The Dalai Lama"s Phrases For Silicon Valley Leaders

On the final day of his three-day swing by the Bay Location, the Dalai Lama sported his Santa Clara University visor Monday morning as he told a Silicon Valley audience that businesses need to teach compassion.

In a area filled with the world’s largest tech giants, the Dalai Lama emphasized the value of compassion in the workplace for diminished anxiousness, pressure and undesirable overall health.

“Modern health-related care is run like a organization, but even business wants a sense of ethics,” he stated. “Since we have a physique and thoughts, we need that psychological peace and bodily comfort to which compassion offers rise. We require to educate folks to enhance their concern for others’ properly-being.”

The Dalai Lama was joined at the offered-out discussion known as, “Compassion, Company and Ethics: A Dialogue with the Dalai Lama,” by Lloyd Dean, CEO of Dignity Wellness, the fifth largest hospital program in the nation and biggest non-revenue hospital provider in California.

Regardless of up and coming companies delivering optimistic rewards such as childcare, gyms and environmentally friendly buildings that inspire folks to walk, Dean mentioned statistics display personnel of those businesses have substantial rates of depression, anxiety and traumatic experiences that are obviously induced by the work setting.

“Whether you are offering me a cost-free dinner or cost-free lunch turns into irrelevant because you are helping me improve anxiety and not have a good quality of existence,” mentioned Dean.

“I feel where the harm takes place and in which I think your query is rightly focused, is when the benefits are really–it’s the intention that goes with it–that folks by no means leave function and function sixteen hrs a day.”

In the second element of the event, the Dalai Lama took element in the discussion of “Incorporating Ethics and Compassion into Enterprise Life” with Charles Geschke, Adobe co-founder, Jane Shaw, retired chairman of Intel’s board of directors and Monica Worline, a study fellow from CompassionLab at the University of Michigan.

Shaw stated an illustration of compassion at work was when Intel grew to become conscious that certain resources have been becoming manufactured accessible as a end result of the intensely violent conflict in the Dominican Republic of Congo, steps had been taken to make certain that the organization did not use this kind of “conflict minerals” for its products.

The event was cosponsored by two of the country’s leading institutes for the study of ethics and compassion—Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Utilized Ethics and Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Study and Education. The talk can be viewed here.

The Dalai Lama’s two-week speaking tour in the U.S. continues these days in Los Angeles at the Forum, according to his schedule.

However the 78-12 months-outdated Tibetan’s talks in the Bay Location had been fully sold out, his U.S. visit did not come with out animosity. Protestors who believe the Dalai Lama discriminated Buddhists by banning the worship of a 500-yr-outdated deity named Dorje Shugden are following his tour by means of southern California. The Chinese government also reportedly accused the U.S. of meddling after Obama met with the Dalai Lama.

The Dalai Lama"s Phrases For Silicon Valley Leaders

To End California Drought, Fill Much more Hollywood And Silicon Valley Swimming Pools

For each action, there is an equal and opposite government system.  —unknown

Jerry Brown and Linda Ronstadt, 1979 (Photograph credit score: Jack Snell)

1 the heels of a West Virginia water contamination crisis, California hosts a grave water emergency.

Gov. Jerry Brown delivered the  news, calling the drought emergency there an “unprecedented, severe scenario.”

The western climate is largely irrigated desert, yet, gallons of H2O value less than a penny, and scarce water fills opulent swimming pools and quenches California desert lawns.

The very good news is water is not acquiring a lot more scarce general it is an earthly consistent.  The Massive Thirst by Charles Fishman referred to:

Olympian springs of fresh water — every single day, the sun, the sea and evaporation mix to make 45,000 gallons of rainwater for every guy, lady and kid on Earth….Even in the United States, the place we use water with profligacy, the oceans are making a lot more fresh water for each of us in a month than we’ll use in a decade.

But allocation and pricing of that bounty do matter. On boring days when the swimming pool seems to be inviting, water’s total utility is large and “marginal utility” minimal compared to diamonds, as the outdated lesson in economics illustrates.

But, wow, does that marginal utility of an extra gallon skyrocket in the course of a shortage. Water’s cost trajectory rapidly tops that of chainsaw following a hurricane.

Western and California landscapes and waterscapes are organic wonders but so too is the outstanding manmade infrastructure western environments are some of the most artificial on earth (sorry, resident greens).

Offered that, no shock will ensue on hearing that all the western states frequently beat a path to Washington for federal drought relief funding and planning.

The most recent was the late 2013 reauthorization of the Reclamation States Emergency Drought Relief Act, on which I testified in the Residence of Representatives.

