Business and Healthcare;Entrepreneurship Joints?

Part-maverick, part-unconventional, part-smart business owner Sir Richard Branson has business lessons to share in spades. Since I recently read his third autobiographical book Business Stripped Bare: Adventures of a Global Entrepreneur, I wanted to pass on some of what I learned from the book.

Without knowing exactly why, I have long admired his acumen and chutzpah. His story has provided me insights into why I’ve been so drawn to his adventures in business and his larger-than-life personality.
For those of you who don’t know much about him, Branson is the product of a somewhat privileged middle-class upbringing (he descends from a line of barristers and judges) and an English public school (what we in the US call a private school). A self-proclaimed poor student with dyslexia, he failed to complete any college degree, but opted instead to start a business, first as a magazine publisher and then as a mail-order record company owner. He went on to found Virgin Records, and this single venture expanded over the decades to become the Virgin Group, a conglomerate of businesses focused on travel (planes, trains, space travel), entertainment and lifestyle (including humanitarian ventures like fighting HIV, AIDS and climate change).
I came away with many business lessons. Here are a few.
Branson’s business philosophy is crystallized in these words, when asked why he went into business:
I’ve never been interested in being ‘in business’. I’ve been interested in creating things … Business is creative. It’s like painting. You start with a blank canvas. You can paint anything – anything – right there, is your first problem. For every good painting you might turn out, there are a zillion bad paintings just aching to drip off your brush. Scared? You should be. You start. You pick a color. The next color you pick has to work with the first color … People who succeed in business have swallowed their fear and have set out to create something special, something to make a difference to people’s lives …
Lesson: To thrive in business, it really helps to be passionate about creating something worthwhile. As a relative newcomer to entrepreneurship, I have maintained for years now that being an entrepreneur is a radical act of creativity, and it makes an every day “practice” so much more fun once you think of it as an entrepreneurial venture.
His fiercely independent path to success, in the face of rampant naysayers and critics, is both inspirational and hard to imagine duplicating. His gut instincts have won out many times over the analytics and pompous prognostications of others. He’s a master as staying on course with his vision and sense of purpose and ignoring the conventional wisdom.
I’m not good at theory. Almost everything I’ve learned, I’ve learned by doing.
Lesson: While you may draw insight and inspiration from someone else’s success story, you must rely on knowledge about your own marketplace, along with your inner talents and skills, to forge your own path.
Branson has been driven by the desire to innovate, partly I suspect because it’s in his genetic make-up and partly because he has been an astute observer of his own ecosystem’s evolution.
The best, most solid way out of a crisis in a changing market is through experimentation and adaptation.
Lesson: Healthcare is in crisis and the market is changing. It’s vital that we, as providers in an unstable setting, experiment and adapt. New business models? New levels of customer service? New joint ventures, relationships, partnerships?
His two greatest secrets of business success, in my opinion?
1. His relentless focus on the Virgin brand, along with his absolute clarity about what the brand stands for.
2. His dogged insistence on placing the people who work for him first. Wouldn’t that be nice, in healthcare?
by Philippa Kennealy, MD, MPH

Street Life,Street Death

Here's an interesting Economist article about HIV/AIDS management in critical areas.It reveals how a derogatory attitude  hampers the fight to curb the spread of AIDS.

Pedram

At a glance, the calf-length cape that a good-looking young model swirled around on stage appeared to be made of shaggy sheepskin, wildly inappropriate for the tropical climate of Pattaya, a seaside resort in Thailand. In fact its composition was more apt, if no less uncomfortable: hundreds of dangling prophylactics. Pattaya has one of Thailand’s highest concentrations of go-go bars, massage parlours and other shop windows for the sex trade. Parts of it call to mind Sodom-on-Sea. But this “Condom Fashion Show” was not part of the sleaze. It was staged at a recent United Nations-led “consultation”. The theme—sex workers and HIV, the virus that causes AIDS—was deadly serious, and the effort to turn it into burlesque rather heroic.

