Category: 200 words project

Here’s the idea from week 3 of the 200 words project from “To Sell is Human” by Dan Pink.

The skill of a radiologist lies in finding abnormalities that the patient and physician aren’t looking for, such as unexpected cysts.

A group of radiologists were provided with reports including the patient’s photographs for 3 months in a row. They were then randomly asked to screen some of the reports from the previous 3 months, this time with no photographs. Radiologists screen a few 100 reports a day and would find it very hard, if not impossible, to remember which reports had already been screened.

The results showed that they were far less meticulous and less accurate without photos on the report. A reminder of the fact that the person on the report is a human being made a big difference to their accuracy.

This practice has been adopted in top laboratories since and is why our photographs are taken when our blood samples are analyzed. Reminding ourselves that our customers/clients/human are human goes a long way in improving the quality of our work.

‘Make it personal – A great radiologist said that he trained himself to look at every scan as if he was looking at his father’s.’ | Dan Pink

Here’s the idea from week 2 of the 200 words project from “The Everything Store” by Brad Stone.

Amazon.com, in an unprecedented move, added a feature in 1995 allowing customers to review books they bought. Until then, books were only reviewed by critics and not by readers. As was expected, some of the early books were trashed by multiple readers. Bezos then got a call from an irate book publishing executive who said Amazon’s job was to sell books and not trash them.

Bezos recalls that he and the team decided then that their job was not to sell things, but to help customers make better purchase decisions. This principle has guided Amazon’s decision making since. A similar big call that Amazon made was to include used books in their book catalogue. Again, this provoked an outcry from authors and customers (and even internal executives) but Bezos was convinced that it helped customers make better decisions.

The learning for me – when you set out on a new project, figure out your most important stakeholder(it could just be yourself), define your guiding principles and focus intensely on it.

“What’s dangerous is not to evolve.” | Jeff Bezos

After posting about taking time off from the book learning and quote initiatives, I took a month to reflect. I felt the need to integrate these projects into one central learning initiative. And I’m happy to announce the start of a new initiative – “The 200 words project” – to present an idea to you every week in 200 words or less from a book I read (most of the time) and once in a while, from an interesting link online.

So, why is this different from the daily learning a day? This is similar to the book learning initiative in that we will focus on ideas from books rather than learnings from my experiences and observations. In short, they will be many times better and a lot more insightful (haha).

I do hope they will lead to a positive start to the week and hopefully will consistently provide food for thought every Sunday. In keeping with the “ALearningaDay” philosophy, I am sure there will be many failures learnings in the process.. so I hope to have your feedback from time to time to help make these 200 word ideas better.

This is available via email subscription too (I will set up a link soon – please leave a comment for now if you are interested) – aside from the personalized email, you will also receive the idea one week in advance of the Sunday blog post.

Now, over to idea #1

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The give-more-earn-more idea. Economist Arthur Brooks conducted a study with 30,000 participants to see the link between their income and the amount of money they gave away. Adjusting for variables like age, race, marital status, the research revealed that higher income typically correlated with higher giving. This was as expected.

Viewed the other way around, the results got interesting. For every $1 in charitable giving, the income of the participant was found to be $3.75 higher a year later. So, let’s assume we both earn $60k and I give $1,600 to charity and you give $2,500. Then, according to the evidence in the study, you are on track to earning 3,375 more in the coming years!

This study is one of a larger group of studies that indicate that the successful people combine what Bill Gates called “the two great forces of human nature: self-interest and caring for others.” Give more and, as the research suggests, you will get more too.
Source: Give and Take by Adam Grant

“We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.” | Winston Churchill

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An additional note – I realized after I sent this that I had made a mistake communicating this correlation as a cause-and-effect. There are a few other assumptions that are embedded in this story that don’t fully make sense without context.

I realize I made the mistake because of a lack of adequate preparation. I was a bit too eager to get started. Nevertheless, I’m working in the background to create repeatable processes to ensure these 200 word ideas get better and better. More to follow..

Have a great week!