The Bureaucratic Life

Adventures in supervision: trying to get one of my interns paid: his check never showed up due to an epic bureaucratic cage match between our payroll system and his bank.

Intern 1

me: I would just call the bank and see if they got a direct deposit request/confirmation from DFAS

if not we should try and get you a paper check

and make sure your address is updated

Intern 1: ok, doing now

already sent in the central change of address form

me: good deal

Intern 1: person needs to call their central direct deposit people, will call me back..........

me: bureaucracy

not just for government

Intern 1: totally, i think that's a message that few people really understand: the private sector isnt as wonderful and efficient as people seem to think it is

I'm sorry for making you do this extra work and adding another thing to your day

me: meh

I'm ok w/the social contract where you do work and we pay you

Intern 1: I do prefer that contract to the Feudal model...

me: This is the futile model

Intern 1: lol

Caffeinated News

1. Who will ascend to Sen. Kennedy's chairmanship of the HELP committee? Perhaps not who you think, and why not.

2. Calls for NIH to supplement pregnancy leave for grantees.

2. Francis Collins' trusty sidekick Rosalind.

4. A fantastic visual, fittingly depicting caffeine and calories.

Caffeinated News

1. NIH research featured in Parade magazine.

2. How to publish a scientific comment in 1 2 3 easy steps! Makes me happy to be an administrative type.

3. The President reiterates his expectation of fiscal responsibility in calling for a 2% civilian cost of living adjustment.

4. Federal contract spending ballooned last year.

From the Bookshelf: Scientists as Government Leaders

Over the past few weeks, I've been discussing the future of the YGL-B bio-med book club with some of the other members. While we have oodles of ideas for more books to read (see our librarything page for the latest additions: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/yglbethesda) , we've been looking for better ways to articulate our niche. After all, it may not always be obvious why reading books about science and medicine can lead to a better understanding of government and/or leadership.

For this reason, I was really happy to read yesterday's Government Executive.com's Fedblog page, discussing the nomination of Dr. Paul Farmer as head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (http://blogs.govexec.com/fedblog/2009/08/paul_farmer_manager.php). Last December our book club discussed Tracy Kidder's "Mountains Beyond Mountains", a biography of Dr. Paul Farmer, and we wondered whether his style of leadership- waging war against HIV and Tuberculosis in the poorest regions of the world, and rarely taking no for an answer- could actually be applied to a government setting. Evidently, Alyssa Rosenberg has had similar thoughts, and her blog post did a much better job connecting the dots between medicine, leadership, and the federal governement.

As the new administration staffs up several of their health and science offices, I'm guessing we're going to see even more examples of doctors and scientists making the jump to government posts, some more successful than others. Whether the success rate has anything to do with their scientific background remains to be seen, but if this is a lens through which you'd like to examine the government, we'd love to have you join our discussion.

*The next meeting of the YGL-B bio-med book club is this coming Saturday, where we will be discussing Michael Crichton's "Next". I hope you can join us!*

From the Bookshelf: the Many Stories of Autism

Last month the YGL-B bio-med book club strayed from our usual fare by picking a fiction book. “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” by Mark Haddon is a best seller and book club favorite, but I wasn’t sure how it would jive with the bio-med themes our group normally discusses.

In turns out that the issues raised by the autistic main character has sparked far more discussion outside the meetings than any of the other books we’ve read so far. Some of the discussions we’ve had look at two very different questions, both of which I think YGL at-large could probably learn from.

The first question is what does a spectrum disorder really mean? My thanks to Rebecca for pointing me to this New York Times article, which puts a human side to this question: Somewhere Inside a Path to Empathy by David Finch. Unlike Haddon’s character, the subject of this article is much closer to being “normal”- in fact he has a wife, kids, and a steady job- there are just a few quirky things about him that indicate Asperger’s Syndrome.

