unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

Could the secret to organizational success be as simple as going back to basics? 

Gene Kim and Steven Spear’s new book, Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification presents practical, grounded research on organizational management and design. Gene is the chair of the Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit and Steven teaches at MIT Sloan.

Gene and Steven walk Greg through the three mechanisms of successful organizational design: slowify, simplify, and amplify. They also discuss how the field of organizational design has evolved and what still needs to evolve with management education. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Three mechanisms of a successful organizational design

We now have everything we need to be able to describe the three mechanisms that must be in place in any high-performing system. You got to slowify, meaning we move the most difficult problems from production into planning and practice, where work can be redone. We can do experiments. We can learn where we can simplify where we actually divide up the problems. We partition them so that they are easier to solve. And there's three dimensions of that. And then there's amplification, this overlay of how do we create a system that can amplify even the weakest signals so that when someone needs help or when there's danger that we can quickly detect and correct or ideally prevent from happening again. 

What the term ‘slowification’ means

38:39 The reason why we had to create the word ‘slowification’ is that we have a lot of adages for slow down to speed up or stop sawing to sharpen the saw, and the absence of the word prevents us from doing it or thinking it. (38:46) But the whole notion is creating time to be able to solve tough problems not in production but in planning and practice. To solve architectural problems, not during the normal sprint or what have you, but actually making time for the architectural spike or the period of technical debt reduction to enable people to do their work easily and well.

The wrong way to measure success

A lot of these metric-driven organizations, the pit they fall into is they don't account for the return on investment of discovery. They measure activity but not accomplishment.

The great advantages of technology in management education

And now, because we can do education at a distance, we can do asynchronous education, we can have education which is interspersed with either structured experiences or just natural experiences that people have. We can now actually teach one by one as needed as ready situation where information is pulled from the instructor to time and place and situation where it's needed, rather than being forced by the instructor in a formulation that the instructor thinks is right but may have nothing to do with the readiness of the student.

Recommended Resources:

• Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System | Harvard Business Review
• Christina Maslach on unSILOed 
• Gary Klein on unSILOed
• Dr. Richard Shannon
• Ron Westrum
• Kim Clark
• Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem

Guest Profile:

• Gene Kim’s Website
• Steven Spear’s profile at MIT Sloan

Their Work:

• Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification

Gene's Books:

• Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations
• The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations 
• The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
• The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data

Steve's Book:

• The High-Velocity Edge: How Market Leaders Leverage Operational Excellence to Beat the Competition

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Do our genes have an impact on how many friends we’ll have in life and the kinds of people we gravitate towards whether our friends are connected to each other? How can the study of social networks help us better prepare for the next pandemic? 

Nicholas Christakis is a professor of natural and social sciences and directs the Human Nature Lab at Yale University. His research focuses on social networks and biosocial science, all of which are central points in his books like, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live and Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society. 

He and Greg discuss how genes can influence our social networks, the dynamics of social contagion, and why the arc of human evolution bends towards goodness. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Why even minds as brilliant as Isaac Newton's succumb to financial manias

01:01:41 Our ability to function in groups depends, in part, on our ability to copy the mood of others around us. And all of us have had this experience. (01:02:20) It's to build group solidarity. And the other is it's efficient in terms of learning. In other words, rather than having to learn something yourself, you just copy what others are doing. And that's extremely efficient. So rather than having to do your own research and figure out what stock really has good fundamentals, you're like, well, I'll just buy what everyone else is buying that sometimes leads to really over-the-top, frothy bubbles that are quite dangerous for all involved.

The spread of germs is the price we pay for the spread of ideas

23:07 One of the reasons we affiliate with each other and live in groups is to avail ourselves of this process of social learning, but in so doing, we expose ourselves to other risks—for example, the risks of infection, the risks of violence, and so on. So natural selection over time has balanced these costs and benefits and yielded, I argue, a structure of networks that obeys the principle that the benefits of a connected life outweigh the costs. Otherwise, we would live separate from each other. We wouldn't form networks.

Network science in a 21st-century approach

06:45 Network science offers a 21st-century approach because it connects the collective and individual layers. It explains how individuals become members of collectivities, become members of groups by identifying the pattern of connections between people. It's kind of a structural approach.

Do modern technologies influence human social interactions?

