Hasta La Gadget!

BANGUI, Central African Republic (AP) — France’s foreign minister says that a French aid worker kidnapped in Central African Republic has been released.

Laurent Fabius did not give details about the release, but thanked Central African Republic authorities and especially the archbishop of the country’s capital for their help.

He announced the release Friday.

Claudia Priest, a 67-year-old aid worker, was kidnapped earlier this week.

Central African Republic was hit by sectarian violence about a year ago when a Christian militia was formed to combat a Muslim rebel coalition that had taken control of the country.

The first message arrived midday on a Sunday, picking up the latest in the long paper and electronic trail that chronicles our family’s health.

Mom, Jan. 4, 12:49 p.m.: Yesterday morning Dad woke up very sick. He has a terrible cough.
Mom, Jan. 5, 2:52 p.m.: Dad has the flu.
Mom, Jan. 6, 3:40 p.m.: Doc said Dad has to get down fluid. He spit up water twice. If he can’t, I have to take him to an urgent care clinic. Don’t come home! This is highly contagious.
Dad, Jan. 7, 2:15 p.m.: I will be visiting the doctor again today. I had a very bad night last night and I am very weak. You must stay away from the house.

When I was 4 years old, my dad lived on red meat and his total cholesterol reached 300. His doctor began him on Lipitor — a cholesterol-reducing medication — and told him he must change his lifestyle through diet and exercise or else he’d have a heart attack.

When my dad played music with his band on Saturday nights, my mom would take my older brother, JD, and me to Pizza Hut. This was our only chance to eat pizza. My dad quit eating most everything besides poultry and broccoli. My dad hasn’t eaten steak in 27 years.

Mom, Jan. 7, 4:40 p.m.: Dad lost 6 lbs from not eating. He keeps wanting to go to the hospital. Yesterday the doc told him he didn’t need it.
Me, Jan. 7, 5:00 p.m.: Holy crap. I’ve never seen him want to be admitted to a hospital before.
Dad, Jan. 7, 6:11 p.m.: The doctor has added a strong antibiotic to calm the cough. I hope that it works. She was confident that it would work. I also had a chest X-ray to determine if I had pneumonia.
Dad, Jan. 8, 9:02 a.m.: The X-ray led to a pneumonia diagnosis.
JD, Jan. 8, 9:12 a.m.: Man this is scary. Anything we can do?

After being diagnosed with high cholesterol, my dad began walking every day outside unless it was raining or freezing, or unless he was severely ill. He bought a treadmill for those occasions. His music source changed, though a decade behind the times, beginning with the Walkman audio cassette player. JD handed down his eight-gigabyte iPod Nano and my dad learned how to import songs but not how to remove them. He claims he doesn’t mind listening to “Chicken Fried” for the thousandth time.

JD and I bought him a Polar watch to track his steps. My dad, the most disciplined man I ever met, used this technology to steadily increase his walk from four to six miles over two years. At this pace he’ll walk almost half a marathon a day by the time he’s 75 years old.

Mom, Jan. 8, 1:49 p.m.: Dad is walking around making noises, saying something that sounds like, “yeah, yeah, yeah.” He is moaning loudly.
Me, Jan. 8, 1:50 p.m.: It is scary how ill he sounds but his doc is hopefully on top of things.
Mom, Jan. 8, 2:09 p.m.: He keeps shouting now. I don’t know what to do.
Me, Jan. 8, 2:17 p.m.: He’ll be fine. Don’t worry. Please try to calm down, you’re just getting yourself all worked up.
Mom, Jan. 8, 4:17 p.m.: He started saying that his chest really hurt. Now I’m going to get his Boost. He didn’t eat lunch and says that he won’t eat dinner. I hope he drinks this.
Me, Jan. 8, 6:08 p.m.: Chest pain is a normal symptom according to WebMD. Please stop, you’re making yourself sick.

My dad still uses a Rolodex, and I don’t expect JD will convince him to switch to the now decade-old Gmail for his contacts. He also tracks his health with paper and pen, amassing paper mountains, years and years of cholesterol and other health readings, even though they never exceed the normal range, all because the doctor he had for 30 years told him to do it once. Until his doctor says “stop tracking cholesterol,” or “go to the hospital,” he won’t.

Mom, Jan. 8, 6:00 p.m.: Dad now says his chest hurts even when he is not coughing. And now he won’t go to the hospital.
Mom, Jan. 8, 6:20 p.m.: Dad isn’t asleep. His chest hurts, his neck hurts, and he now has a fever.
Mom, Jan. 8, 11:28 p.m.: Every time he complained about pain, I told him to go to the hospital. Whenever he said that he couldn’t stand it, I told him the same thing. He said maybe tomorrow.
Me, Jan. 8, 11:30 p.m.: I’m off work tomorrow. I’m coming home. Don’t try to tell me not to, it will do no good. I’ll take Dad wherever he needs to go. He’ll be fine tonight. Goodnight.
Mom, Jan. 9, 9:19 a.m.: I have to get dressed. Doc called and told him to go immediately to urgent care. He can’t breathe now.

