Smiling Makes You Happier

It’s easy to acknowledge that our own body language impacts how other people view us.  Did you know posture and posing can impact how we feel about ourselves?

I watched a fascinating TED talk video today by Amy Cuddy, a researcher and professor at Harvard Business School, about the surprising impact of body language on our own psyche.  In brief, certain open body language is associated with power and confidence, while closed postures are linked with insecurity and powerlessness. In open body language, one takes up more space and spreads out, rather than crouching, slouching, or crossing legs or arms. By standing in a position of power (feet apart, shoulders spread, hands on hips) for just 2 minutes in private ahead of a key meeting or job interview, you can influence your own hormones, feel more positive, and thus modify your own demeanor in that important interaction.

In the talk, Professor Cuddy goes on to say that her recommendation is not “Fake it ‘til you make it”, but rather, “fake it ‘til you become it” because eventually, the new body language will become routine and your behavior will change.

Open posture sends a message of approach-ability and confidence, whether sitting or standing. Here’s how to maintain it.

• Keep your arms and hands unfolded.  
• Open your leg stance to avoid crossing your angles or legs.  
• Try to take up more space rather than less space.  
• Lean forward slightly. 
• Keep your palms visible (never clasped together).

I’m going to challenge myself to be more aware of my own posture, how I pose myself in team meetings, and my body language in client meetings.

How to Think Like a Consultant - part 1

I hope to make this a theme rather than a singular blog post, especially since many of my friends and readers are not in consulting and seem curious about what it is and what we do.

There are a several types or flavors of consulting and clients hire consultants for a host of reasons, but in general they have a core question and want an outside firm to give them an answer or recommendation.  Consulting has been defined as "renting brains" whereby a client hires a consulting team to think through a challenge or question.


Strategy consulting firms, like my health care-focused company, address questions like this:

• Should we buy this company?
• We have x dollars and have two products we could build.  We cannot build both now; which should we prioritize?
• How much will x market or y field grow in the next 10 years?
• To move into a new market or industry, should we develop tools and products internally, or acquire a company that already plays in that space?

Our tasks are to (a) understand what our client wants to know – it’s not always clear, then (b) go away and do a bunch of research and think really hard, and (c)  provide the client with an answer to their question.

Here's an odd-ball example to illustrate how a consultant approaches a question.

Question:  How much money does the San Francisco Bay Municipal Ferry make per year?

Here are some of the questions you'd consider:

• How many ferry routes are there in the Bay? -- This defines the universe of research.
• How many scheduled departures are there per route per day? -- The number of trips.
• How many passengers ride an average ferry?
• How many ferry boat companies exist? – What we call the 'competitive landscape'.
• Of all passengers riding ferries in the Bay Area, what percentage of passengers ride on a SF Bay Municipal Ferry?
• How much does a ferry boat ride cost?  In reality, its $5 for locals and $9.50 for tourists, so knowing the split between local vs. tourist riders is relevant.

To arrive at the answer, we might do a calculation like this:

Step 1: Number of ferry boat passengers per day =  (# ferry routes) x (# trips per route per day) x (# passengers per trip)

Step 2:  Number of passengers per day on our ferry boats.  There are multiple companies that provide ferry service; we’re only interested in one of them. = (Number of ferry boat passengers) x (% of ferry passengers riding SF Bay Municipal Ferry)

Step 3:  Daily revenue = (Number of passengers per day on our ferry boats) x (% passengers who are tourist) x (tourist price) + (Number of passengers per day on our ferry boats) x (% passengers who are locals) x (local price)

From here, we could easily extrapolate from daily earnings to annual annual revenue.  To be more detailed, you could figure out how the # of passengers varies throughout the year and how the distribution of tourist-vs.-local changes over the course of the year and many other layers.  Some of this data could be found in secondary research (published statistics or market research reports) and some could be obtained through surveys or interviews or first-hand experience.

Being "Just" Friends

Can men and women be "just" friends?  A NPR show delved into the topic earlier this month.  


The gist of the story is this:  a study at Utah State asked male and female students this very question and overall, women said yes, while men said no.  Additionally, men and women in cross-gender (I’m assuming heterosexuality for the remainder of this post) friendships show an interesting trend: the men report more unexpressed feelings of attraction to the woman and also assume the friend is more interested in them than woman in cross-gender friendships do.  The story goes on to suggest that it's all evolution; that platonic co-ed relationships are an evolutionary novelty, and that men who received vague or subtle sexual signals were at a disadvantage if they did not follow through, so evolution encourages men who may be getting mixed messages to err on the side of assuming the potential for mating.


