Senior Project Blog Post 5

The main issue the Heath brothers addressed in this week's reading is the "bad is stronger than good" bias.  Previous chapters focused on finding "bright spots" in order to explore "what is working right now and why" and trying to expand on these successes, but in reality we ask this question very infrequently, as we tend to fixate on the negatives.  On a website entitled "Learn English at Home," of the first 24 words to display emotion, only six were positive.  A psychologist later analyzed 558 emotion words (every one he could find in the English language) and found 62% of them were negative.  The most simple example of this is if a child comes home to her parents with a report card with one A's, three B's and one F.  Almost every parent will fixate on this F and try to fix it by either getting her a tutor or punishing her until the grade improves.  Few parents would say, "think about what you do in the classes you get A's in.  How can we build on those strengths?" Parents don't think much about their children's grades if they are A's and B's, but once a C or F pop up, they go berserk.  Our world has a heavy negative orientation.  If every time a light switched on we were ecstatic (instead of getting irritated every time they don't) we would be a much happier people.  The ratio of time spent solving problems to the time spent scaling success is astronomical.  "We need to switch from archaeological problem solving to bright-spot evangelizing" says Heath.  This relates to my project because coaches spend lots of time looking at their team's and player's weaknesses and trying to figure out how to solve them.  In order to fix them, almost every coach has made the team practice it over and over again until it improves by punishing the team whenever it goes wrong (much like a parent to a child with a bad grade).  Instead of this repetition that often leads to the adoption of bad habits, coaches need to look at things the team does right, or one player that really gets a skill the rest of the team struggles with and try to illuminate and expand it.

Senior Project Blog Post 4

This week, the Heath's focus on Bright Spots continued with a variety of new case studies.  They talk about "solutions-focused therapy" which is a technique far removed from traditional methods.  Instead of "archaeology" and digging for clues about why people act the way they do (ie delving into one's childhood), solution's focused therapy aims only to solve the pronlem at hand.  Understanding a problem doesn't necessary solve it.  Change doesn't require a long and arduous process to reverse a habit.  There are a variety of techniques used to find such solutions.  The first of which is the Miracle Question: "Suppose that you went to bed tonnight and sleep well.  Sometime, in the middle of the night, while you are sleeping, a miracle happens and all the troubles that brought you here are resolved.  When you wake up in the morning, what's the first small sign you'd see that would make you think, 'Well, something must have happened -- the problem is gone." The therapist then prods for specifics and forces the person to identify the first hints of the miracle (not overly grand hints such as a million dollars or a new car).  For example, in a Marital session, a wife or husband might say that a first hint could be their spouse listens to them more which would be clear if the other made more eye contact and nodded in the right places, and responded without atacking or ignoring their ideas.  The specific and vivid signs lead to the Exception Question: "When was the last time you saw a little bit of the miracle, even for just a short time." By asking this question the Therapist aims to show the client that they have actually already solved it in at least some circumstances.  For example, if a Mom is having trouble controlling her children, the therapist can help her focus on the times her kids have listened to her and figure out what she was doing during those specific instances in order to replicate them again.  Like analyzing game film of a sporting event they can work through how they were behaving, whether they were smiling, their tone of voice, etc.  If it worked once it can work again.  An alcoholic is able to see that they stayed sober for a couple hours one day because they went to the library to read the newspaper, so maybe if they do it every day they can beat their addiction.  These bright spots provide direction for change and are far more efficient than trying to find the root of the problem.  This relates to my project because there are many bad coaches out there.  Probably hundreds of thousands.  Instead of going to these coaches and trying to figure out why they are bad coaches (perhaps when they were young they had a bad coach who caused them to adopt bad habits), if they adopt my website's tips and player tracking device, they can immediately improve the quality of their player's development without having to do a major overhaul of their coaching style or technique.

Senior Project Blog Post 3

This week in "Switch" I read about finding bright spots.  Heath uses the work of Jerry Sternin, an employee of Save the Children, an organization working to help children in need.  His job was to create a new office in Vietnam to fight malnutrition, but when he arrived he was told he only had 6 months to make a difference, as the foreign minister told him his presence was not appreciated by everyone in the government.  He knew about the issues that caused the rampant malnutrition: Poor sanitation, not enough clean water, and little education about proper nutrition, but all of that was "TBU" (true but useless).  With a short time span and a minuscule budget there was no way he could address these issues effectively, so he decided to take a different approach.  He went to rural villages and met with groups of mothers who would measure and weigh each child in the village and analyze the results.  They were looking for examples of kids from poor families who were well nourished.  If some kids could remain healthy despite immense poverty, then their success could be replicated and create a practical (but short term) solution.  The mothers needed direction, not motivation because all of them wanted to make their children healthier, the question was how.  This is similar to the goals of my own project.  All coaches want to make their teams and players better, but they do not know how. I want my skill development chart and data to be the "direction" these coaches are looking for even if they don't know it yet.  The solution Sternin found was that the mothers of the healthy children were feeding their kids 4 smaller meal a day (rather than 2 with the same amount of food), as their stomachs could not handle such large amounts at a time.  They also were including improvisations in the meals such as crabs and sweet-potato greens which were often seen as lower-class or improper.  These few bright spots led to a 65% decrease in malnourishment in the 6 months while Sternin was there.  I hope my tool, most likely over the course of 3 or 4 years, will help coaches develop more personalized approaches to their kids on a short term scale, while also helping the organization develop long term solutions to problems the tool will make clear.

