Yep! This Clown Will Make You Pregnant

Tel Aviv native Nimrod Eisenberg had no intention of following in his parents’ footsteps and becoming a doctor. Although his childhood was spent mostly in hospitals—his mother is a midwife and his father a physician—he had career ambitions outside the medical field. So when he was just seventeen years old, he says, “I ran away and joined the circus.”

Not literally, but he did spend several years performing as a clown and juggler at circuses around Israel, much to his family’s consternation. And he eventually moved to Paris to study the clowning arts at L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq, a renown theater school. (He never wanted to be a clown in the traditional Western tradition. “In America, your clowns are either happy hobos or sad hobos.” His clowning personality, he says, is more like Charlie Chaplin.) Eisenberg soon found his way back to Israel, where he enrolled in the University of Haifa and graduated with a bachelor’s degree… in medical clowning.

“Yes, that’s a real thing,” Eisenberg laughs. “A lot of people think I’m kidding, but I’m a university accredited medical clown.”

In 2003, he joined Dream Doctors, an Israel-based organization that brings medical clowns to clinics and hospitals. It isn’t an unorthodox option that patients have to specifically request. In Israel, medical clowns are available to anybody who wants them. “We’re just another service provided by the hospital,” Eisenberg says. “We’re as integral to the medical staff as anybody.” He works alongside the doctors and nurses as a collaborative part of a patient’s treatment. “We try to be there for every procedure,” he says. “We’re there when they draw blood or change a bandage or do an x-ray.”

He has arguably the toughest job in medicine. Making somebody laugh while they’re stuck in the unhappiest place on earth is, unsurprisingly, often an uphill battle. “A hospital can be pretty grim and depressing, even for positive people,” Eisenberg says. “But if I can change their perspective, get them to reconnect with their joy, it can do wonders.” Clowns can be so effective in stress reduction that, in some minor surgeries, Eisenberg says, “a clown replaces general anesthesia.”

It’s a healing philosophy that’s also at the core of a new experimental treatment being pioneered by Eisenberg and Dream Doctors: Clown-assisted in vitro fertilization. “I only visit the patient after the in vitro procedure,” Eisenberg clarifies. The theory is, much like laughter contributes to the healing of sick people by reducing their stress, a little levity could have the same effect on fertility patients. There’s even research to back it up. In a study conducted by Dr. Shevach Friedler of the Assaf Harofeh Medical Centre in Israel, 219 women undergoing IVF were visited by clowns for 15 minutes after embryo implantation. 36 percent of them became pregnant.

“There’s a lot of unspoken tension and stress in a fertility ward,” Eisenberg says. “Once you start playing with that tension and acknowledging it and joking over it, it’s able to burst out and offer some relief.” One of his more successful bits with fertility patients involves a tea kettle with a red nose covering the spout. “I hold it like it’s a baby that’s crying,” he explains. “It’s my clown baby. I apologize for it, and I try rocking it to sleep and singing it songs, anything to make it stop crying.” Perhaps not a comedy routine that would amuse most audiences, but for a patient just coming out of IVF surgery, it addresses the elephant in the room. A tea kettle baby is the manifestation of all their hopes and anxieties.

“It’s a delicate balance,” he says. “You have to play on their fears without mocking them. You take those things that sit in the stomach and bring them to the surface so we can look at them and laugh about them.”

Fertility clowns have become more commonplace in Israel, but the rest of the world is still reluctant. Earlier this month, Eisenberg and fellow Dream Doctors clown Jérôme Arous toured hospitals in Canada, giving conferences and hosting workshops for fertility patients and curious doctors in Quebec City, Montreal, Chicoutimi and Halifax. They were met, Eisenberg remembers, with cautious enthusiasm. “I am not convinced,” Dr. Hananel Holzer of Montreal’s McGill Reproductive Centre told a local radio station about fertility clowns. “Not yet.”

Eisenberg is confident that the global medical community will catch on eventually. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that even his own family didn’t take him seriously. He was the black sheep who went into clowning instead of medicine. But he ended up in the family business anyway. He even spent a few years in residence at Hadassah Mount Scopus in Jerusalem, where he worked alongside his brother, an orthopedist.

“It was pretty easy to tell us apart,” Eisenberg says. “One of us dressed strange and talked funny, and the other was a medical clown.”

via businessweek.com

What If Talent is Equal? Too Few Good Women: Why Are Boards Still Male Dominant?

I encourage the writing of this article by Grace Sergen. Jim 

 

New corporate governance strictures are making way for women on corporate boards. But how to find suitable candidates? And what do women really add to the board room?

