Inspiration :: June 2007

All of us are inspired at one point or another. It's part of the dream that propels life itself. I've decided the last post to this blog should be about inspiration, about what motivates people, and about the where you are oriented.

Lives and careers are propelled by dreams.


Congratulations to the Class of 2007!

Stay awake to life around you. That's your greatest teacher of all.

Article Archive:: May

Sometimes, What’s Needed Is a Nudge
Article in NY Times By
By DAVID LEONHARDT
(May 16, 2007)

NY Times article on the use of EPO and the dynamics between pharmaceutical companies and physicians.

She calls herself the "Penelope Trunk, The Brazen Careerist"
Five Steps to Being More Productive
by Penelope Trunk

Yes, you too can become a brazen careerist.

The Players On Our Team

Current position titles:

Director ( Wai-Yin, the point guard )
Co-Directors (Ran and Kathy)
Renal Clinic Triage Technicians (Ran and Kathy and Dr. Lee and Wai-Yin)
Renal Clinic Site Patient Liaison ( Ran, James, Brian )
Renal Clinic Site Ethnographer (*Wai-Yin, *Brian)
*Brian, starting April 11th, 2007, switched over to working at Wednesday's clinic from Thursday's unit. *Wai-Yin made ethnographic notes of a social nature of the clinic, though she will not publish those here or anywhere.
Dialysis Unit Site Ethnographer (*Brian, Wai-Yin)
Recruiter (Kathy, Wai-Yin, Ran)
Treasurer / Grant Writer (to be determined)
Fundraiser ( to be determined)
Publicity (Kathy, Wai-Yin)
Kidney Disease Awareness Committee Co-Chairs (Anthony, Raymond "Homan")
Vascular Access Patient Tracking Co-Chairs (Veena and Shalra)
Web Designer (Anson and Amir)

See Your Business From the Outside In by Ram Charan (Article Yahoo Finance 4/26/2007)

Article Archive :: March

The leaders at the top of the chain have constraints such as time, energy, and day-to-day responsibilities. For innovation to occur, the leadership mindset should permeate all the ranks.

Leadership
Leading From Below
CEOs can't change companies on their own. The secret is to foster a leadership mentality throughout the ranks.
By JAMES KELLY and SCOTT NADLER


From WSJ:
Toyota University Opens
Admissions to Outsiders
Car Giant Preaches Its Mantra
Of Continuous Improvement
To Police, Military, Businesses
By MIKE SPECTOR and GINA CHON

The Challenge of Getting Truly Evidence-Based Medicine Defined:
The problem with evidence-based medicine is that you have to read the methods section. Given that becoming tenured is so very important and virtually impossible these days without publishing something, the temptation to fudge experiments are clearly high. Let's just say 5% of all the experiments are fudged. You have to account for that. It takes a few years for people to find out that something is awry with the published work, that's assuming that it will be found out at all. Some studies are so unimportant that no one wants to take the time to verify it. That's the trouble with the whole thing. Beyond that, a truly proficient mathematician who happens to be a statistician is necessary to do the analysis. Now, if in retrospect you found out that a certain experiment cannot be replicated, then you have to throw it out of the way you weigh things. This is something the statistician and programmer have to acknowledge when designing their methodology.

February's Wishful Thinking

February is every young person's warm and fuzzy dream. A dream of butterflies, roses, fuzzy bears, and warmth.

Speaking of wishing upon a dream, our club needs to get money so that our UCLA chapter can have our own PayPal linked credit union account. I observed that a club needs money to start asking for money in the first place.

The prize is in the mind, therefore we read books.
We present to you our club's wish list!

Dr. Kraut's Book list:
1) The Toyota Way by Jeff Liker
2) Emotional Intelligence by Dan Goleman
3) Know-How: The 8 Skills That Separate People Who Perform from Those Who Don't by Ram Charan
4) True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership (J-B Warren Bennis Series) by Bill George

More good reads:
1) Getting To Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Roger Fisher
2) Business Ethics : Successful Business Practices by Ken Blanchard
3) A subscription to Harvard Business Review (HBR.org)
4) A subscription to BusinessWeek
5) The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership by John Maxwell

If you have any ideas as to what books to get or what else should get on the wish list, please send us suggestions. A link on the right will let you email us.



Here is what we would like to get beyond books.
A) Suggestion box.
B) Banner for UCLA Tabling / Recruitment / Science Fairs.
C) Hard drive to work on our video project.
D) Polo shirts for our members to wear on campus without looking like a quack in disguise.
E) Pens with our logos on them. This helps people remember our club name.
F) Our own file cabinet or book shelve for our books/ and hard copies of business article archives.
G) $40 bucks of pizza money for our 8 members to eat together and commune once a quarter. (We work for free, so bodily sustenance is necessary. )


Be frugal:

* Most of the books we can get cheap at Amazon.
* The hard drive we can get on E-Bay, where people sell them cheap.


Memorize:

* Basically, do not change the title of the club. Just pound it into the new members like they do laws to law students. The title isn't that bad when compared to some of the things we memorize for school.
* We should know what is erythropoietin.
* We should know what is glomerular filtration rate.
* We should know what the eGFR levels don't really tell us what the stage of CKD is. There are many other factors that affect GFR, such as muscle mass, gender, size, race, and many hidden variables.
* Trust me, read Medlineplus more, watch Grey's Anatomy less.
* Read the link to KDOQI GUIDELINES on the right side of the page.

Article Archive:: January

California Plan for Health Care Would Cover All
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
Near universal health coverage for Californians? You heard it from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. There's a hero inside that governor of ours.

Early Start in Business Teaches CEOs Lessons They Use to This Day By Carol Hymowitz (taken from Wall Street Journal)

Article Archive:: December

Norihiko Shirouzu wrote about Toyota CEO's worries about rivals catching up. This drives improvements once again.
Paranoid Tendency
As Rivals Catch Up,
Toyota CEO Spurs
Big Efficiency Drive
Culture of Institutional Worry
Drives Mr. Watanabe;
How Paint Is Like 'Fondue'
Finding Limits to Improvement
By NORIHIKO SHIROUZU


A Hospital Races To Learn Lessons Of Ferrari Pit Stop
By Gautam Naik