The Chilling Effect of SOPA and PIPA: Why should you care?

You may have seen Google today or read about Wikipedia and other websites going dark in protest of SOPA and PIPA. First of all, what are SOPA and PIPA? SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, was introduced in Congress last October. PIPA, Protect IP Act, is SOPA’s counterpart in the U.S. Senate. 

At its simplest, the two bills are intended to give intellectual property owners (think movies and music) the right to completely eliminate foreign websites against whom they believe they have a copyright claim. What does it mean to completely eliminate? According to a recent Gizmodo story, “[they] could demand Google remove that site from its search results, that PayPal no longer accept payments to or from that site, that ad services pull all ads and finances from it, and—most dangerously—that the site's ISP prevent people from even going there.” 

Scary. But what’s worse is that any kind of legal due process is completely missing from the two bills. This means that any content provider may proactively shut down a site it thinks violates a copyright. And that CAN INCLUDE YOUR OWN, PERSONAL Facebook profile, or photo gallery or Twitter account. Facebook and Twitter would be legally required to remove your updates if there is a question of copyright infringement. 

SOPA and PIPA are “meant” for foreign websites. But the opportunity for abuse – at both the brand and personal levels – is immense. A chilling effect may be the least of our worries.

(Betsy Parkins)

ND&P : Inside the 2011 Holiday Card

ND&P designer, Grace Milburn shares her process in creating our 2011 Holiday card. Want in on the fun? Print your own card here.

For me, the idea for the printed card was more of a "Eureka" moment.  I had been talking to Grant (senior designer at ND&P) at his desk one day and saw a box behind him with printed triangles on it.  It gave me the idea that maybe we could do some sort of 3-dimensional card, resulting in origami or some sort of paper craft.  After doing some research, I found a shape that was holiday appropriate and ran from there.  The biggest challenge was definitely figuring out how to make the paper craft work.  What I mean by that is, how do the tabs attach to each other? How does it fold? Where are the different patterns supposed to go? I found a basic template online for the shape I wanted which was a good basis, but going beyond that was definitely where it got more challenging.  By the time our senior management group saw the final product, I had probably put together and taken apart the star at least 15 times to make sure it worked.  The original idea never changed from beginning to end, but the star definitely got less complex (with fewer points) and the template changed to make the star more stable.

(Grace Milburn)

The Innovation Imperative: Who’s Innovating in Healthcare and How to Get There

Please click here to view the full article

Like excellence, the word innovation is often overused in healthcare, frequently espoused in well-intended promotional materials lacking in any real substance. Referred to indiscriminately, innovation is a nice feel-good notion. But implemented strategically, it can mean the difference between performing on par with the industry and achieving exceptional success that includes defining strong healthcare brands, serving as a magnet for patients and employees, and increasingly changing the way healthcare is practiced.

True innovation is a powerful concept with an inherently unique capacity to align people, foster creativity, and bring significant improvement to existing processes or transformational change to whole systems and industries.

In a recent article for the Journal of Healthcare Management, Ian Lazarus and I explore some of the ways health systems are fostering true innovation, partnering with outside industries to bring new products to market and improving the healthcare delivery system.

Below are a few of the tools and ideas you can use to help your organization or team become more innovative and a link to the full article appearing in the Journal: 

• Fostering Innovation – While there is no one single or right approach to increasing innovation within an organization, healthcare executives looking for ways to tap into the innovation spring can benefit from adopting some of these successful core concepts.
   
• Think Big—and Small – For healthcare institutions, incremental improvements can often be easier to implement yet over time have an additive effect that makes their impact even more potent. Such is the case with many Lean and Six Sigma tools that allow performance improvement efforts to focus equally on low-hanging fruit and true breakthrough improvement opportunities.
• Be Open to Everyone – Innovations can come from anywhere and anyone in an organization. Whether someone works in patient care, information systems, housekeeping, or patient records, she has ideas that can lead to real innovation.
• Look Everywhere for Inspiration – Healthcare organizations can benefit from analyzing the fields of retail, banking, and even aerospace.
• Use Your Resources – Consider finding a book that profiles a company or industry that has gone from good to great and purchasing a copy for every member of your management team.
  
• Build Your Brain – While good ideas do sometimes pop out of nowhere, the most successful and sustainable innovation arises from structured processes and a multidisciplinary approach to creative brainstorming.  
  
• Bust Through the Best Practices Ceiling – While identifying best practices can be immensely helpful in shaping the landscape and framing possible improvements, best practices rarely lead to meaningful innovations.
• Crowdsource Innovation – One rising approach to innovation and idea-generation is crowdsourcing—mass collaboration. While the technique is not without its limitations and pitfalls, crowdsourcing can be a powerful creative tool.  