17:17 There's no question that new technologies are affecting our social interactions in a number of ways. But the fundamental reality of our desire for social connection and our susceptibility to technology's social influence is not changing over a hundred-year time span. This has been shaped by ancient and powerful evolutionary forces.

Recommended Resources:

• Lumpers and splitters 
• Adam Smith 
• Émile Durkheim 
• Karl Marx
• Francis Galton
• Diffusion of Innovations 
• Thomas Valente 
• Richard Dawkins
• Steven Pinker 
• Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft
• Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond
• Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert 

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Yale University

His Work:

• Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live
• Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society
• Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives -- How Your Friends' Friends' Friends Affect Everything You Feel, Think, and Do

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Humans have always had the propensity to be irrational. In fact, humans may be as irrational today as they were centuries ago. But with a more educated and technologically advanced society, why does this level of irrational thought and behavior persist? 

Steven Nadler is a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin. His books like When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People: How Philosophy Can Save Us from Ourselves and Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die encourage readers to examine their lives through a philosophical lens.

He and Greg discuss how social media has contributed to the perpetuity of irrationality in society, why more education doesn’t necessarily lead to more rational thought, and why philosophy should be more widely integrated into our education systems. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Exploring Spinoza’s determinism

Nobody can be truly free from external influences because we have to live in the world. But you can liberate yourself insofar as your life is guided by reason and not by passion. Now, for Spinoza, the world is deterministic. Everything happens because of its antecedent causes. And this is as true as much for leaves falling off trees and rocks rolling down hills and for our bodies, which respond to the physical influences of the world. But it's also completely true with respect to the human mind. Our mental states, our thoughts, our beliefs, our desires also exist within a deterministic system.

Where do irrational beliefs come from?

02:46: I don't think that human beings are necessarily more or less irrational now than they were centuries ago. However, the difference is that irrationality can flourish more easily now with the advent of social media internet sites that traffic in irrational beliefs that encourage irrational thinking, and that make it very easy for a person to be overwhelmed by misinformation and thus form beliefs without any evidence and never really be exposed to counter-evidence.

Two kinds of bad thinking

07:08: In the book, we distinguish between two kinds of stubbornness or two kinds of bad thinking. We call the first, epistemic stubbornness, and the second, normative stubbornness. Epistemic stubbornness is where you adopt beliefs without sufficient evidence in favor of their truth. (08:19) What we call normative stubbornness is more a matter of behavior. And maybe here, temperament plays a bigger role. A person who is normatively stubborn applies rules without thinking the actions they choose and the courses of behavior that they adopt.

What Nadler says is one of the root causes of persistent bad thinking

11:46 Very often we know what the right thing to do is, we know what is good, but we act contrary to our better judgment. That's not just something that's a matter of our actions and behavior, but even in our minds, sometimes we know that a belief is not probably the right thing. It's probably not true, and yet somehow through peer pressure, for example, we feel compelled to go with the crowd, and we find ourselves believing things that we have no evidence for believing, and in fact stand in the face of contrary evidence.

Recommended Resources:

• Plato
• Ethics by Baruch Spinoza
• Meditations on First Philosophy by Rene Descartes 
• A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume  
• Immanuel Kant
• Socrates
• Conatus
• Apology of Socrates by Plato
• Clytemnestra
• Achilles
• Stoicism 
• Aristotelianism
• Thomas Hobbes

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at University of Wisconsin

His Work:

• When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People: How Philosophy Can Save Us from Ourselves
• Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die
• A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age
• The Best of All Possible Worlds: A Story of Philosophers, God, and Evil

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The problem with the business mindset of “move fast and break things” is that what often gets broken is people. But how can companies take care of their employees without sacrificing accelerated growth?

Frances Frei is a professor of technology and operations management at Harvard Business School. She’s spent decades researching operational design and leadership and has co-authored numerous books like, Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leader's Guide to Solving Hard Problems and Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader's Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You. 

She and Greg discuss the importance of fostering a culture of curiosity, why moving fast and breaking things is not worth it, and how inclusion can be an organizational superpower. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Can you do layoffs with dignity?