INSEAD professor of Strategy Annet Aris sits on six corporate boards. She was first invited to a media company board in 2004 because of her reputation as a media specialist, particularly in digital media. “I was brought in not because I was a woman but because I had the knowledge that the companies didn’t have,” Aris says. “That helped to establish my credibility.” Other companies heard about her and she soon started receiving offers to sit on other boards as digitalisation began to take place in insurance and other industries.

The female factor

When women get to the mahogany table they tend to change the rules of the game, and that’s not always comfortable for everyone else. Some male board members grumble that such politically motivated changes lower quality. For Aris, the most compelling reasons for having women onboard is that you get better decisions because you have more points of view.

“When women are on the board, they set a different tone. They tend to ask questions in a way a man might not (as he doesn’t want to appear uninformed). When something doesn’t sound right, women tend to ask for clarification and to understand why things are (the way they are). In critical situations like takeovers, women tend to get less carried away by the game aspect,” Aris told INSEAD Knowledge.

Then there’s the adjustment process as women learn boardroom rules of conduct. Aris says that initially she underestimated everything that was discussed outside the board. “I would go in relatively naive and there would be important topics for the board (to decide on) and there would be no discussion. I would then say, ‘No I don’t agree’ or ‘Why don’t we talk about that’, and there would be this big silence. And I thought ‘what’s going on here?’ Then I found out that many things had been discussed beforehand so it’s knowing what things can be discussed in formal settings and what topics you need to talk about beforehand with who, and make sure you really understand what’s going on.”

Talent search

The Davies report suggests that one of the reasons why there are so few women on boards is that there are few transparent procedures for appointing people.
“The vast majority of people appointed to boards are appointed because they know the chairmen - who are overwhelmingly male. There’s no interview process and firms that are asked to identify targets for people to sit on the board often come around and say there are no (qualified) women,” Blair told INSEAD Knowledge. “I don’t accept that and I’ve heard that people like Christine Lagarde (France’s Minister of Finance) now comes around to the board with a list of female names – because if you look, there are women who are qualified.”

For the most part, companies approach headhunters. However, Aris claims that headhunters can be risk-averse, and that hampers the search process. Ideally, she says the chairman needs women who have worked in the industry, in senior management positions. However, the problem is that there are not that many of those women around, so the chairman has to be more creative and look beyond conventional benchmarks for experience or expertise. Aris calls this predicament “double diversity”. The board needs to incorporate the gender issue as well as different backgrounds – and this is not always easy.

Quotas: a necessary evil?

One of the problems arising from the introduction of quotas is that companies suddenly feel they have to get women onto their boards now. In the rush to comply, and with demand outstripping the number of capable women, companies motivated by availability rather than appropriateness will of course lose out. There are also the ‘trophy directors’ – the women everyone wants – who have multiple requests for board positions and who can crowd out other eligible women candidates.

 

Aris feels that older women tend to support quotas, but younger women don’t see representation problems “because they are young, bright and entrepreneurial – why should they bother?” However, when they reach their 30s, have children and are thrust into leadership positions, things tend to be more complicated, and it’s an uphill struggle to advance further. By the time they reach their mid-40s they say advancement isn’t moving fast enough; ‘we need quotas’.

 

“The first couple of years (into quota requirements) are really painful,” says Aris. “But after a few years, you actually get the good ones. Capable women begin to see the opportunity and they go for it and it starts working really well. After about five years, you can do away with the quotas because by then you’d have obtained the critical mass. So it’s not a bad idea to jumpstart (the process) with quotas.”

 

The talent pool really is upper management. And once you get enough women in top management, there is a natural flow of qualified women to the board and representational issues are solved, says Aris. This also inspires younger women to be more ambitious… And she adds you also get a more motivated workforce because female employees feel they are represented all the way up to board level. via knowledge.insead.edu

Hire Jim Woods to Speak to Your Organization

Innovation, Growth, & Hypercompetition Consultant/Speaker/Business Coach

 Website: InnoThink Group

Request a consultation: Office: +1 719.649.4118 or complete our form.  

 

Innothink Group is a strategic management, innovation and business coaching consultancy. 

Our Guarantee. Where many consulting firms are reluctant to bear risks or tie their rewards to project outcomes, we decided to build a better model. We align our success with yours. We’re outcome obsessed, outcome paid, putting nearly two thirds of our fees at risk subject to hitting predetermined milestones. More than a guarantee we wanted from the outset to create true partnerships with shared responsibility. See a few of our clients.   