Senior Project Blog Post 2

This week in Switch, the author focuses on the Institute of Healthcare Improvement.  IHI is a Boston based company who has revolutionized how hospitals and other healthcare providers improve the quality of their services.  After years of analyzing data they found that the “defect: rate in health care was 1 in 10 meaning that 10% of patients were not being cared for in the right way.  In 2004 they set a goal to save 100,000 people from avoidable deaths.  To do so, they had to understand the steps it takes to keep people healthy, and pinpoint the times when their coverage goes wrong.  In order to develop a way to fix the issues, hospitals, who are very hesitant to admit that they erred, needed to change decades of habits and customary practices.  Eighteen months later, however, hospitals who had enrolled in IHI’s 100,000 lives campaign prevented an estimated 122,300 deaths.  One of the main reasons for its success, according the Heath Brothers, was the fact that before it started, IHI CEO Donald Berwick set June 14, 2006 as the date he wanted to save 100,000 lives by.  This specific and measurable goal with a due date gave hospitals and healthcare providers something finite to work to accomplish.  Instead of “We want to save lives in the next few years” he made sure people remained focus on the task at hand.  He also made it easy for hospitals to embrace change.  He created an elaborate system of forms and instructions, training, support groups, and mentors, all of whom worked together. organized and efficient,  in order to complete the campaign.  I hope to be able to make the path easy for coaches to adopt a more data driven analysis and tracking of their players development by giving them all the tools they need in order to make the transition easy.  The difficult part will be showing them a finite goal they should have in mind while coaching.

Senior Project Blog Post 1

Switch by Chris Heath and Dan Heath is a book about change.  It is difficult to get people to adopt new habits because our hearts and minds rarely can reach an agreement.  Switch talks about a study done by psychologists in Chicago in 2000.  Moviegoers going to see Mel Gibson's Payback were given free buckets of purposefully stale popcorn in order to study their eating behavior.  They were given different sized buckets, each far too big to finish completely, but when they measured the amount of gross popcorn each group had eaten, those with the larger buckets ate 53% more than those with the smaller buckets.  It seems like an unimportant conclusion but the data shows there is an issue with the way we address issues and try to solve them.  Public health experts would say that those who ate too much need to be motivated to eat better.  That is a difficult, and often even impossible task.  Habits are often subconscious behaviors, thus educating someone on the benefits on better eating won't have much of an effect.  It ends up being an easy solution.  All you have to do is change the bucket size.  The study's data clearly showed bucket size as the number one determining factor in snacking size.  This pertains to entrepreneurs and my project because business is a largely psychological profession.  The product you create must make fulfill a consumer's desire or solve a consumer's problem.  For example an entrepreneur trying to help people eat healthy would be more successful at solving the problem if they created a product that helped limit people's serving sizes than if they tried to educate people on the dangers of large portion sizes.  The book describes this situation as a situational problem masked as a people problem.  It will be difficult for me to convince old-time coaches to believe in a system of charting player development data and reading about child athlete psychology (a people problem), so if I can figure out a way to alter the situation and create an environment in which they have "smaller buckets," I think that will be the key to a successful endeavor.

Tipping Point Blog Post 5

This week in Tipping Point, Gladwell explores the Air Walk shoes.  Immediately I drew a connection to the Case Study we read and responded to in class.  The two cases are strikingly similar.  The air walk shoes appealed to hipsters and the mainstream alike by releasing products that were distinctly aimed at each group, they were able to appease two vastly different segments of consumers.  "Early Adopters" in southern California were beach loving skateboarders who were the initial targets of the company, but they didn't just buy them, they translated them.  This group of highly specialized people leveled, sharpened, and assimilated the product to make it popular in the mainstream as well.  Airwalk realized it had just expanded its reach to potential buyers and through segmentation was able to please the masses.  As it reached its highest point of success however, it switched strategies and made its products more wholesale centric.  With nothing specialized, different, or unique, it lost the key component that made it popular in the first place.  It was then no different from a major retailer, and was no longer "cool." This is almost exactly what my proposal for James was in the case study.  I thought it would be best to separate the cupcake company into an artisan entity for small scale, boutique sales, and then a larger segment for huge production of less intricate products.  The problem for Airwalks was that they decided to release one product and hope that it would please both types of people based on name value alone.  It failed miserably, as it probably would for the cupcake company because once you sell your soul to the devil (wholesale), your product becomes nothing but a price tag with a cost to make that they drive as low as possible without regard to the integrity of it.  I think segmentation also is not a good long term solution however, as the vast majority of the time one part is hugely more successful than the other and it ends up a disaster for the company as a whole (see Netflix).

