Weekend Digest: The Lego Edition

For our weekend business and political readers:

COULD THERE BE FEWER HOSPITALS IN THE FUTURE?
Forbes says it’s entirely possible “hospitals may be disappearing in the era of health care reform.”

Forbes points out the development in the 90’s of managed care and alternative outpatient services caused a reduction of inpatient services forcing some hospitals to close and “since 2000, the number of acute-care hospitals has held steady at around 5,700.”

Over the past decade, 16 percent of hospitals have consolidated by joining a health system.That trend is accelerating in the context of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.

Why is that happening and what is the “strategic inflections point” and how did that help change the rules of the game?  Click here for a look at the future of inpatient care.

$3 BILLION ISN’T ‘COOL ENOUGH’
That is for the young entrepreneur behind Snapchat who turned down a $3 billion cash offer from Facebook. If you don’t have a teenager, Snapchat is a photo messaging application where users can take photos, record videos, add text and drawings, and send them to a controlled list of recipients. These sent photographs and videos are known as Snaps.

But the news seems more striking for what it says about Facebook than for what it says about Snapchat. Facebook is no stranger to snapping up a threatening competitor, as it did with Instagram last spring, and Snapchat has been haunting Mark Zuckerberg’s dreams for quite some time.

After failing in an attempt to buy the company last year, Facebook decided to build its own disappearing photo app, releasing Poke last December. Some observers immediately chided Facebook for its copycat ways.

So what happened to Poke and why is Snapchat so popular?

Nor is Snapchat the only app beating Facebook in some corner of digital communication. WhatsApp, a messaging service, is more popular in the U.S. than Facebook’s messaging app. And as industry analyst Benedict Evans pointed out recently, Facebook-owned Instagram is far from the most popular photo-sharing service. Mobile communication services are emerging and finding they can beat Facebook at one thing or another.

Can Snapchat continue to grow without Facebook and could it be possible any of these social network services actually overtake FB? Bloomberg Businessweek has complete details and analysis at this link.

TREAT STRATEGY AS A DESIGN PROCESS
Harvard Business Review reports, “Managers routinely claim that their strategic planning process creates large, detailed documents, but often little else.” So what gives?

It’s as if the process serves no purpose other than to create the plan, and execution is somehow separate. An approach that we think might work better would be to treat strategy making as if it were a design process. But the aspect of design we want to focus on here is a bit different.

The key feature of the design process that interests us is the concept of “levels of design,” a notion that the creation of a design goes through a series of levels of increasing complexity and detail.

So as HBR points out, it’s like architectural designs that are completed “in stages of increasing detail” in usually “five levels of strategy.”

For your strategic planning, how can you use those five levels?  Click here to explore.

UP CLOSE WITH BILL GATES
Exclusive interviews with prominent business icons are hard to come by. An exclusive with Bill Gates is a business journalist’s dream and an unbelievable score. FT Magazine made that big score with Gates whose net worth of $72 billion makes him the richest person in America.

FT Magazine’s exclusive is vintage Gates with some interesting twists.

Bill Gates describes himself as a technocrat. But he does not believe that technology will save the world. Or, to be more precise, he does not believe it can solve a tangle of entrenched and interrelated problems that afflict humanity’s most vulnerable: the spread of diseases in the developing world and the poverty, lack of opportunity and despair they engender.

“I certainly love the IT thing,” he says. “But when we want to improve lives, you’ve got to deal with more basic things like child survival, child nutrition.”

For an intriguing read from the genius behind Microsoft and a bite of his sarcastic humor, go to this link for the full interview.

LOSING TRUST IN OBAMA
With his approval rating continuing to slide and his signature health care plan in tatters, President Obama could use some political allies in his corner. What he is getting though is friendly fire.

President Barack Obama’s credibility may have taken a big hit with voters, but he’s also in serious danger of permanently losing the trust of Democrats in Congress. The Obamacare debacle has been bad enough that it’s tough for Democrats to take on faith that the president can fix the problems. His one-time allies are no longer sure that it’s wise to follow him into battle, leaving Obama and his law not only vulnerable to existing critics, but open to new attacks from his own party.

POLITICO reports when under attack in the past, “Congressional Democrats have often sprung to his defense.” Not now.

