Bruce 'knew' me via his colleague and partner Ray Price when they were working on their Serial Innovators book (Stanford Press, 2012, https://www.amazon.com/Serial-Innovators-Individuals-Breakthrough-Innovations/dp/0804775974). I had been to the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana (UIUC) in January 2010 to co-deliver a talk about Ray's and my Stanford 2009 book about Hewlett-Packard (The HP Phenomenon: Innovation and Business Transformation) https://www.amazon.com/HP-Phenomenon-Innovation-Business-Transformation/dp/0804752869
Both books, I am happy to report, continue to sell (admittedly in smaller quantities these days), even though the HP we reported on has since endured some choppy waters.
Vojak attended our lecture, and Ray introduced him at the end, briefly, as a colleague rather than a co-author--the meeting was not memorable at the time. Ray and Bruce had yet another colleague, Abbie Griffin, who had by this time left UIUC for a role at U of Utah, whom I did not meet.
Well, Zoom is a wonderful mechanism to get to know someone. Bruce on May 7th this year had just completed the first (of three) interviews with Aidan McCullen (described elsewhere in this post, and also in my Intrapreneuring Post (https://intrapreneuringinnovation.blogspot.com/) We scheduled a half-hour, that stretched easily to an hour and a half. The book that the three wrote had a number of different stories about my career (more by far than I recalled were included in the book), and we visited about his writing experience there and in subsequent consulting gigs. The book itself took them twelve years; indeed, they never intended to write a book, but the collected interviews of some twenty people were compelling enough that the book emerged, almost naturally.
But you cannot talk for an hour and a half without covering what has happened for each of us in the intervening sixteen years. And that was the excitement, I think, for each of us. We talked at length about 'the interview process' and our mutual findings about how they work, what it takes to get someone candid enough to share true goals, insights and key accomplishments without the braggadocio that ruins so many stories due to hagiography.
And then we talked about COVID, and in particular, the work that I've done on that topic over the past six years. Bruce knew of the COPD work I'd done long ago, but not the recent work in that arena (see my COPD blog https://breathecopd.blogspot.com/ ). I also shared the lecture I had just delivered for the Innovation Value Institute in Ireland (at the Maynooth University, one of the four National Universities in Ireland).
And here is where an 'old friend'--one you've basically never met, but who 'knows' you--comes in. The Zoom summary itself is insightful: The core of the discussion was Charles's development of advanced data visualization and analysis tools for COVID-19, including dynamic dashboards and compendiums that aggregate and interpret pandemic data at granular levels, such as county and province, using both traditional and AI-driven methods. He highlighted the challenges of data collection, inconsistencies in global reporting, and the political and emotional barriers to effective data use, as well as the lack of comprehensive public analysis of COVID-19 data. Charles shared his efforts to publish a prototype book and make the data accessible, but noted obstacles in distribution due to controversial topics like vaccination.
In a subsequent note, Bruce shared the following: I'm suggesting something of a lessons learned presentation of the data, laid out in a non-political, non-aligned way, with the message, "Isn't this interesting? What might we learn from this?" I think you're already doing this, but perhaps I'm suggesting it be framed in such a non-politically-aligned way that nobody will miss the message.
Food for thought? I think so. Great to have a new, interacting colleague!!!
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