27:01: When Elon Musk famously bought Twitter, he did layoffs and maybe a caricature of how to do everything wrong. But on the same day, he did layoffs, Stripe did layoffs. And so we got the two. Like on the same day, you could see the transcript of what Elon said to his employees and what Stripe said to their employees. So now Stripe didn't anticipate the layoffs, but the guy took responsibility for it in a way that I think strengthened the organization. That's what I mean. Either anticipate it so you don't have to do it or take responsibility that you did it and you learn the lessons…[28:02]I'm not sure we code layoffs as the management failure as they mostly are. And so I treat it, and I'm not saying this with any extra judgment; just learn from it like we do everything else. Like, great, yeah, you went through a layoff, what went wrong, learn from it so that you can avoid it the next time.

Curiosity is a cultural artifact

11:42 Curiosity is a cultural artifact; it's a cultural behavior. It's a cultural mindset, and when you have it, the symptoms are delightful to you because you're going to get curious about it. So many organizations have the "don't bring me a problem unless you bring me a solution," which is the opposite of curiosity. It's guaranteed not to have very much improvement.

Inclusion as an operational superpower

41:22: Inclusion, to me, the reason I like it so much, is I know of no other thing that can get me achievement, sentiment boosts, and performance with no new people and no new technology. I find inclusion to be an operational superpower. No new people, no new technology, and business performance and employee engagement skyrocketed.

Speed vs. sensibility

22:41: When people were writing code, and the code didn't influence individuals, I don't care if you got the code wrong and you wanted to move fast and fix things, and that somehow helps you do faster iterations of code. But when it's humans, personally, it's a worldview. I personally have a problem with it. That's the first thing. The second thing is it seduces you into thinking you are going faster, breaking things along the way, but when you factor in the collateral damage and the rework that you have to do, you're scarcely going faster; you just that somebody else had to pay for it later, and you got the advantage of it today. So, I think it's also misguided.

Recommended Resources:

• Little’s Law
• Travis Kalanick
• Karim R. Lakhani | unSILOed
• ServiceNow
• Valerius Maximus
• The No-Stats All-Star by Michael Lewis (New York Times)
• Chris Argyris
• Amy Edmondson | unSILOed
• Anita Tucker

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Harvard Business School
• Professional Website

Her Work:

• Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leader's Guide to Solving Hard Problems
• Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader's Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You
• Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business
• Fixable podcast

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How can an interdisciplinary approach to the study of our past help our understanding of history? How transformative was the Spanish Empire’s global influence and how did they accomplish it?

Felipe Fernández-Armesto is the William P. Reynolds Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame and the author of several books including How the Spanish Empire Was Built: A 400-Year History, 1492: The Year the Four Corners of the Earth Collided, and Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food.

Felipe and Greg discuss the hunger for simple, moral narratives in history, a stark contrast to the reality of multifaceted characters and events that shaped our world. They scrutinize the legacy of Cortez and the Spanish conquest, challenging notions that have influenced our moral judgments of history. Felipe also takes on some myths surrounding the technological prowess of the Spanish Empire.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

What did engineers contribute to the political functioning of an empire?

24:02: What did engineers contribute to the political functioning of the empire? And I think that was crucial as well. Because if you've got an empire, especially if you've got a pre-industrial empire like that of Spain, and you're trying to manage this vast enterprise from a very small country with a very small population, a very restricted domestic resource base, a poor, small country, in order to do that, you need indigenous collaborators. You mentioned the Black Legend, of Spanish cruelty and oppression. No matter how cruel or oppressive you are, you can't run an empire of that sort with pre-industrial technology unless you can reconcile sufficient indigenous people to it.

What can we learn about hatred from history?

41:22: One of the lessons I've learned from history is that hatred is an intractable emotion that has extraordinary enduring powers, and people tend to change their friends a lot. The history of international relations is basically the history of shifting alliances. People always change their friends, but they keep the same enemies. I think, for all the good intentions of the Spaniards, they never quite created the sort of Pax Hispanica, which might fully deserve the name. Of course, Pax Romana didn't deserve the name either.

History isn't a science

51:08: For me, history isn't a science. It's an art; it's a humanistic discipline. I make no apology for that revel in it. That's what makes it fascinating, because the problems of science are fundamentally solvable; if they're genuinely problems of science, they're fundamentally solvable. When scientists take on subjects beyond their province, like, you know, "What's the origin of the cosmos?" or "Does God exist?" all those sorts of questions. Now, science—that's rather foolish and ambitious on the part of a scientist; if a question is genuinely scientific, then it's in principle answerable. If a problem is scientific, it's, in principle, solvable. Whereas a problem in the humanities is, in principle, insoluble because you can never have a completely objective assessment of the evidence.