C4E Week 6 In Class

This week during class the Foam Home mainly focused on creating our presentation.  I put together an initial version of our powerpoint with a heavy focus on visuals.  While it may have looked good, because our projects is heavily numbers based it didn't give the viewer a better understanding of our vision.  After meeting with our consultants and going through an initial run through of our presentation we realized we still had a lot of work to do.  We went back to the drawing board and created a variety of graphs and charts to emphasize the most important figures in our financial documents.  We also heeded our consultants advice on the importance of buzzwords.  We chose 3 or 4 of the adjectives we most wanted associated with the Foam Home and implemented them into as many of our slides as we could.  We settle on "student-centric," "collaboration," and "comfortable" as our main descriptions, but also worked on making sure that the parts of our vision that made it unique were also repeated and made clear.  The computer lab and conference rooms are an integral part of what sets the Foam Home apart, so we wanted to make sure those two features were well documented.  While our $200 project winds down to a close, we are wringing out the calendars for all they are worth.  Since every dollar we make is profit, we are selling them for really anything we can get our hands for.  I sold a few for $5 (we ordered them at around $4.50 a piece so the return isn't that bad).  It was probably a mistake to reach out for the extra funding at the beginning of the project as we are now left with a large number of boxes with products that will be worthless pretty soon.

Tipping Point Blog Post 4

This week in Tipping Point Gladwell talks about how lifestyle, background, and culture influence the success of an individual.  He uses Jewish immigrants from the turn of the century as his prime examples.  These immigrants, he explains, came to the country with nothing except a little bit of know-how in the clothing industry.  Through hard work and sacrifice, they achieve a modicum of   success, and were able to give their children an education.  These men and women who sacrificed everything when coming to the new world are not Gladwell's focus, however.  Its those they sacrificed everything for who he believes are the key to understanding success.  He explains that these children grew up watching their parents sweat and toil to put dinner on the table, and thus they adopted this determination and applied it to their educations (which their parents had not obtained).  This hard work combined with the declining birth rate during the depression (less competition to get into schools) got them into good colleges.  When few firms were hiring jewish lawyers, they started their own and took cases that were deemed unfit for "whit-shoe" firms (such as corporate takeovers) which eventually uber profitable.  It seemed to me that these lawyers were not so much skilled as they were lucky.  The only reason they were able to take the (unforeseen) lucrative hostile corporate takeover cases was that no one else wanted them, and not because they were incredibly good at their jobs.  It is an interesting case of people casting a product or idea away as unfit for high brow society, but later accepting it when it becomes trendy.  The first thing it made me think about was ripped jeans.  Twenty years ago, if your jeans had holes in them, you threw them out and bought new ones.  It was a simpler time.  Now, however, you can pay $200 and companies will save you the trouble and rip them for you before you ever put them on.  The jeans themselves didn't get better at being jeans, but society evolved (devolved?) to a place where a certain style became trendy or exciting, much like corporate takeovers.

C4E Week 5 In Class

This week in class as we prepared our Foam Home documents to send to Mr. Gladstone we noticed a few errors in our startup costs.  While they didn't effect our P+L statements were minuscule in total, it got me thinking about what would happen in the real world if this happened.  While I do not take the Legal Studies class, I do know that the falsification of financial documents is a big no-no.  I also know that humans are prone to err and wondered how often companies over/underestimate their own figures and get in trouble.  Blue chip companies that deal with millions of dollars on a daily basis are constantly under the scrutiny of the SEC and the media, so they must be incredibly careful with every number that gets inputted into a spreadsheet.  While we at the Foam Home were able to catch our mistake before the cops were at our doors, the necessity of double checking figures is a good lesson to learn early on in the entrepreneurship process.  As we begun to put together our presentation, it forced us to rethink what exactly our vision was and why that vision is unique.  Since there is another coffee shop proposal, I think it is important for us to distance ourselves from a stereotypical café, and figure out a way to represent the Foam Home as a space for shared learning experiences.  For the $200 project, we devised a new strategy to sell the remaining calendars.  Last week we attempted to make bulk sales at discounted prices, but unfortunately there were very few interested groups.  This week we decided to go back to the basics of 1 on 1 sales.  We found the people who had shown interest in the product (especially those featured in it) at first but were hesitant about the price and attempted to convince them to buy with the incredible sale being offered.  While it didn't work every time it was encouraging to find more buyers and hopefully continue to make profit slowly but surely now that we have fully paid Kyle back.