Setting aside the biology, which does make sense, do you think guys and gals can be friends to the same level of depth and honesty that same sex friends can?  In what circumstances can this be the case?  


Is it based on age?  Clearly, college age men are at the peak of sexual appetites, so there are a host of reasons why a study of college-age co-ed friends might not be representative of all cross-gender friendships.  It seems like toddlers and young children can be equally good friends with boys and girls, aside from that whole cooties thing.  What about middle age and elderly?  Do we stop trying to have strong co-ed relationships after getting burned as youths?  Is it easier as we get older? 


Does it depend on relationship status, agnostic of age?  If both the guy and gal are in serious committed relationship with other people, is their friendship unencumbered by this "it's all evolution" argument?  From personal experience, I can say I had and have very honest friendships with the male college roommates of my fiancé.  I was never "available" and I think that allowed us to be friends on a level that we might not have achieved had I been single.  I don't think there are many topics, personal, academic, or embarrassing, that we didn't discuss.  


Are there other factors?  Physically proximity, perhaps?  


On the other hand, despite the close friendships with T’s roommates, I also embody the quintessential anecdote for those who say that men and women cannot be friends.  T and I were best friends throughout late middle school and high school.  I remember multiple dinner table discussions with my family and older brother suggesting that teenage boys and girls cannot be friends, that one of us must secretly have a crush on the other.  At the time, I defiantly stood up for our friendship and assumed my older brother was just teasing as brothers do.  Fast forward to late high school and our relationship became romantic and now we’re engaged to be married in a few months.  I vividly remember how conflicted I was about our first kiss, though.  I was very aware of the fact that we were bridging the gap from platonic to romantic and after being “just” friends for so long, we wouldn’t be able to – easily – go back to that.  


Overall, I suggest that single men and woman – at least in the teens and early adulthood and quite possibly at all ages – cannot really be “just” friends.  If one or both are in visible, serious romantic relationships, I think it becomes possible for the party in a relationship to engage in a deep, honest friendship and perhaps the other person can, too.  I speculate that men and women who are both in committed relationships with others can successfully manage a serious platonic relationship, but that it might create its own set of challenges (jealousy?) for those romantic pairs.


Hattip to EX for sharing the article.  What do you think - weigh in in the comments.

Wedding Planning as Decision-Making Endurance

This is a post about wedding planning.

The initial decisions to make about the wedding were few and big: whether to say yes (of course!), when to have the event, where to have the event.  The intermediate phase has seen decisions increase in number and decrease in relative importance.  Each decision made then opened another flow-chart-worthy path of evaluation, comparison, and selection.

For example:  do we want professional photography for the wedding.  Answer: Yes.  From there, I evaluated websites/reviews for 8 photographers in the area where I'm getting married, then arranged face to face meetings with 3 and selected one to work with. Then, more decisions like: many hours of photography, how early to start on the wedding day, do a first-look session or not, which posed photos are must-haves and many other small decisions.

The current project on my mind is that of invitations.  To give you a sense, here are the range of moving parts that impact how and when I can send them.  We had professional photos taken locally (thanks Groupon!) and we are using those to create a photo-postcard.  The first set of decisions is around selecting how many photos to include, selecting which images and obtaining them from the photographer.  Then, I found a graphic designer I liked and she's going to create the design and font.  Next, we have to determine the language for the invitation text.  This involves feedback and discussion with both of our parents.  Traditionally, wedding invitations are written from the perspective of the bride's parents as "Mr. and Mrs. (Bride's family) invite you to join as their daughter marries xx, son of Mr and Mrs. xx".  We're doing something a bit different.  Once we have the photo selected and the text finalized, then we give that to the designer who will make a few versions for us.  We'll select our favorite and it goes to be printed.  Then, the completed photo postcard invitations come back to us and we add mailing addresses and stamps and send them off.  This postcard route is far more simple and affordable than the full-on elaborate stationary and envelopes typically used for wedding invitations.  Many people spend an average of $8 per invitation.

And all that is just to invite guests!  I see the appeal of Paperless Post!

If you're interested in more glimpses behind the curtain of wedding planning, let me know in the comments.

My Day Job, Part 2

This is a continuation of my earlier post describing in more detail the type of work I do - what my day to day job entails.  For my next post, I'll talk about how to think like a consultant.

What do I do?

I am always working on projects for two different clients at one time.  This is a challenge for time management, but creates a diversity of experiences and opportunities.   50% of my work time goes for project A and 50% goes to project B.  The tasks I do vary by project, but some of the activities I do most frequently include the following.  None of those are things I would do without support and oversight from a more senior person on my project team.  