The nature of truth in historical narratives

07:27: A very important truth about history is that we don't know what the truth is. We know only the truth of what the sources say, so we know what particular people who've left us sources wanted us to think. And to some extent, I suppose we can corroborate that against archaeological evidence or dispassionate statistics if they happen to be available. But essentially, the problem of being a historian and telling the truth is that the evidence is not present to our senses, so we cannot test it in the same way that we can test the truth of assertions that are made by things that are happening in our own time.

Recommended Resources:

• R. G. Collingwood
• Leopold von Ranke
• History of the Conquest of Mexico
• Pax Romana
• Pax Americana
• Pax Hispanica
• Reconquista

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at the University of Notre Dame
• Wikipedia Profile

His Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• How the Spanish Empire Was Built: A 400-Year History
• 1492: The Year the Four Corners of the Earth Collided
• Civilizations: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature
• Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States
• A Foot in the River: Why Our Lives Change — and the Limits of Evolution
• The Oxford History of the World
• Amerigo: The Man Who Gave His Name to America
• The Conquistadors: A Very Short Introduction
• The Americas: A Hemispheric History
• Straits: Beyond the Myth of Magellan
• Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food
• Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration
• Out of Our Minds: What We Think and How We Came to Think It
• The World: A History, Volume 2
• Truth: A History and a Guide for the Perplexed
• Approaches to Global History: To See the World Whole
• Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonization from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229-1492
• Columbus
• So You Think You're Human: A Brief History of Humankind

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Without the Dutch revolution of the 16th century, England may never have taken its place as a world superpower and there could have been no such thing as the American Revolution. Yet, the pivotal role the Netherlands played in the development of the modern world seems to go overlooked and under taught in history courses. Why? 

Jonathan Scott is a professor of history at the University of Auckland and the author of numerous books, including England's Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context and, most recently, How the Old World Ended: The Anglo-Dutch-American Revolution 1500-1800. 

He and Greg discuss how the Netherlands' geography played a crucial role in its rise to dominance in the 17th century, why that power eventually shifted to favor England, and how the Anglo-Dutch influence has permeated throughout history. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

What inspired the American revolutionaries?

30:46 The people by whom the English Republicans and revolutionaries of the 17th century were themselves inspired, who were the Dutch revolutionaries of the 16th century, were very important for the American revolutionaries of the 18th century. So, I think the most important influence in America is the Anglo-Dutch. And the Dutch part of that has been forgotten in America. Why exactly is, again, complicated, but one reason might be that when England ends up dominating, the Dutch component of the American founding and of the American revolution is just quietly forgotten.

Was the Anglo-Dutch Revolution seminal to the success of England?

03:52 What happens in 17th and 18th century England, which is remarkable and of global importance, derives very substantially from competition with the Netherlands, a competition during which the Netherlands is initially dominant and during which they're eventually overtaken.

The complex alliance and rivalry between the English and the Dutch

04:43 Not just rivals and frenemies, but they were also very close allies and dependent on each other for the survival of their Protestant religion and political regimes. So, they were close military allies in the war against Spain during the Elizabethan period in the 16th century. Then, they were equally close military, political, and religious allies from the Glorious Revolution in 1689 against France in the nine-year war until 1697. So the framework is one of close alliance, but between those two dates, between the Elizabethan and that end of the 17th century, that is, during the 17th century itself, there's an increasingly bitter rivalry between the merchants of these two countries, which ends up involving three very bloody naval wars between 1652 and 1673.

The Anglo-Dutch-American Revolution

33:12 The Anglo-Dutch-American Revolution in the early modern period is a series of political revolutions which put in place a new kind of state, which is federated and the product of parliamentary representation and parliamentary votes. And so the United Provinces of the Netherlands is the first one established in the 16th century, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain is the second established in 1707. Then, the United States of America is the third. Each of these is conscious of its place in a sequence where there is copying and adaptation going on.