Innovation or Stagnation? Crossing the Creativity Gap in Healthcare by R. Lazarus, FACHE, Director, KP OnCall LLC, and Senior Advisor, Creative Healthcare, and Daniel Fell, Executive Vice President, Neathawk Dubuque & Packett appears in the November/December 2011 issue of the Journal of Healthcare Management 

Think Different

Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. But the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

That, of course, is the voice-over script for the now famous “Think Different” television spot—the anchor of the “Steve Jobs’ Returns to Save Apple” phenomenon in 1997.

100 hundred words it runs, a phenomenally verbose spot in a medium where “show, don’t tell” had been a well-established mantra for years.

The spot’s “wordiness” is just one of the ways the work reflects its “think different” essence: using black-and-white photography; including an apparent grammatical faux pas in the tag line; featuring cultural icons, many deceased, like Einstein and Jimi Hendrix, and others not highly recognizable; never once mentioning a product, benefit or call-to-action.

Rightly, Jobs, San Francisco ad agency TBWA/Chiat/Day and creative legend Lee Clow have received the lion’s share of credit for the campaign; and like so many such campaigns, specific credit for certain aspects aren’t all that easily nailed down.

Copywriter Ken Segall, the man who put the “i” in iMac, is credited with the script, and has acknowledged that art director Craig Tanimoto conjured up the essential “Think Different” theme line.

It’s clear from reading Walter Jacobson’s recently published bio—Steve Jobs—that Jobs was always very hands-on, perfectly setting the agenda strategically, giving key agency players unprecedented access to proprietary R&D, even changing a word here and there in scripts.

The phrase, “push the human race forward” was Jobs’ en total and captures the motivation for his entire professional life, something he understood from his garage days with Wozniak.

While Jacobson makes no bones about presenting Jobs as a complex, volatile and sometimes cruel and maddening personality, it’s just as evident he truly “got” marketing. Upon Clow’s presentation of the “Think Different” campaign, Jobs openly wept, expressing his pure delight at seeing his vision realized so perfectly.

Moving someone to feel something is always an ad man’s goal. Moving a client to tears of joy may be the ultimate reward.

The book, by the way, is excellent—well worth each of its 600+ pages.

(Doug Cook)

Thanksgiving 2011: By the Numbers

Thanksgiving is full of some of our favorite things (or should we say “foods?”), so we polled our own ND&Pers for some scrumptious statistics, and here’s what we found:

What We're Eating

• On the “favorite pie” front, just over 1 in 3 claim PUMPKIN the winner (36%)

• Don’t fret, nut lovers – PECAN came in a close second at 27%

• Other pie preferences ranged from basics like chocolate and apple, to more exotic options such as coconut and mincemeat.
  
  

When it comes to sides, we like our spuds. About 32% of us claimed favorites in some form: sweet potato casserole, mashed potatoes or potato salad. Almost 23% voted for a carb-cousin in either dressing or stuffing.

"Light Meat vs. Dark Meat" 64% of us raise our hands for light meat, 18% for both, 14% for dark and 4% may just be reaching for Tofurky (since they don’t eat meat)

In the big “dressing vs. stuffing” debate (think of stuffing as something that goes in the bird, and dressing as something that gets baked in a pan – though here, too, there is some gray area on definitions), 55% of us like our dressing and 27% of us go for stuffing. If you’re wondering about that “missing” percent – they either indulge in both, or are deep in discussion on the difference between the two.

“Least Favorite Side Dish” resulted in NO clear consensus. Of any kind. Apparently we dislike a wide variety of things – from “weird jello with fruit/any gelatin item” and “anything store bought” to faithful side dishes like green bean casserole and cranberries.

“Favorite Leftovers,” on the other hand, gave “turkey” the landslide victory, but many of us aren’t picky, claiming “whatever is available” or “all of them” as our favorites. And what do we do with that leftover turkey? You probably guessed it – 68% of us reach for bread and make a tantalizing turkey sandwich. When we’re tired of those, we opt for soup or turkey tetrazzini. And a few poor souls are simply left asking “what leftovers?”

What We’re Doing 

"Traveling vs. hosting" 41% of us are bravely hosting this auspicious feast, with the rest of us heading to a friend or relative’s (or even a restaurant)…(maybe that will get us out of having to do any dishes?)

Just for fun, we wondered how old we were the last time we sat at the kids’ table. Some of us don’t have a kids’ table, btw, but for those who did many of us were sitting there well into (or past) our teens. Some of us don’t remember (14% - maybe our memories are fuzzy?). And some of us (23%) are still sitting there - but don’t seem to mind it. We’re either sitting there next to our own young children, or enjoying it as a “drama-free table.”

And last – we were curious how big our family gatherings are. A significant 64% of us sit down to a Thanksgiving meal with 10 or more people, while the rest of us enjoy a more intimate company.

Those are some of our statistics, but in the big picture they’re just numbers. They don’t really do the holiday justice, so we asked our staff to share some of their Thanksgiving adventures and stories – and trust us, they’re worth the read!