We provide broad ranging advice covering innovation, commoditization, competitive advantage, business policy and strategy, as well as global strategy and implementation. 

 

 

Why Top Innovators Make Time to Waste Time | Humanizing Technology | Big Think

 

What’s the Big Idea?  

The average consumer associates 3M with tape – a product so integral to our daily lives that we barely notice it anymore. But in 1925, as an alternative to the unwieldy, glue-covered sheets of paper it made obsolete, the product was a stroke of genius. In fact, 3M is consistently innovative in an astonishingly diverse array of technologies, from drug delivery to post-it notes to cellphones to nanobots. And they’ve been at it for over 70 years, since a sandpaper salesman with the nascent company invented the concept of a roll of tape as a pet project, in his off hours. 

How do they do it? While researching creativity for his book Imagine: How Creativity Works, Jonah Lehrer spent some time at 3M, studying the company culture that earned it the title of third most innovative company in the world in a recent survey of executives. 

At the core of 3M’s innovation strategy are practices like its “15% rule,” which allows each researcher to spend 15% of their workday on a hobby or pet project of their choosing – the only requirement being that they have to share their new ideas or discoveries with colleagues. More broadly, the company encourages researchers to take breaks, long walks, a nap – whatever they need to give their minds sufficient space to solve tricky creative problems.  

Jonah Lehrer on the surprising benefits of daydreaming:

According to Lehrer, this is in keeping with the state of the art in the neuroscience of creativity. Joydeep Bhattacharaya, a psychologist studying attention and creative problem-solving at Goldsmiths, University of London, has managed to pinpoint creative insight in the brain. Moments before subjects solve a tricky creative problem, a steady stream of alpha waves emanates from the right hemisphere of the brain – the half more closely associated with abstract thinking than with tightly focused logical reasoning. 

What stimulates alpha waves? Laughter, a warm shower, a game of ping pong – activities that we find relaxing and pleasurable and that give the mind freedom to wander. Creative workers consistently report arriving at solutions to problems they’ve been struggling with for weeks while lying in bed on a lazy Sunday morning. Intense focus has its place too – it enables us to clarify the parameters of the problem and activate prior knowledge that’s likely to help us solve it – but the research suggests that downtime allows the brain the necessary breathing room to free-associate and arrive at the unlikely solutions that are the essence of creative thinking. 

Jonah Lehrer: I think the real message of the 15 percent rule, the real virtue of it, is that it sends this message to the researchers and scientists and engineers, look, we trust you.  We hired you.  We think you're smart.  We’re not going to get in your way.  We’re not going to try to micromanage your mind.  So if you’re stuck on a problem and you think the best thing you can do is take a nap on the couch, go take a nap.  If you need to take a walk, go take a walk.  Go play some ping-pong.  Go take a shower.  Leave work early.  That they’re not going to try to get in the way of the creativity of their employees, and think this is backed up by a lot of interesting research on how people solve very hard problems.  Because it turns out that, when you hit the wall, when you’re flailing and failing and you have no idea what to do next, your problem seems impossible, that what you really need to do is put down the coffee and instead find a way to relax, that you are much more likely to have that answer, to have that moment of insight, when you are playing ping-pong, when you’re taking a nap.  

What’s the Significance? 

The global economy remains precarious. In order to ramp up productivity while keeping employee overhead to a minimum, employers expect workers to stay later at the office and juggle more responsibilities than ever before. For employees, that means more coffee, less sleep, fewer trips to the gym. In short, more nose-to-the-grindstone focus and less alpha-wave activity. 

But in an increasingly competitive marketplace of ideas, this “always on” strategy may be counterproductive. Rather than evaluating employees on the quantity of their effort, in terms of the number of hours worked or the number of tasks performed, companies that want to remain ahead of the game might take their cue from 3M, implementing structures that don’t necessarily look like “hard work,” but have a proven track record of facilitating great ideas.

From life-saving apps to cutting-edge military defense, Big Think and Bing's Humanizing Technology Expo explores and expands the boundaries of what it means to be human, today and far into the future. 

Follow Jason Gots (@jgots) on Twitter  via bigthink.com

Hire Jim Woods to Speak to Your Organization

Innovation, Growth, & Hypercompetition Consultant/Speaker/Business Coach

 Website: InnoThink Group

Request a consultation: Office: +1 719.649.4118 or complete our form.  

 

Innothink Group is a strategic management, innovation and business coaching consultancy. 