This kind of federal efforts won’t break the fiscal financial institution.

But they gravely distract from the infrastructure and regulatory liberalization actually necessary for adaptable, plentiful water in arid areas.

Plus, politics encourages resource management principles at odds with an adaptable and lightly regulated water sector, and critical infrastructure wellness typically.

Pet agendas like desalination do boast remarkable doing work applications, but they are frequently vitality-intensive, by-product-laden approaches to make costly drinkable water. They’re not sustainable, however.

Politics has difficulty with tradeoffs: Why brackish groundwater desalination alternatively of seawater desalination, or smaller scale solar nonetheless-kind projects, or why not a great number of different water investments and approaches?

To End California Drought, Fill Much more Hollywood And Silicon Valley Swimming Pools

Can An Uber Investor Deliver Silicon Valley Disruption To Healthcare?

Numerous tweets right now from Benchmark Capital spouse Bill Gurley suggests that the legendary VC company – popular for their backing of eBay, Uber, OpenTable, and Yelp, amongst others – could be preparing to get critical about healthcare, and aggressively crowdsource their search for new options.

“Spending time learning where the Web intersects with healthcare. If you have concepts and want to chat, get in touch with me: overall health@benchmark.com,” he initially tweeted, incorporating, “100% convinced US healthcare industry is genuinely messed up &amp that implies possibility, 17% of GDP.”

Possibly most interestingly, Gurley mentioned that “approach must be orthogonal/disruptive. Not interested in ideas that spouse closely with current players.”  He asserts,“i dont want a swift exit, but I really do not want to fret about trials and regulation as well considerably both.“

This positioning would seem to align Gurley with other engineering VCs like Vinod Khosla, who believe the greatest opportunities lie in operating outdoors the present program, which they tend to view as irredeemably dysfunctional.

Others firms, although possibly sharing a similar view of the status quo (“calcified hairball program of care”), nevertheless appear to strive to recognize solutions that address discomfort-points of existing gamers, and more usually, try to operate inside of the framework of the current system.  I’d spot Venrock, Aberdare, and Sequoia in this class.  Notably, Venrock’s efforts right here are led by physician Bob Kocher, Aberdare has a legacy in existence science and just lately pivoted to healthcare providers and digital wellness (capstoned by the hiring of doctor Mo Kaushal), and Sequoia’s efforts appear to be led by former healthcare CEO, Todd Cozzens.

(Conspicuously absent from this list are companies like Social+Capital, my 2013 digital well being investor of the year although I might be tempted to place founder Chamath Palihapitiya squarely in the Gurley/Khosla camp, at least some of his portfolio companies, this kind of as Geoff Clapp’s Better, seem to be centered, at least initially, on functioning inside of the existing technique.)

The basic question isn’t so a lot no matter whether healthcare requirements disruption (it does), but rather, whether this adjust is far more probably to be achieved by brash brilliant upstarts, working from with no, or by savvy, visionary insiders, who know exactly where to search for seams.

A latest, unsettling HBR publish by Jason Hwang (co-author of The Innovator’s Prescription) and Ateev Mehrotra, describes what they see as the failure of retail clinics to transform healthcare.  “Understanding their disappointing overall performance is especially critical,” Hwang and Mehrotra  write,

“given that retail clinics are viewed as the prototypical illustration of how disruptive innovation can alter the health care system for the better. The thought of disruptive innovation, a idea pioneered by the Harvard Enterprise School’s Clayton Christensen and written about previously in HBR and in a book that one particular of us co-authored, is that industries are a lot more generally transformed by new entrants, rather than entrenched gamers. Disruptive firms get their start off by supplying affordability, ease, and simplicity to previously neglected market place segments that are too little and reduced margin for incumbents to pursue or aggressively defend.

Retail clinics match this description to a tee “

However, Hwang and Mehrotra argue, retail clinics have been derailed by “perversities in rules and reimbursement.”  (An assertion with which Christensen, as properly as HMS Dean Jeffrey Flier and researcher Vineeta Vijayaraghavan, would seem to agree.)

But, if any person has purpose to believe in the potential of a promising thought to overcome “perversities in regulation,” it just may well be Bill Gurley, a fellow who invested in an upstart car support that that has had to battle its way into a historically regulated and impenetrable market place, and  aside from displeasing Jessica Seinfeld,  seems to have been remarkably profitable.

The abiding hope is that whether or not led from the inside or the outside, the irresistible force of inspired entrepreneurship will find some way to dislodge the immovable object of contemporary healthcare.

Can An Uber Investor Deliver Silicon Valley Disruption To Healthcare?