• Lit review:  Read lots of abstracts and articles in clinical journals and figure out the rate of specific complications for a range of surgical procedures or the precise criteria for when a drug is used.
• Primary research with experts:  Identify key opinion leaders in a field of research, invite them to participate in a one on one phone interview or online survey, create the set of survey or interview questions and then administer the research instrument and synthesize the key findings. 
• Pipeline pull:  Access a database of drugs in development (not yet available to patients on the market to patients) and pull a list of all the drugs currently in clinical development for a specific indication (disease) and prioritize them based on a set of criteria developed by the team or the client
• Make slides.  Lots and lots of PowerPoint slides.  Sometimes with charts and graphs, sometimes with lots of bullet points.  It’s easy to make a slide; it’s hard to make a good slide.

What are examples of projects?

A project is usually 6-12 weeks.  A client enlists us to research and report our recommendations based on a specific question.  Here are some of the scenarios or questions I have worked on:

1. A company that makes tubes used for blood collection wanted to know if hospital pathology labs (where blood and urine and other diagnostic tests are run) were concerned about the volume of wasted blood they had to dispose of (removal and disposal of biologic waste is no small thing).  The company was considering developing a new product – a tube for blood collection that would collect a lot less blood.  We interviewed nurses, phlebotomists (blood-drawers) and pathology lab managers and technicians to understand how big of a problem the excess blood presented and provided a recommendation to our client based on everything we learned about biohazard waste disposal regulation and feedback from healthcare workers.
2. A company that has a compound in late-stage clinical development wanted to acquire another compound that was in earlier stage development.  Drugs take a very long time to develop and if a company does not have multiple drugs in multiple phases of development, they might launch a drug and not have another new drug for a decade.  In that case, if your lead compound – the drug that is farthest along – is submitted to the FDA for review and is rejected, your company is in deep trouble (that’s not the technical term).  Our client wanted to “fill the pipeline” so they could release a new product a few years later instead of 10.  This is a huge trend in pharma and biotech.  They did not have a specific compound or molecule in mind and asked us for recommendations.  We evaluated a bunch of companies and compounds based on specific criteria and the amount of money our client could use to purchase a compound and  prioritized a few targets, i.e., companies that had a compound in early stage development that might be willing to sell it to our client.
3. A company with a drug used in the treatment of an acute condition is considering expanding the patient population which is a candidate for the drug.  Before they undertake the clinical research and time necessary to do so, they asked us to find out how much of a commercial benefit (read: how much more money could they earn) if a wider number of patients were eligible for the drug.  We did a lot of secondary research, meaning I read a ton of clinical literature on the treatment and we did a lot of primary research, meaning we interviewed physicians who treat these patients to see whether they would use the drug in more patients if they could.

Dear Antibiotics, thank you!

So this is not the next post I intended to write, but I wanted to share this cool article from NEJM (New England Journal of Medicine, arguably the most prominent medical journal to have your article published in).

The article is part of 200th anniversary of the journal and discusses the leading causes of death in 1900 and in 2010 in the US.  You can see the dramatic reduction in disease burden from contagious and infectious diseases.  The three leading causes of death in 1900:  pneumonia/influenza, tuberculosis, and gastrointestinal infections.  In present day, it's heart disease, cancer, and "non-infectious airway diseases".

Click the graphic to enlarge it.

Article source:


Jones, David S., "The Burden of Disease and the Changing Task of Medicine", N Engl J Med 2012; 366:2333-2338June 21, 2012

Link to article: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1113569

My Day Job

Today’s blog post is a description of my day job, based on a reader request.  My next post will elaborate on this topic.

What is a consultant?

I am a consultant.  Generally speaking, consultants work for clients who have questions about their business and the market for their products.  Consulting is a hierarchical field.  My firm has 7 levels from the fresh-out-of-college entry level Analyst role to the top-boss title of Partner.  Each level is defined by a set of expectations and skills and one is not promoted until they can demonstrate competency in a variety of areas such as (for the junior levels) -- interviewing physicians, analyzing data in Excel and SPSS, writing a survey, managing time and communicating with teams.  Consulting is like an apprenticeship – you are constantly seeing what those above you can do and learning from them.  Usually, once you’re good at your job, you get pushed into a new role with new challenges and opportunities.  Consulting is not the type of job when you stay at a level/role for a long time after you’ve mastered it.

Who becomes a consultant?

Consultants tend to be type A overachiever personalities.  As a group, we tend to be extroverted, but that’s not always the case.  It’s probably a similar personality to those who are successful in sales – interpersonal relationships become very important, along with communication and strategic thinking and planning.  To college students, consulting represents a field that “doesn’t close any doors” meaning if you become a consultant upon graduation – as I did – you are not narrowing your options for future jobs but you are gaining valuable skills and an understanding of the business world.  Consulting lets you avoid picking an industry or specific role, it preserves – or appears to college seniors to do so – the attributes of “the generalist” compared to many career or academic options.

