Dick and Jane - Postmodern Urban Edition

I got a real kick out of this magnet on my new WCG buddy Tom Haan's desk ... he swears that he is NOT the "Tom" referred to in the image.  It is nice to see that the American institution of Dick and Jane has once again gained cultural relevance in the 21st century.

Greg Matthews

(785) 566-6735

@chimoose

my blog: chimoose.com

Posted via email from chimoose is (pre)posterous

Foursquare and the Beer Rule

Techcrunch published an interesting article on the growth of Foursquare and Gowalla today ["Foursquare is 5 times larger than Gowalla and growing 75% faster each day"] that's worth a look if you're into such things (mobile, location-based games and applications). I happen to think that they're pretty important - and pretty fun as well. I've been using both services for some time, but I tend to spend most of my time in Foursquare ... because I have a bigger, more active group of friends there. For the uninitiated, here's how it works:

1. Either sign up online, or download the foursquare app for your mobile device
2. Find your friends; it'll allow you to connect to both your twitter and facebook accounts to find active foursquare users. Highly recommended (for reasons you'll see below).
3. Whenever you go somewhere (with the important exceptions of your home and anywhere your kids go on a regular basis) you use your mobile phone to "check in." By doing so, you alert your friends to where you are; earn points; and move towards becoming the "mayor" of the location (by checking in there more than anyone else).

Although some businesses are getting smart and offering free or discounted stuff to their mayors (imagine how much extra traffic this drives for people trying to take over the mayorship!) I can take or leave the points, badges and mayorships. What I like about foursquare is that it allows me to a) stay in tune with and b) connect with my friends. And that's where the "beer rule" comes in.

Foursquare, still in its early days, is a lot like facebook in its early days in one key respect: People who are complete strangers try to connect with you. This is not only inadvisable in my opinion, its also creepy and potentially dangerous. That's why I have a beer rule, which is as follows:

If I randomly found myself in the same town as this person, would I want to have a beer with them?

If yes, then I would accept a foursquare contact from them (or offer one of my own). If not, I just decline and go about my business. It actually does work (I've met up with foursquare friends in various cities on numerous occasions), which, in my opinion, makes it a good rule. What are YOUR rules for accepting someone's offer to connect on foursquare? Twitter? Facebook? I'd love to know; leave me a comment!

Hello, WCG!

Six years ago I moved to Louisville to take a job at Humana - pulling up roots and leaving my beloved Chicago behind. I was joining a company that had begun to establish itself as a leader in innovation, and was about double in revenue and size. I still remember the line that hooked me:

"Come and join the department that's transforming the company that's transforming the health insurance industry."
- Carleen Haas, VP Human Resources

It was as true - and as compelling - then as it is now. And it's a big part of the reason that I'm moving on six years later. Not because the transformation at Humana has stopped - but because there is a bigger transformation in the business world that is picking up speed and getting ready to explode.

Over the last 10 years, we've seen traditional business models change forever in publishing, music and entertainment - and they are just the harbingers of what people like Don Tapscott, Steve Rubel and Jeff Jarvis refer to as "the Collaboration Economy." I've had the good fortune to be able to explore what that means for Humana. And now I'm headed to WCG - a global communications firm - to help their clients to define its meaning for themselves.

It's hard to sum up what the last six years at Humana, and in Louisville, have meant for me and my family. I've worked with brilliant, passionate people. We've made friends for life in our neighborhood and in our church. I've also had the opportunity to work for some true visionaries - like Jack Lord and Grant Harrison - who helped give form to a few key fundamentals in my professional outlook:

Don't accept the unexceptional - It's really easy to do things the way they've always been done. It can be really efficient to follow optimized processes. And thinking inside the box is usually a way to have things "accepted" inside a corporation. A lot of the time, that's fine ... but you should never stop thinking about whether, if something was done differently, it might open up possibilities you never dreamed of. And at a minimum, it'll get you noticed and help people think differently about YOU.

If you don't like reality, change it - "Do the best you can with the resources you've got." A fine motto. But sometimes you don't know what's possible until you try. When we built TPS, it was because we didn't like any of the publically available twitter monitoring and analysis tools. And we were prepared to make the best of it, and temper our expectations about what we could achieve with the existing toolset. But when we tried to bend reality to create what we really wanted, it opened up new doors for us ... and as a side benefit, completely changed the way that we started thinking about interactive development in the innovation center.

Know when to jump the curve - This is where the wisdom to decide comes into play. Sometimes, the best move is to make incremental improvements on what already is ... sometimes, it's time to do something completely new. The knowing when comes with experience - and working with people who have done it successfully for years.

I believe that following those principles as best I could led to the opportunity before me at WCG - and I can't wait to get started. Please keep my family and I in your prayers as we go through this period of big transition - and I'd love to hear from you. Feel free to use the comments on this post, or connect with me on LinkedIn (professionally), facebook (personally) or twitter (everything!).

65 Roses

"65 Roses" is what some children with cystic fibrosis (CF) call their disease because the words are much easier for them to pronounce. Mary G. Weiss became a volunteer for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation in 1965 after learning that her three little boys had CF. Her duty was to call every civic club, social and service organization seeking financial support for CF research. Mary's 4-year-old son, Richard, listened closely to his mother as she made each call.

After several calls, Richard came into the room and told his Mom, "I know what you are working for." Mary was dumbstruck because Richard did not know what she was doing, nor did he know that he had cystic fibrosis. With some trepidation, Mary asked, "What am I working for, Richard?" He answered, "You are working for 65 Roses." Mary was speechless.