Recommended Resources:

• Hanseatic League
• Mark Kurlansky | UnSILOed
• Navigation Acts
• John Locke
• Montesquieu
• Baruch Spinoza
• Hugo Grotius

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at University of Auckland

His Work:

• England's Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context
• When the Waves Ruled Britannia: Geography and Political Identities, 1500–1800 
• How the Old World Ended: The Anglo-Dutch-American Revolution 1500-1800

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Our guest today suggests that law is the cloth from which capitalism is cut. And lawyers are the tailors! From the enclosure movement to the financial crisis, law has been the engine of capital accumulation.

Katharina Pistor is a Professor of Comparative Law at Columbia Law School and the author of the book, The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality, about how capital is created behind closed doors in the offices of private attorneys and why this little-known fact is one of the biggest reasons for the widening wealth gap between the holders of capital and everybody else.

Katharina and Greg discuss the nuanced ways in which legal coding privileges certain groups. Katharina lays out the path of capital developing from land ownership and its metamorphosis into powerful financial instruments. Katharina and Greg analyze the legal frameworks that have contributed to the economic tapestry of today. They conclude with a discussion of the intricacies of global legal systems and their sway over commerce and society. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

The unseen impacts of legal innovation

36:32: Under our civil procedure rules, not everyone has access to the courts. Not everyone has the justiciable interest. Who does or who does not, who has standing in a court of law, determines already who can bring a case to court. So, there was this wonderful debate in the 1970s about the efficiency of the common law. So, if you litigate and relitigate, the best rules will come about. But even at that time, people pushed back and said, "But this is not randomly selected, which rules will be even litigated." There are other conditions that have to be in place. So, I think if we were able to completely reverse those or change those conditions to make sure that everyone has access to the courts; remember how long women couldn't litigate for their own rights or Black people couldn't litigate for their own rights. And now that has changed, but there's still certain interests that you can't bring. Typically, individual rights have a better chance than collective rights. And so, there are lots of "if we could change all this, you can make your own rules," and there's some umpires that sort of sometimes create a balance between this. Then, I think we would be in a different world, but that's not the world we have.

Is common law taking over the world?

31:47: When I say capital is coded in law, I named the law, and it's actually domestic private law. We don't have a global private law, and we don't have a global state that could enforce it. So the question could be, how can global capitalism exist without that global law? And what I'm basically saying: global capitalism can exist in theory with only one legal system, as long as all other legal systems are willing to respect the rules that are made and enforce them in their own courts. That's what the config of law rules do.

Lawyers and the art of asset coding

11:42 You can see that a lot of private wealth is held in different types of assets over time. And that's actually what fascinated me so much: the same legal institutions were first used to code ownership in rural land for the landlords. The same mechanisms can be used to create complex derivatives today. And the shift from asset to asset is something that the lawyers can maneuver because they know how to code different assets. It also allows, and this is important to recognize: it allows different types of groups to come forward. So it's not necessarily that you have only the aristocracy that wins all the time.

Looking at the cumulative power of capital

08:19: If you look at the cumulative power of capital and the agency that certainly corporations have, or also agents have through their patron rights over others, sometimes you really have the feeling that these are actors in their own rights that actually can exert power over others, in particular over humans, in a way that might not have been anticipated when we created these institutions, but that's the real effect that we feel and experience today.

Recommended Resources:

• Amartya Sen
• Martha Nussbaum
• Lehman Brothers
• Thomas Piketty
• Hernando de Soto
• Kuznets curve
• Paul Carrington
• Pierson v. Post

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Columbia Law School
• Professional Profile at Institute for New Economic Thinking
• Profile on LinkedIn

Her Work:

• The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality

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Doctors and scientists have been studying how our diet affects our health since the 18th century. But despite technological advancements and varying hypotheses over the years, there’s a chance that the wisdom of the 1700s might be more accurate than more recent beliefs on how food contributes to our overall health. 

Gary Taubes is an investigative health science journalist and the author of books like Rethinking Diabetes: What Science Reveals About Diet, Insulin, and Successful Treatments and Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It. For decades, he’s studied the history of diabetes and obesity research and found instance after instance of faulty science that’s led to some of the most widely accepted beliefs about metabolic health.

Gary and Greg deep dive into the centuries-long history of diabetes and obesity research, including some of the major moments and breakthroughs like the discovery of insulin. They also discuss what makes some science bad science, modern misconceptions about obesity and its causes, and the surprising impact WWII had on obesity research. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

What is an allegiance bias?