The consultation differed in more fundamental ways from the usual run of international conferences. Several dozen sex workers from eight countries (Cambodia, China, Fiji, Indonesia, Myanmar, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea and Thailand) attended as full-fledged participants, not just models in the fashion show. Sex workers are on the front line in the struggle against an epidemic that in Asia still claims 350,000 new infections each year. A 2008 report prepared for the United Nations by an independent commission confirmed that “men who buy sex are the single-most powerful driving force in Asia’s HIV epidemics.” It is thought that about 10m Asian women sell sex to 75m men, who in turn have a further 50m regular partners.

A simple and effective way to cut HIV transmission is to ensure that sex workers have access to condoms, know how to use them and always do so. Yet the UN estimates that only a third of Asia’s sex workers are reached by HIV-prevention programmes. And in some countries possession of condoms is taken as evidence of involvement in prostitution, and hence a cause for harassment, extortion or detention.

Yet sex workers themselves are normally excluded—or exclude themselves—from the air-conditioned conference halls where officials and NGOs discuss their plight. One reason is a poor grasp of English, a language, one male Thai sex worker complained, that “we learned only from our clients”. More importantly, sex workers often suffer from official disdain or condescension and are seen as the problem, not the solution.

Of course, the sex industry has not been ignored in the battle against AIDS. Thailand’s early successes are perhaps best-known. It was the first country in Asia to launch a “100% condom-use programme” in the early 1990s, and it managed to cut HIV prevalence sharply. The danger now is of complacency.

The best prevention schemes involve sex workers themselves. As a Chinese delegate put it, given the chance they do a far better job of educating and helping peers than do the UN or government. Myanmar, not normally cited as an outpost of progressive policy, has an HIV-prevention scheme seen as a model. Population Services International, an international NGO, has set up a “peer-to-peer” network with 18 drop-in centres around the country. There, 350 staff, mostly former or present sex workers themselves, dispense advice, discounted condoms and treatment for sexually transmitted infections. HIV prevalence among sex workers dropped from over 30% in 2000-06 to 18% in 2008.

Still, a Burmese sex worker made a passionate intervention at the conference lamenting the stigma her profession carries. In Myanmar as elsewhere, sex workers suffer at the hands of the authorities. And the worst perpetrators are often the police and other official protectors. Take Cambodia, recognised for bringing down HIV prevalence, partly through a condom-use programme. In 2008 a law on “the Suppression of Human Trafficking and Sexual Exploitation” led to the closure of brothels and a shift of the sex trade to bars and other places, complicating measures to prevent HIV. Worse, Human Rights Watch says, it has helped the police to beat, rob and rape sex workers “with impunity”.

A group of Cambodians wrote: “Our lives and our industry have been ruined by the anti-trafficking industry. We used to work in a brothel where we have safety and solidarity… Now we are scattered on the street where it is more dangerous.”

This is an extreme example of two problems besetting efforts to help sex workers. One is that, in most places, sex work is illegal, and almost everywhere frowned upon. Indonesian delegates complained that a new “Puritanism” accompanying a slow Islamisation of public life is forcing the sex trade underground and so making it more dangerous. As our debate showed, arguments for and against decriminalising prostitution are fierce and complex. But as long as it remains a criminal act, sex workers will be vulnerable to arbitrary abuse.

Second, the debate about sex work has become drowned in a campaign against human trafficking. That campaign, however justified its goals, fosters an assumption that all sex workers ply their trade against their will. Yet most migrant sex workers have left home for good reasons of their own—among them a desire to work away from their families, and to earn more money.

Parts of the debate, such as terminology, are as old as the oldest profession. One side regards “sex worker” as a dangerously obfuscatory euphemism. The other sees “prostitute” as degrading and derogatory. One sees those who sell sex inevitably as the victims of exploitation. But those seeking to be heard in Pattaya wanted recognition as independent actors who have made their own choices. They demand to be treated with basic human dignity just as they are.