He could not see the tears running down Mary's cheeks as she stammered, "Yes Richard, I'm working for 65 Roses."

- From "65 Roses"

This is a first for me, and it's appropriate that my first online fundraising attempt would be for a cause that is dear to me. Cystic Fibrosis is a disease that affects relatively few people directly - approximately 30,000 children and adults in the United States have cystic fibrosis. But an additional ten million more—or about one in every 31 Americans—are carriers of the defective CF gene, but do not have the disease.

Someone I love has cystic fibrosis. I'm not going to name him here because he's too young to decide to be a spokesperson. But I've learned enough about CF to know that we can do something meaningful about it. There is no cure - yet - for cystic fibrosis and the disease generally gets worse over time.

The life expectancy for people with cystic fibrosis has been steadily increasing over the past 40 years. The numbers can easily make you sad - but they can also inspire. This timeline shows how incredible the advancements have been in treating CF ... just imagine what could happen in only a few more years if we were able to focus on it!

GREAT STRIDES is the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation's largest and most successful national fundraising event. My parents, brothers, and their families will be participating in the GREAT STRIDES walk at the Batchelor Middle School on May 1, 2010.

Please help us meet our fundraising goal by supporting Team Matthews. Your generous gift will be used efficiently and effectively, as nearly 90 cents of every dollar of revenue raised is available for investment in vital CF programs to support research, care and education.

Making an on-line donation is easy and secure. Click the "Click to Donate" button on this page to make a donation. Any amount you can donate - even a few dollars - is greatly appreciated!

Research and care supported by the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation is making a huge difference in improving the quality of life for those with CF. Help is needed now more than ever to ensure that a cure is found. To learn more about CF and the CF Foundation, visit http://www.cff.org.

We believe we can make a difference in the lives of those with CF! Thank you for supporting the mission of the CF Foundation and GREAT STRIDES!

Photo courtesy of Pittsburgh's 50 Finest

one checkin to rule them all

via check.in

My team and I have been fiddling around with a lot of different location-based applications recently, and have developed what I think are some pretty good use cases for our company. During the course of that process, we've gotten to know a few things ...

- It's amazing how many apps are out there; we've found at least 20 that fit the bill
- A few, including some of the biggies, have open APIs
- Very few are really interested in partnering with businesses yet on anything; there are too many product-related and competitive hurdles to clear first.

My iPhone was starting to get crowded with location-based apps, and every time I'd walk into a restaurant, my wife wanted to kill me because I'd have to check in using at least four different apps. So as we were fiddling with APIs, we started thinking about how to create a single check-in service that would report your location to all of your apps.

Lo and behold, not even a week later I got an invitation to check out the beta version of check.in, a new mobile app from the guys at brightkite. At the moment, it allows you to check in to brightkite, foursquare and gowalla with a single click. I just tried it at one of my local favorites, and it worked like a charm!

It's going to be really interesting to see how this space evolves ... and I wonder if check.in is going to give brightkite a (needed?) dose of relevance. Hope so; I was always a fan of the app, but it seems to have been overtaken by foursquare, gowalla and causeworld.

Another site that's making cool use of the APIs for foursquare and gowalla is http://vicarious.ly. I love the idea and the interface, but if you can figure out why you'd need it, please let me know.

Posted via web from chimoose is (pre)posterous

Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution

via jamieoliver.com

I was one of the folks who was eager to watch Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution last night ... and I wasn't disappointed.

I spend a lot of time thinking about health, and how to help people live healthier lives. My team at Humana has spent a lot of time thinking about the exercise piece of that equation; much less on the nutritional components. Nonetheless, I have been a big fan of Alice Waters' movement in California, and was really excited when Jamie Oliver took up her mantle in the UK.

The show, if you haven't seen it, is a reality show set in Huntington, WV - recently named the unhealthiest city in the US. More than half of Huntington's adults are obese. So Jamie Oliver has come to Huntington to revolutionize how the citizens there think about food. The show is equal parts entertainment/drama and shock value. And while I think some WV residents have been offended by the way they feel they've been characterized, if we think about this as a WV problem, we are missing the point.

The WV schools abide by the same USDA guidelines as every other public school district in America ... so if your kid goes to public school, it's likely that he or she is subjected to the same (or worse) lousy breakfast and lunch options that the Huntington kids are.

In any case, I think that this show has the potential to cast a bright light on a major problem - and I encourage each of you who reads this to sign Jamie's petition to present his case directly to the President at the conclusion of the show. Oh, and be sure to watch - Friday nights on ABC.

http://www.jamieoliver.com/campaigns/jamies-food-revolution/petition

Posted via web from chimoose is (pre)posterous

The ER 2.0 Panel from South by Southwest

via twitpic.com

I had the pleasure of attending the ER 2.0 "core conversation" at South by Southwest this morning. It turned out to be a terrific conversation - and it didn't hurt that it featured some of my best friends in healthcare and social media.

In this picture are Dr. Bryan Vartabedian of the Baylor Medical Center, Ed Bennett of the University of Maryland Hospitals, Jen McCabe of Contagion Health (and a business partner of mine at Humana) and Aimee Roundtree, a medical writer and researcher at the Texas Medical Center.

Also not coincidentally, I also had the opportunity to spend all day on Thursday with this crew (and about 75 other really sharp people) at the first Social Health summit in Austin (2010) ... a fantastic opportunity to really expand understanding across the health system for how we can all do things differently to improve people's lives.

Thanks to these friends, new and old, for making this year's south by southwest a particularly special experience for me.

Posted via web from chimoose is (pre)posterous