38:59: It's the first hypothesis that tends to have such an advantage over all those that follow. That the others have to then try and replace that, and then more and more people buy into that first hypothesis and believe it, and they base their treatments on it, and they write papers and textbooks about it. They've become more and more biased. I was just speaking to a nutritionist 80-year-old tremendous nutritionist the other day who used the phrase allegiance bias. So you develop an allegiance to what you believe, to the technologies you're using, to the therapies you're giving, and to what your colleagues believe. And all of these reasons are why scientists are supposed to express hypotheses with such humility. You get an idea of what's working and what's not, and you voice it with incredible humility because the worst thing that can happen is that it be wrong and be embraced. And it's the easiest thing to have.

Rethinking conventional wisdom in health

01:09:16: The internet took away the gatekeepers. So for anyone who's suffering from obesity or diabetes, if the conventional wisdom works for you, then you're fine, right? You eat a little less, you exercise, and you don't live with obesity anymore—end of story. You don't need blood sugar medications, but if you've tried the conventional wisdom, as I think most people do, and it fails, then you start looking for alternatives.

What makes a good scientist?

24:34: When you do an experiment, you learn how you screwed up if you're a good scientist because, by definition, you're always doing something no one's ever done before because it's boring to do stuff that people have done before. So you're always doing something new. You're always working at the limits of what your apparatus or your observational equipment can do. And 99 times out of 100, you're going to screw up that first time out, and then you're going to learn how you screw up and you're going to fix it. And you iterate your way toward what you hope is truth.

Recommended Resources:

• CERN
• Bradford Hill criteria
• John Rollo
• Elliott P. Joslin
• Oskar Minkowski
• Ancel Keys
• Carl von Noorden
• Gustav von Bergmann
• Julius Bauer
• Louis Harry Newburgh
• Jeffrey M. Friedman 
• Atkins
• Eric Westman 
• Virta Health
• Bittersweet: Diabetes, Insulin, and the Transformation of Illness by Chris Feudtner

Guest Profile:

• Professional Website

His Work:

• Rethinking Diabetes: What Science Reveals About Diet, Insulin, and Successful Treatments
• Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It
• Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health 
• The Case for Keto: Rethinking Weight Control and the Science and Practice of Low-Carb/High-Fat Eating
• The Case Against Sugar
• Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion 
• Nobel Dreams: Power, Deceit, and the Ultimate Experiment 
• What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie (New York Times Magazine) 

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University professors have to become good at doing the intricate dance between research and teaching, as institutions have to help their faculty navigate this balance as well as maintain a good experience for the students in the institution.

Nicholas Dirks is the president and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences, the former chancellor of UC Berkeley, and the author of several books. His latest book is titled City of Intellect: The Uses and Abuses of the University.

Nicholas and Greg discuss how universities have dealt with and should deal with current issues and challenges with faculty governance, and the evolution of student activism while maintaining academic freedom. They discuss the challenges of maintaining relevance, fostering interdisciplinary study, and adapting to the 21st century's demands while preserving the essence of academic freedom and intellectual debate.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Are universities too unique for outsiders to manage?

46:32: The difficulty you have when you bring somebody in from outside of the university to have a senior administrative position is that there's just so much about the university that is, only really possible to learn if you've been in it. And for the most part, in the corporate world, when somebody is running a company, they've worked in either that company or they've worked in that field. I've never been offered a job running Goldman Sachs or Google, but I have been offered a bunch of jobs running universities. Well, I say that because I think the presumption that universities are badly managed and therefore they need to have somebody who really knows about management doesn't fully take on board what the impediments to managerial success are in the university. And in part, it's about precisely the things we've been talking about—the kind of resistance to change on the part of the most senior, the most valuable faculty that you have, certainly as much as it is about the failure of the imagination of the administrator.

Modeling prompts institutional change 

45:20: You can't change an entire institution, and you can't do it even in the corporate world. It's a little more [difficult], particularly for a long-established institution, but you can begin to change things on the edge. And as you do so, you can model how things might actually be better.

What can we learn from history and anthropology that’ll help reinvent liberal arts

01:00:25: One of the things I learned from history and anthropology is how much things change over time. And so what today are the appropriate ways for one to both justify and organize a liberal arts curriculum that would inherit some of the things that I think were so important about earlier modes of doing this, reinvent it for the modern moments, and be more appropriate for the world that our students are in and about to enter. [01:01:14] I believe that we can find something that might not be the same, and I might not have it exactly, but we'll continue to carry on the tradition of a certain kind of knowledge that doesn't become confined to either disciplinary or professional modes of knowledge that can enlighten and enable one's disciplinary and professional education in time but can also address these issues about what it means to be human.