“I don’t have long to talk,” my dad said on the phone, “Because I get out of breath. Send Mom the address of the urgent care.”

I met my parents at the wrong urgent care, ordered my mom to the backseat, started my phone’s navigation towards the correct urgent care, and stomped the pedal. My dad’s eyes looked like he’d just consumed a venti dark roast belying four days of sleep deprivation. He took 60 breaths a minute into the tiny portion of his lungs that didn’t crackle with fluid. I’d never seen someone so sick.

At first, I used soft reason with JD.

Me, Jan. 9, 11:02 a.m.: Mom thinks you should come now. I don’t know, but I can’t say that is a bad idea.
Me, Jan. 9, 11:13 a.m.: I asked Doc if you need to come right now, he said, “I don’t think he’s at that point yet. I think he’s going to get better. But he’s a pretty sick guy and it wouldn’t hurt.”
Me, Jan. 9, 11:25 a.m.: I’m trying to analyze whether this is immediate or not. I do not know.

Finally, I was direct.

Me, Jan. 9, 11:30 a.m.: I don’t think Dad will die today. Dad thought he would. His pain is a constant 8 out of 10, uncontrollable with every breath.

JD left his house immediately.

Urgent care stabilized him and ordered an ambulance to take him to the hospital emergency room where the nurse connected him to the BiPAP ventilation system. His lungs wouldn’t stop crackling. He wouldn’t stop moaning.

When it was time for his usual afternoon pill regimen, which the hospital temporarily halted, he wouldn’t stop yelling, “Lipitooooooooor,” the final vowels drawn out, the words reaching several pitches. Despite his terror, his mind missed nothing regarding the chronic diseases he dedicated his life to managing.

When I was 19, I awoke from an afternoon nap and found my mom and dad asleep next to me. From across the room JD smirked and pointed at my dad’s head tipped back on the rocker, tongue out. My family had quit working, pausing their lives during my bone marrow transplant to treat my second cancer, to be with me. Each day we napped together. They filled my loneliness and watched me suffer.

“I’d offer to stay with Dad tonight, but I can see you’re not leaving him,” JD said.

I wouldn’t leave. My superhero and best friend looked so fragile. I waited for him to pull his iPod out of his pocket and walk out of the ER, as if this was all a misunderstanding because he missed his morning six-miler. Instead the ventilatory assist machine forced air into my dad’s lungs, reduced pressure so he could exhale, and repeated, the robot of death knocking at his doorstep.

I pulled the chair adjacent to his bed, close enough to touch his hand in comfort.

I drifted off in between moans and more shouts of “Lipitooooooooor.” Sometimes, I woke to beg him to forget his meds for just this one day. Sometimes, to understand the terror in his blank stare. My eyes streamed tears for just the third time in 14 years, as uncontrollable as the pain when he breathed.

Early the next morning JD returned to the hospital. Too scared and sick to make eye contact, my dad’s bright, blue, teary eyes focused between us. He whispered. We got closer. But he was conversing with someone else. “Mom, I’m not ready to go to the other siiiiiiiiide.” I looked up at the monitor expecting question marks and flatlines, and then I turned to where my dad was looking, expecting to see my translucent grandmother who passed before I could remember her.

I only felt JD’s eyes on mine. “You’re not going to the other side, yet,” we said, pulling him back to ours.

I am not the kind of person who wants to forget trauma and suffering. Rather, I want to cherish it. I want to remember that life is fragile no matter my effort to prevent another cancer — no matter my dad’s effort to stay active, healthy and strong. Within days, severe necrotizing and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus pneumonia, and pneumothoraces and collapsed lungs with holes in them, nearly took my 69-year-old father with an obsessive attention to health.

He will get out of the hospital and return to his Lipitor and long walks, handwriting his health and history in notebooks. Just not yet.

And he agreed to have steak on his 70th birthday.

Feel free to wish my dad a speedy recovery by posting a comment on my blog.

Michael Lewis’ book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, documents how the Oakland Athletics, a baseball team with a near league low $40 million payroll, won over 100 games by focusing on the most valuable, not the most expensive, skills. Perhaps just as importantly, general manager Billy Beane had people on his team that bought into his philosophy.

On 6 January 2014, Mayor Martin J. Walsh took over as the first new mayor in the city of Boston in 20 years. He set out to change how government was operated — and measured. Although the concept of Moneyball originates in baseball, its philosophy directly applies to governing.

