Vrey's Share

~Vision without action is a dream. Action without vision is simply passing the time. Action with Vision is making a positive difference.~
Joel Barker

A novel - and natural - way of creating new bones for humans could be just a few years away.

Scientists in Italy have developed a way of turning rattan wood into bone that is almost identical to the human tissue.

At the Istec laboratory of bioceramics in Faenza near Bologna, a herd of sheep have already been implanted with the bones.

The process starts by cutting the long tubular rattan wood up into manageable pieces.

It is then snipped into even smaller chunks, ready for the complex chemical process to begin.

The pieces are put in a furnace and heated.

In simple terms, carbon and calcium are added.

The wood is then further heated under intense pressure in another oven-like machine and a phosphate solution is introduced.

'Very promising'
After around 10 days, the rattan wood has been transformed into the bone-like material.

The team is lead by Dr Anna Tampieri.


"It's proving very promising" she says. "This new bone material is strong, so it can take heavy loads that bodies will put on it.

"It is also durable, so, unlike existing bone substitutes, it won't need replacing".

Several types of wood were tested before they found rattan works best.

That is because of its structure and porous properties, which enable blood, nerves and other compounds to travel through it.

Dr Tampieri says it is the closest scientists have ever come to replicating the human bone because, she says: "It eventually fuses with real bone, so in time, you don't even see the join".

The new wood bone is being closely studied at the nearby Bologna University hospital.

That is where orthopaedic surgeons like Maurillo Marcacci are monitoring the sheep tests.

The x-rays of the sheep's legs show the progress they are making.


Particles from the sheep's own bones are migrating to the bone made from wood.

Within a few months, the real and the artificial bone will be like one continuous bone.

Mr Marcacci says that existing bone substitutes, like metal or ceramic, or bones from dead bodies, all have their drawbacks.

He says for people with major trauma accidents or cancer, the current range of alternatives can be weak and do not fuse with the existing bone.

The new wood bones, he says, could be a major step forward.

"A strong, durable, load-bearing bone is really the holy grail for surgeons like me and for patients" he says.

The new bone-from-wood programme is being funded by the European Union.

Implants into humans are about five years away.

But with no signs of rejection or infection in the sheep, there is real hope here that a natural, cheap and effective replacement for bones is now possible.

Bones from wood could soon be opening up a new branch of medical science.

Source: Turning wood into bones

This is a lesson learn for client who has pay a consultant for design. Please remember that you hire the consultant for good, so leave it to expert, or you will make a trouble to yourself, just wasting your money and time (and the consultant time of course).

Source: How a Web Design Goes Straight to Hell

Ensuring IT alignment with the business has traditionally been viewed as the CIO's job. However, successful IT/business alignment entails more than executive level communication and strategy translation.

CIOs who achieve alignment typically do so by establishing a set of well-planned process improvement programs that systematically address obstacles and go beyond executive level conversation to permeate the entire IT organization and its culture.

One commonly used methodology is the "IT/Business Alignment Cycle", which introduces a simple framework that the IT organization can adopt to manage a broad range of activities.

The four phases of the cycle are: plan, model, manage, and measure.

Following this cycle fosters organization-wide shared expectations between business and IT managers, and defines a common framework for a broad range of activities that together serve to align IT and business objectives. The cycle also identifies best practices and common processes within and between IT functional groups to make IT/business alignment sustainable and scalable.

This framework functions best when integrated and automated with software applications and monitoring tools.

The Cycle
Now let's examine the four phases individually, describing the activities, best practices, and benefits associated with each phase.

Plan: Translating business objectives into measurable IT services. The plan phase helps close the gap between what business managers need and expect and what IT delivers.
According to Giga Research, IT leaders in poorly aligned organizations are still attempting to explain technology management issues to their business colleagues and have not made the leap to understanding business issues and communicating with business managers on their terms.
To close the gap between what business expects and what IT delivers, IT needs an ongoing dialogue to clarify business needs in business terms. Without an ongoing dialogue, IT may not be able to determine which IT services to offer or how to effectively allocate IT resources to maximize business value. Furthermore, when business needs change, IT should adapt and modify the service offering and IT resources appropriately.
CIOs should mandate the use of a disciplined service level management process that will lead to agreement on specific IT services and service levels needed to support business objectives. IT management can then translate service definitions and service levels into underlying rules and priorities that empower and guide IT resources.
Finally, IT needs a way to measure and track both business level services and the underlying capabilities that support the services.