From a human interest angle, it’s an interesting article; but if we take a step back and look at it from a manager’s perspective, there’s another lesson to be had. There’s a gap between our standard leadership training and real life, when it comes to working with other people. Just knowing that I’m an ISTJ and some of my colleagues may be ENFPs is not going to prepare me for managing a team if one (or more) of the members has a medical condition that causes extreme egocentrism, as described here. Similarly, I haven’t seen a lot of trainings out there that address working with bipolar or mildly schizophrenic officemates. The thing with spectrum disorders is that at one end of the spectrum, people can be almost fully functional, and it’s not hard to see how an office environment can make that “almost” into more or less of a burden, but it’s just not something that comes up when we talk about managing diversity in the workplace. Yes, most MBTI, DISC, etc. trainings encourage you to appreciate the diversity in others, but I think we could stand to probe the outlier cases a bit more because they’re probably far more common than we acknowledge.

The second issue raised this month is Jenny McCarthy, which begs the question: what was Oprah thinking? For those of us who don’t automatically think of Jenny McCarthy when the word “autism” comes up, Jane suggested the following National Post article: Vexation over Vaccines by Emily Senger.

Scientific evidence leans towards no link between childhood vaccines and autism, and yet Jenny McCarthy insists that vaccines gave her son autism. When faced with this debate, it’s surprising the number of parents that side with this actress over the medical establishment; even Oprah Winfrey has bought into this hype, giving Ms. McCarthy a new platform to espouse her views. For those of us who believe in the power of sound data over sound byte, this whole debate has been a rather rude awakening.

The YGL-B bio-med book club will probably get more into the discussion of data versus people this month when we discuss “How Doctors Think” by Jerome Groopman. So if you’re interested in discussing whether Viagra has created a disease out of natural aging and whether doctors are really swayed by personal testimonials over hard data, please join us on June 13th.

Double Espresso: Links I Liked

A recurrent feature of current events (potential fodder for the next Caffeinated News, May 17th!)

Lots of new links since my latest hiatus...

1. A former IMF head compares the US financial crisis to previous crises here.

2. Former Director of the Human Genome Institute and much talked about potential NIH Director Francis Collins launches Biologos and a new blog on faith and science.

3. A troubling expose from the LA Times on the power of the LA Unified School District's teacher's union. Part 2 here.

4. A fascinating graphical look at time spent eating and obesity. (Hat tip: Marginal Revolution)

From the Bookshelf: Nudging, Pushing, and the American Way

Several of the topics from the YGL-B bio-med book club have come up in the news recently, and in order to continue our discussions on these topics, YGL-B has graciously allowed me to post some updates to the blog. For my first highlight, I wanted to bring up an interesting follow-up to our February meeting on behavioral economics.

According to this post at Government Executive, Cass Sunstein, a coauthor of “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness” has been nominated by President Obama to be this administration’s regulatory chief, and not everybody is happy about that. ‘Nudge’ offers some great suggestions for how agencies can craft their messages, policies, and practices to get the public to ‘do the right thing’. The question is whether this ‘nudging’ is in essence removing our free will to make decisions.

This isn’t anything new. Going back to Uncle Sam wanting YOU for the army, the government has been trying to nudge the American public in numerous ways, but it has not always been the most efficient marketer. The idea of the government becoming more efficient can be scary, especially if you don’t agree with the current policies, and especially if you feel that your ability to choose is being limited.

So what does this mean to a young government leader like yourself? Well, in your career you will probably be put in a position where you can ‘nudge’ your co-workers, colleagues, and stakeholders. And, while you may have the greatest of intentions, your ‘nudge’ may be resented not because of the outcome but because it’s seen as pushing people in a direction they didn’t want to go. What’s an answer to this? Transparency may be a good place to start. At least if people know the how and the why of your actions, they’ll still have a choice to resist the nudge and make the ‘wrong’ decision. Hmm, transparency, now where have I heard that from lately?

*The next meeting of the YGL-B bio-med book club is May 9, where we discuss autism spectrum disorders and the “Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” by Mark Haddon. I hope you can join us!*