly giving examples or demonstrations or talking about the impact the design of the innovation could have on the company's offerings. That's one direction—the top-down direction of influence. How do we foster ownership? 29:08: Ownership of people's actions takes place when they first-hand experience the value of something. So the engineers that are doing research on the field suddenly become part of the field, doing interviews, talking to customers, and getting insights. So, they take ownership of that process by immersing themselves in that context. So ownership is a big part of my belief that, in order to give ownership, you have to make people participate in these diverse types of activities. Show Links: Recommended Resources: Larry Keeley Human-Centered Design James G. March Cutting Cubes Out of Fog Christopher Alexander Charles Owen LinkedIn Alfred P. Sloan Six Sigma Guest Profile: Faculty Profile at Illinois Institute of Technology Vjiay Kumar on LinkedIn 101 Design Methods Website His Work: 101 Design Methods: A Structured Approach for Driving Innovation in Your Organization Google Scholar Page ResearchGate Page Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ashley Ward, Professor of Animal Behavior at the University of Sydney, explores the world of animal senses and their role in understanding the environment. They discuss smell's influence on human communication, the power of smell in social insects, and intriguing theories about human behaviors like kissing. The podcast also delves into animal behavior, group decision-making, and the fascinating hunting abilities of hyenas. Additionally, the speakers explore the potential of using animals and electronic noses in medical diagnostics.