Now, Democratic sources say, Obama can expect that lawmakers will be quicker to criticize him — and distance themselves from his policies — than they have in the past. With Obama now free of the demands of running for re-election, the gloves are off, they say.

For the complete story click on this link.

SMILING AND DIALING FOR BITCOIN CONTRIBUTIONS
Could political candidates soon be soliciting bitcoin contributions in their campaigns?

The Washington Post reports that the FCC is considering a proposal to allow just that.

The Federal Election Commission debated a proposal Thursday to let candidates and committees accept bitcoins as in-kind contributions, in the same way computer equipment or shares of stock are sometimes given as donations.

The six-member panel appeared to be leaning toward sanctioning them, as long as it can resolve concerns about whether the Internet cash could be used to mask the identities of donors.

Created by a still-unknown ­developer in 2009, the bitcoin network allows people to make nearly instantaneous online payments without going through a bank or a third party. The transactions are public, although the parties involved are identified only by their bitcoin addresses.

Read more on this subject at this link.

THE ROLE OF MONEY IN ELECTIONS IS ‘GROSSLY OVERSTATED’
So says Real Clear Politics in a post that makes its case with data that shows “there are quite a lot of instances where incumbents badly outspent their opponents and had tight races, as well as cases where incumbents were badly outspent but won easily.”

In reality, the relationship between a challenger getting outspent and his margin of defeat is pretty small. If we look at the margin of victory for all incumbents who ran in 2012 with major party opposition, and compare it to the amount by which they outspent their opponent (or were outspent by their opponent), the relationship is statistically insignificant.

It’s a counterintuitive piece. Go inside the numbers at this link.

THE LAST MOMENTS OF JFK’S LIFE
The photographs were taken by H. Warner King an amateur photographer who was standing close-by when President Kennedy’s motorcade drove past him that fateful day in Dallas 50 years ago. Now King’s daughter Sonia, who was 10-years-old when Kennedy was assassinated, has made available those never-before-seen photos she discovered after her father passed away.

We were all devastated by what happened, and the assassination was at the forefront of my father’s mind for a long time. He retired at age 53 and moved back to New Zealand in 1975. He shipped all his slides with him, the Kodachromes riding across the Pacific Ocean on a large container ship. In 2005, my father passed away. As we were going through his possessions, I didn’t want all his old slides at first, because I worried it might be some giant burden and I’d never look at them again. But I took them, anyway.

Recently, I began to sort through them, and came across a long, red box labeled “November/December 1963 Kennedy.” I found these pictures right away. The images have never been published, but my dad would be happy to see them in TIME Magazine, his favorite news publication. Now, fifty years later, his photographs of the Kennedys finally see the light of day.

To see them yourself, click on this link.

LEG UP ON LEGO FOR DESIGNERS
The headquarters for the world-famous and beloved Lego Company is in Denmark, and recently 21 designers went there for a “series of brutal exercises” with a principle quest in mind.

James Colmer, 46 years old, had a reason for spending two days building Legos in Denmark, leaving behind his kids in Australia. He was applying for a job.

Mr. Colmer was one of 21 men and women who came from around the globe to the small town of Billund last month to compete for a job as a Lego designer. The Danish company has an unusual method of filling this position. Rather than conducting formal interviews, Lego invites the most promising applicants to its headquarters to sketch and build Lego sets in front of a panel of senior designers.

This was the seventh year the No. 2 toy maker in the world has held this boot camp for recruits. Did Colmer get the job? Find out by “snapping together” this link.

HOW DID INFOGRAPHICS BEGIN?
“Infographics transform dense and dry facts into eye candy, and the Internet can’t get enough,” posts Fast Company, but where did this data-viz craze begin?

Born in 1888, German scientist, doctor, and author Fritz Kahn was the grandfather of modern data visualization. A new 390-page monograph of Kahn’s work, published by Taschen, takes readers into an illustrated world that features winged fish, insect-size parachutists, and blood cells used as boats. Surreal as these scenes seem, they’re actually meant to visualize scientific facts.

Remember Miss Frizzle’s Magic School Bus rushing through the human digestive system? Well, Kahn did it first, decades before in “A Fairytale Journey through the Bloodstream.”

For more on Khan, who was actually medically trained, and how this visionary storyteller could make dull things like daily hair growth into a surreal picture, go to this link.