I came across a great presentation by Ron Williams, Chairman and CEO of Aetna on innovation and leadership. He made a turnaround at Aetna with new focus on employees and customers and using information technology and fact-based decisions. He spoke at MIT Sloan School of Management. This is a really great session, don’t miss it.
If you only have a few minutes, the first 2/3 of the video is what you should watch. Some key points:
making the case for change
transformation through technology in a very short period of time
92% of employees take the employee survey (45 minutes)
key question – is my manager / supervisor practicing the Aetna way (at 83%)
they had a situation where staff did not admit they worked for Aetna
employee engagement moved from 48% to 78%
the are focusing on a high performance organization (expectation, not fear based)
their performance management system is based on results AND leadership (can’t get results while not developing and leading staff - if you achieve good results but have poor leadership = no reward!
Each year the amount of information created in the enterprise, paper and digital combined, grows faster than 65%.
Non-productive information work, such as reformatting documents or reentering documents into computers, consumed more than $1.5 trillion in U.S. salaries last year.
Survey respondents spend as much as 26% of their time trying to manage information overload.
Respondents split their time evenly between dealing with paper and digital information, but 71% prefer to deal with digital information.
The amount of time U.S. information workers spent last year managing paper-driven information overload cost $460 billion in salaries.
Reducing the time wasted dealing with information overload by 15% could save a company with 500 employees more than $2 million a year.
The war and terror has been ongoing in Africa for many years. Something must be done now. One of the horrible areas is the Democratic Republic of Congo.
FYI: This area is very close to the children’s villages being built and run by Watoto.ca. Our daughter Tanya is working for the Watoto Canadian office and is responsible for coordinating volunteer trips to Uganda.
Refugee camp in DRC
Child who grew up in refugee camp
Child soldiers
Condition: Critical
DRC and Uganda
This short video below highlights the plight of the people caught in this horrible situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Condition Critical is a short film that brings us the voices of those who are living there every day. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) – Doctors without Borders has been working in the DRC since 1992.
Check out New Perspectives on Business. Also take a look at the other sections: “The Business of Technology”, “How the Biz does Business”, “The Business of Food” and “Richard Branson”.
The site is Open Forum, sponsored by American Express.
If you are small or large business, you should be paying attention to Twitter. CEO Evan Williams talks about using Twitter to connect with your customers.
We often thing that life is a journey that we start at A and finish at C with very few decisions or opportunities for change along the way. In reality there are many decisions we can make. We have a tremendous amount of information available to us that provides opportunity to make a change.
Check out this 2-part video blog “Life is not so linear” from Beachwalks.tv.
Part 1
Part 2
Beachwalks with Rox is a great video blog that provides some insightful reflection and personal development. Lots of great episodes on the site.
Nice, crisp short interview with Don Tapscott, author of Grown Up Digital. Don talks about the expectations of the young generation just entering the workforce.
A sign that Christmas is close at hand, is the discussion about getting ready to fill a shoebox with gifts for a needy child. Everyone can help make a child’s day brighter through Operation Christmas Child.
Our family has participated for many years as our children grew up, both through our church and christian school. It is easy to anyone to fill a shoebox and deliver it to one of the thousands of groups assembling shipments of shoeboxes. If you don’t know about this program, check out this short video.