Our Guarantee. Where many consulting firms are reluctant to bear risks or tie their rewards to project outcomes, we decided to build a better model. We align our success with yours. We’re outcome obsessed, outcome paid, putting nearly two thirds of our fees at risk subject to hitting predetermined milestones. More than a guarantee we wanted from the outset to create true partnerships with shared responsibility. See a few of our clients.   

We provide broad ranging advice covering innovation, commoditization, competitive advantage, business policy and strategy, as well as global strategy and implementation. 

 

 

To Innovate, Turn Your Pecking Order Upside Down - Chris Trimble

Here's an uncomfortable truth about innovation: No matter how great your idea, you can't deliver breakthrough innovation without breakthrough organizational design. Some companies are great at finding opportunities, diagnosing what customers want, and even designing the perfect offerings to satisfy them. But even if you get all of that right, your effort will fall apart if you build the wrong team to execute.

Most companies take the team building step far too casually. To build the right kind of team, for any breakthrough innovation effort, you have to think, quite literally, as though you are building a new company from scratch. You have to discharge all of your company's rarely challenged assumptions about how the work gets done and by whom. Rather than throwing a team together based on who is most readily available, you have to build a team that is custom-designed for the task at hand. This may mean inventing new jobs, hiring new kinds of experts from the outside, and rethinking hierarchy. Talk to us about our 28 day program to strengthen your innovation capabilities to drive growth.

This last piece — rethinking hierarchy — is both the most important and the most discomfiting step. Most companies have a "power alley" — a function that is the most dominant. These power alleys tend to be very stable, but the hierarchy often needs to be upended within teams built for innovation projects.

For example, consider the publishing industry and its fraught transition to the digital world. The companies that made the transition most gracefully are those that created special teams in which the hierarchy was literally turned upside down. Instead of keeping writers and editors at the top of the pecking order and IT specialists somewhere near the bottom, they created special teams in which internet experts were heavily empowered or even dominant. A crucial turning point early in the evolution of New York Times Digital, the internet unit of the New York Times Company, was an explicit decision to recruit and empower a small army of internet experts: Three out of four New York Times Digital employees had been hired from outside the company.

When Electrolux, the European appliance maker, decided that it needed to push its product line up market, it faced a similar organizational challenge. The company had a reputation for high-reliability, midpriced products that were a bit dull. To move up market, the company created a special team in which market researchers and industrial designers were at the top of the pecking order instead of engineers.

The rising phenomenon of reverse innovation — any innovation that is adopted first in the developing world — presents a similar challenge for many companies. To date, most companies have entered the developing world in a straightforward way. They have taken the products that they have made for home markets, put them in boxes, loaded them on ships, and sent them off to be sold abroad.

That approach has delivered some growth at the top of the market, where customers look similar to those at home. However, it leaves the bulk of the opportunity on the table. Customers in the developing world have different needs — not slightly different, but massively different. You can't win by making light adaptations to existing products and services. You have to innovate from scratch.

Reverse innovation is going to be particularly difficult for those companies in which the most dominant function is technology, product development, or engineering. In most cases, these companies will need to create special teams that deliberately shift power from those who understand technology to those who understand what customers want, because success at reverse innovation is more dependent on the latter. When Deere & Company initiated the development of a tractor from the ground up for India's middle market, for example, it created a team that was far more heavily staffed with market researchers than had been the case in the company's earlier forays into India. As a result, the design anticipated the unexpected ways tractors are used in India — for family transportation, for example.

The main point of this post is that any breakthrough innovation, reverse or otherwise, requires special teams that are custom-built from scratch. When building such a team, be sure to:

• Start hiring by asking What skills do we need?, not Who do we know? or Who is available?

• Create custom titles and job descriptions, tailored to the task at hand.

• Deliberately shift the power structure, as the task at hand requires.

Breakthrough innovation is not just about ideas. It's about getting unfamiliar work done, and unfamiliar work requires unfamiliar teams. via blogs.hbr.org

Consulting, Speaking & Coaching. Driving Growth through Innovation 

Innothink Group is a strategic management and innovation consultancy. Where many consulting firms are reluctant to bear risks or tie their rewards to project outcomes, we decided to build a better model. We align our success with yours. We’re outcome obsessed, outcome paid, putting over a third of our fees at risk subject o hitting predetermined milestones. More than a guarantee we wanted from the outset to create true partnerships.

 

For speaking, coaching or consulting inquiries contact:

 

CEO Jim Woods

+1 719- 649-4118