Who do you work for?

Because my consulting firm is specialized, we focus only on the healthcare and life science markets.  Our clients are pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, the makers of medical devices and technologies, and the manufacturers of diagnostic and life science research equipment.  We work for companies that make cutting-edge cancer treatment, catheter tubing and syringes, robots that perform surgery, machines that analyze DNA and many things in between. 

What is the office like?

My office is not the company headquarters –we have about 8 staff in the office.  On a day to day basis, everyone in my small office works on computers in cubicles.  The office – located in a high-rise office building – includes two private offices for senior staff, a few conference rooms and a kitchen stocked with shared snacks and treats.  I’m usually in the office 10-12 hours/day, Monday to Friday and usually have weekends free. 

Innovations

The NY Times published a pretty cool list of innovations here (hat-tip toVera's gchat status) http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/06/03/magazine/innovations-issue.html

What's your favorite?

Permanent sunscreen might be my favorite.

A few that are particularly interesting from the health and wellness perspective:

• the anti-slouch screen (#13) for better posture at the desk
• the spandex exercise pants with sensors (#3) to monitor muscle use
• the tooth sensor that detects and reports plaque (#23)
• the blood test for depression (#25) is amazing, and would go so far toward de-stigmatizing and enhancing treatment

How Often Do You Call Family?

I find mundane habits very interesting, especially how they vary between people.  Let's take calling your parents as an example.  I cannot imagine going weeks at a time without chatting with my Mom and Dad, but my brother doesn't call home very often.  Even Travis and I have very different parent-calling habits.  I call often but for short times; Travis calls weekly but for longer conversations.

How do you talk to your parents?

When I call, I almost always talk to both parents, together, on speaker phone.  Some people call one parent and only one parent at a time, others call and talk to one, then talk to the other.  Do you have different kinds of conversations with one parents compared to the other?

How often do you call your parents?

I consider myself to be pretty close with my parents and I probably call them greater than 3x per week.  I typically call on my walk home from work, which is usually around 7:30pm my time, so it's about 10:30pm Eastern.  My phone calls typically last 10-20 minutes -- my parents can tell when I get to the lobby of my building because the sound quality improves (no more wind or traffic noise).  As a random aside, I have found my headphones with built-in microphone to be really useful in this regard.  If I work late and walk home after 8, I don't call.  As a result, my parents tend to know if I have a busy week -- they won't hear from me for several evenings in a row.  They also know if I call them before 9:30pm Eastern that I'm leaving work early.  Some weeks, I call every day in the work week; on some very hectic weeks I might not speak to them M-F at all. But, I'd say it is very, very rare for 8 or 10 days to elapse between calls.

How often to you call other relatives -- siblings, aunts/uncles, others?

I'm not very good about calling my brother, but we exchange either an email or call monthly and we're trying to do better.  I don't really talk by phone to any of my extended family.

Do you have any other communication habits with your parents?

I did not really fly much before college, so most of my early flights were between home and Boston.  As a result, I tended to call my parents to tell them I was on the plane or had landed -- this had a practical purpose when they were meeting me on one end of the flight.  Now, however, I've established  a pattern or habit of calling or emailing when I land, where ever I've traveled.  I always tell my parents about trips for work or fun and let them know when I arrive in a new city.  Well, except that last time I went to Boston and totally forgot to tell my dad, who got a little worried since I stick to this habit all the time... several missed calls later, I reassured him I was indeed fine!

In Complete Sentences

Starting today…

To me, blogging, or, more accurately -- being a blogger -- is an ongoing process.  Just because you've written a poem once does not make you a poet; taking a few pictures does not make you a photographer.  I don't want to belabor this sentiment, but writing is a process of reflection, of chronicling, and of creating.  It's a process I'd like to initiate and sustain, starting now.  Starting today.

Why now?

There are several reasons I am doing this now:

1. I started this blog this summer and was not able to sustain routine posting, which was my goal.  Now that a big life milestone is out of the way, I’m ‘rebooting’ my efforts at blogging.
2. I work in consulting, a field that emphasizes incomplete sentences over prose; monosyllabic words over colorful narration; and bullets over paragraphs.  I miss using complete sentences in my professional life.  
3. When I emailed a bunch of friends about "should I start a blog?" the reaction was "yes, do it!" so I'm carpe-diem-ing.

 Topics

I will share observations and ideas I have about personal and professional growth, including lessons learned at my job and in my relationships.  I am interested in personal betterment, changing habits, and pivoting perspectives.