Government, he believed, could change the way it functioned by striking a proper balance between people management, statistics and investment. Resources, by nature, are limited, but if spent wisely, can lead to results that have a real impact.

Data-driven decisions

The new mayor set out to prove this model, first building the infrastructure for its success. He spoke to employees across the city about the new mind-set. He hired the city’s first ever analytics fellow. He held monthly meetings with his cabinet specifically focused on data and its progress towards key goals. He held a public hackathon to identify systematic solutions to permitting. And to track it all, he had dashboards installed in his office that allowed him to see, in real time, vital city stats, set to his initial vision developed during his campaign and initial time in office.

On an hourly basis in 2014 the mayor evaluated progress against key numerical goals and would actively discuss progress with his cabinet each time he saw an issue. The year-end results were striking: in 2014, more than 18,000 potholes were filled, a 50% increase from the previous year, and 4,000 sidewalks were repaired, a 52% increase. Meanwhile, 10,000 LED streetlights were installed, a 54% increase. And permitting? The city saw wait times to get a permit reduced by 25% and a four-month backlog of appeal hearings reduced to zero. This complemented the pre-existing data-driven culture of the police, which saw shootings fall by 16% and overall violent crime drop by 6%.

The data-fueled strategy paid equal dividends. The Department of Public Works continued expanding “smart” trash cans that would allow the mayor to see in real time how full trash cans were, allowing for smarter routing and a reduction in costs. The city’s SnowCOP system — which tracks snowplows on the road during a storm (and creates maps of areas where they have yet to hit), ensuring that every street gets the attention it needs — was improved.

While the quantitative results were impressive, perhaps more impactful was the data-driven culture that resulted from a human touch. A member of the support staff of Veteran’s Affairs became so excited when she found out the department’s calls were being measured that she encouraged her team to “beat her score” from the day before. The Mayor’s Office received requests from employees across the city to build their own dashboards so they could track data like the mayor.

People power

Externally, the mayor also developed buy-in from the residents of Boston. Anyone with a smartphone can alert the city to neighborhood issues such as potholes, damaged signs and graffiti using the Citizens Connect app. Reports are automatically sent to the city’s work order system to be tracked and assigned to service teams, and residents can follow the status of their request through their unique tracking number online or on the app. And to boot, when a case is closed, users often see an uploaded photo of the team that did the work, emphasizing the people behind the data.

Furthermore, the mayor introduced a program called NEW (Neighborhood Engagement Walks) Boston, a comprehensive audit of every street in every neighborhood across the city. Representatives from the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Services, alongside residents, walked the 850 miles of city streets across Boston with tablets, logging every issue in an effort to assess each neighborhood in great detail. The findings are shared in a forward-facing story map, continuing the mayor’s pledge for increased transparency and accountability in city government.

This new model of governing has statistically proven to be a success in Boston. With fewer resources available for more programs, government must be smarter about how it functions. As Billy Beane revolutionized the way baseball players are evaluated, Mayor Walsh seeks to transform how cities utilize its data and how they assess their core mission.

This post is part of a series produced by The Huffington Post and The World Economic Forum to mark the Forum’s Annual Meeting 2015 (in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, Jan. 21-24) and in recognition of the Forum’s Global Shapers initiative. The Global Shapers Community is a worldwide network of city-based hubs developed and led by young entrepreneurs, activists, academics, innovators, disruptors and thought leaders. Aged between 20 and 30, they are exceptional in their achievements and drive to make a positive contribution to their communities. Follow the Global Shapers on Twitter at @globalshapers or nominate a Global Shaper at http://www.globalshapers.org/apply. Read all the posts in the series here.

In his State of the Union address this week, President Obama again delivered a message to Americans that we can’t sit still as the arteries of our economy – our transportation system – fall into a state of severe disrepair. While short on specifics, the president challenged lawmakers to get focused on reversing decades of neglect.

That’s the good news. The bad news is two-fold. First, the president didn’t offer a new way forward on transportation investments. And second, the Republican response did not even mention the word transportation.

The choice facing Americans and the people they’ve elected isn’t just, as the president said in his address to the nation, deciding “who we want to be over the next 15 years,” but also how we are going to get there. Right now if you’re a working person just trying to get to work, a mayor trying to serve the needs of your constituents, or a multi-billion dollar corporation trying to compete in the global economy, your problem is the same: the transportation system you rely on is dangerously deteriorating.

As I said in my speech at the LAANE City of Justice Awards last month, the challenge we face in addressing this crisis is overcoming the ill effects from the single largest export coming out of Washington: failure. That failure is endangering the very foundation of the economy we are trying to rebuild.