Rethinking institutional change

47:32: It's really critical to find new ways to think about institutional change in higher education. And I do believe that we risk serious problems in the sector if we don't take it much more seriously and then need to make this kind of collective commitment to know ourselves and think differently about who we are, how we function, who we're here for, how we contribute to society, and how we survive in the long term.

Recommended Resources:

• Clark Kerr
• The Uses of the University
• Franz Boas
• Mario Savio
• Max Planck Institutes and Experts
• Andrew Delbanco
• David Starr Jordan
• Arthur Oncken Lovejoy
• American Association of University Professors
• Leland Stanford
• Johns Hopkins University
• Pell Grant
• John Hagel
• John Seely Brown
• Frantz Fanon

Guest Profile:

• NicholasBDirks.com
• Professional Profile at The NYAS
• Faculty Profile at UC Berkeley
• LinkedIn Profile

His Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• City of Intellect: The Uses and Abuses of the University
• Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India
• The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain
• Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory
• The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom

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To our guest today, the current American healthcare system feels less like a means to get well and more like a gigantic racket. We’ve gone from hospital visits in the 1950s costing five dollars a day to getting billed for everything from the oxygen reader on your finger to the IV bag. So how did we get here?

Elisabeth Rosenthal is the senior contributing editor at KFF Health News and the author of the book, An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back. Before her career in journalism, she spent some time practicing medicine at an emergency room in New York City. 

Elisabeth and Greg discuss the puzzling economics behind healthcare pricing, how medical bills balloon because of too many hands in the honey pot, and some practical advice for people heading to the hospital. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Private equity goes with where the opportunity is, and it's in health care

04:32: One person told me, when I was writing my book, between the hip manufacturer, the implant manufacturer, and the patient's bill, that there are 13 people taking a cut of the price of that implant. 13 middlemen, and we just keep adding middlemen who take more money from the system. So the interesting thing is how much of that, now 3.5 trillion dollars that we spend on healthcare, how much of that is actually going to care, and how much of that is being siphoned off for profit, for executive salaries, for investor profit. I don't know what the percentage is, but it's like a Rube Goldberg machine for extracting money. And the poor patient is, well, what about me? You're just kind of an ATM; it’s really sad. Private equity goes where the opportunity is, and it's in healthcare.

Which side are the insurers truly on?

11:48: People have this misguided thinking that, ‘Oh, my insurers are in my corner’ They're not in your corner. They're like, ‘They take in premiums, and they pay out claims.’ And if they can raise the premiums and raise the copays and deductibles, they don't really care if the prices go up. Plus, they have these very sophisticated deals with big hospital systems.

Are we regulating the wrong things in healthcare? 

39:33: We regulate all the wrong things. Yes, putting stitches in your hand is fine. You don't need a doctor to do that. A tech can do that fine. But in the U.S., you are going to be billed as if a doctor did it, whether a doctor did it or not. You might be billed for the physician assistant who did it too. You might be charged for both because the doctor might have come and looked at it and said, "Yeah, that needs stitches." So it will be billed in this crazy way, but I think on the other hand, the physician assistants and nurse practitioners are looking for independent licensing. Mostly everything they do is billed as if the doctor did it, even if the doctor was 50 miles away. So that's why some of the bills are so high.

Navigating consumer rights and prices

50:23: When you go to a hospital, and they give you that clipboard to sign 20 forms or even a tablet, I always cross out the part that says I will pay for anything that my insurance doesn't cover because that's in one of those forms that are always in there. And people should never sign that; you can shop for the electives, small-dollar items. You can get estimates, and to me, this is where the government should come in.

Recommended Resources:

• Uwe Reinhardt
• Willie Sutton
• Rube Goldberg machine
• No Surprises Act
• Diagnosis: Debt (KFF Health News)
• March of Dimes
• Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation

Guest Profile:

• Professional Profile at KFF Health News

Her Work:

• An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back 
• How Your In-Network Health Coverage Can Vanish Before You Know It (KFF Health News)

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