It isn’t enough to say, as the president did on Tuesday night, that “21st century businesses need 21st century infrastructure.” Nor is it enough to say, as important as it is, “Let’s pass a bipartisan infrastructure plan.” Given the urgency and extent of our investment deficit, we can’t simply rest on hope and the desire for action; we need to come up with clear paths to progress. And then we need to act on them because time isn’t on our side.

Users are flocking to public transit systems but thanks to political inaction, services and jobs are being cut and passengers are left with over-crowded buses and trains.

Thousands of bridges are growing increasingly dangerous – and some are falling down – and highways are falling apart and doomed, it seems, to endless gridlock.

Amtrak keeps breaking its ridership records but congressional funding decisions force the company to use decades-old equipment and outdated infrastructure such as century-old tunnels.

As we approach 800 million air passengers a year flying on U.S. airlines, a lack of funding has forced us to rely on air traffic control technology from a bygone era, capacity-constrained airports, and a short-staffed FAA as we’ve failed to hire and train enough air traffic controllers, safety inspectors, and technicians to keep up with demand.

And take a look at the U.S. maritime sector, where middle-class jobs are disappearing in droves as too many politicians support policies that hollow out this critical industry. And too many of our ports can’t compete in the global shipping industry thanks to nickel and diming by the people we elect.

If we ended this neglect we could also launch a transportation manufacturing renaissance across America because when we start building and modernizing our economy again, U.S. factories will start humming.

We need those in Washington to stop talking past one another about these vital issues. The president knows, and I know, that transportation and infrastructure have historically been issues where Democrats and Republicans, no matter their states or their backgrounds, have been willing and able to compromise. They’ve done it before – that’s how some of America’s grand infrastructure was built in the first place.

This must be the year when upgrading and modernizing our failing transportation system makes the checklist for every lawmaker in both parties. Indeed, the State of the Union and the other party’s response are – or at least should be – about the hopes and aspirations of the American people. But with hope there must be progress on breaking the transportation funding stalemate that is harming American competitiveness, eroding our cities, and idling millions of jobs.

The start of a year affords us all the opportunity to reflect back on the good and bad times of the previous 365 days. What were your highs and lows? What lessons did you learn professionally? For me, 2014 was a year of re-evaluating how all of us at Nextiva communicate with one another, how we hire and how we maintain (and improve) the atmosphere in which our growing team of 300+ staffers work.

In no particular order, here are my three key takeaways.

Lesson #1: Free snacks do not make a company culture.
Don’t get me wrong–free food is a bonus. Who doesn’t appreciate the occasional complimentary lunch or Clif Bar? But what I learned this year is that just because a company offers free snacks doesn’t mean employees are happy deep down. We changed our snack policy this year and are testing another culture-building strategy: to hone in on what our employees truly want in their careers.

After nixing the snack perk (we do still offer food from time to time; it’s just no longer a daily thing), we created a team focused on improving the internal culture of the company. We scheduled one-on-one meetings with a number of employees and asked them to be frank with us about what they liked about working at Nextiva, what they wanted to see improve and where they saw their careers headed.

The responses were highly enlightening to our management team and we’ve since implemented new communications and training procedures. Bonus: we are getting much higher internal satisfaction ratings.

Lesson #2: Hiring for attitude is paramount.
There was a time when I was more impressed with a candidate’s resume than his or her attitude. That time has passed. Over the years I’ve learned that skills can be taught, but attitude is inherent and it affects everyone on a team. If one person shows up to work with a negative attitude, it brings everyone down.

Case and point is an analogy I heard recently: Lets say you have a cup of water. It is clear and fresh. But then you put in one drop of ink. Although tiny compared with the amount of water in the cup, that ink spreads quickly and the water becomes contaminated.

It is the same with staff teams. One person can spoil it for the rest. Because of this lesson, we are increasingly selective when hiring and take our time to look at attitude first.

Lesson #3: Create a solid pre-hiring strategy.
Have you ever thought about the sources in which your best applicants originate? Up until last year, we, like many companies, spent a good deal of time tracking the ROI and communication strategies of our marketing and sales departments (we still do that, of course), but didn’t give the same level of attention to hiring. That changed drastically in 2014.

Today we track which lead sources bring us the best candidates (be it LinkedIn, internal recruiters, other job boards) and are dedicating more resources to the sources that bring in the candidates that fit our culture.

In addition, we are paying closer attention to the hiring experience for each applicant–how we keep in touch, how we communicate with a candidate if he or she is a good fit of or a bad fit for the company, etc. This dedication has helped improve our internal culture (by choosing the appropriate candidates right off the bat) and, thanks to word-of-mouth and increasingly positive online employee reviews, we are now attracting more of the right kind of employees to join our growing team.

What business lessons did you learn in 2014?