Model: Design infrastructure to optimize business value The model phase identifies resources needed to deliver IT services at committed service levels. This phase involves mapping IT assets, processes, and resources back to IT services, then prioritizing and planning resources that support those business critical services.
The bottom line in measuring the success of alignment is the degree to which IT is working on the things about which business managers care. That means IT must have processes in place for prioritizing projects, tasks, and support.
To successfully prioritize resources, IT needs a service impact model and a centralized configuration and asset management repository to tie the infrastructure components back to specific IT services. This combination is essential if IT is to effectively plan, prioritize, and consistently deliver services at agreed-upon service levels while also reducing costs.

Manage: Drive results through consolidated service support The manage phase enables the IT staff to deliver promised levels of service. CIOs can ensure that their organization meets expectations by providing a single location for business users to submit all service requests, and by prioritizing those requests based on pre-defined business priorities.
Without a single point-of-service request, it is difficult to manage resources to meet agreed-upon service levels. Moreover, without a method for effectively managing the IT infrastructure and all changes, the IT staff faces the risk of causing failures.
To ensure the effectiveness of the service desk, the IT staff needs to provide:

• A method for prioritizing service requests based on business impact.
• A disciplined change management process to minimize the risk of negatively affecting service level commitments.
• An IT event management system to monitor and manage components that support business critical services.
• The underlying operational metrics that enable service delivery at promised levels, as well as the means for measuring and tracking the progress of service level commitments using these metrics.

Measure: Verify commitments and improve operations The measure phase improves cross-organization visibility into operations and service level commitments.
Traditional IT management tools operate in functional silos that confine data collection and operational metrics to focused areas of functionality. They typically relate more to technology than to business objectives.

Component-level metrics and measures are certainly important for ongoing service availability. However, to support real-time resource allocation decisions, these measures must be interpreted in a broader business context, including their relationship to business-critical services. Without a business context for interpreting measures and metrics, isolated functional groups can't get a holistic view of IT services that support business objectives.
By committing to the cycle and integrating and automating activities using software solutions, CIOs can align their whole organization to make systematic improvements that overcome obstacles.
Mary Nugent is vice president of Service Management Solutions for BMC Software.

Thinking outside the box is more than just a business cliché. It means approaching problems in new, innovative ways; conceptualizing problems differently; and understanding your position in relation to any particular situation in a way you’d never thought of before. Ironically, its a cliché that means to think of clichéd situations in ways that aren’t clichéd.

We’re told to “think outside the box” all the time, but how exactly do we do that? How do we develop the ability to confront problems in ways other than the ways we normally confront problems? How do we cultivate the ability to look at things differently from the way we typically look at things?

Thinking outside the box starts well before we’re “boxed in” – that is, well before we confront a unique situation and start forcing it into a familiar “box” that we already know how to deal with. Or at least think we know how to deal with.

Here are 11 ways to beef up your out-of-the-box thinking skills. Make an effort to push your thinking up to and beyond its limit every now and again – the talents you develop may come in handy the next time you face a situation that “everybody knows” how to solve.

1. Study another industry.
I’ve learned as much about teaching from learning about marketing as I have from studying pedagogy – maybe more. Go to the library and pick up a trade magazine in an industry other than your own, or grab a few books from the library, and learn about how things are done in other industries. You might find that many of the problems people in other industries face are similar to the problems in your own, but that they’ve developed really quite different ways of dealing with them. Or you might well find new linkages between your own industry and the new one, linkages that might well be the basis of innovative partnerships in the future.

2. Learn about another religion.
Religions are the way that humans organize and understand their relationships not only with the supernatural or divine but with each other. Learning about how such relations are structured can teach you a lot about how people relate to each other and the world around them. Starting to see the reason in another religion can also help you develop mental flexibility – when you really look at all the different ways people comprehend the same mysteries, and the fact that they generally manage to survive regardless of what they believe, you start to see the limitations of whatever dogma or doxy you follow, a revelation that will transfer quite a bit into the non-religious parts of your life.

3. Take a class.
Learning a new topic will not only teach you a new set of facts and figures, it will teach you a new way of looking at and making sense of aspects of your everyday life or of the society or natural world you live in. This in turn will help expand both how you look at problems and the breadth of possible solutions you can come up with.

4. Read a novel in an unfamiliar genre.
Reading is one of the great mental stimulators in our society, but it’s easy to get into a rut. Try reading something you’d never have touched otherwise – if you read literary fiction, try a mystery or science fiction novel; if you read a lot of hard-boiled detective novels, try a romance; and so on. Pay attention not only to the story but to the particular problems the author has to deal with. For instance, how does the fantasy author bypass your normal skepticism about magic and pull you into their story? Try to connect those problems to problems you face in your own field. For example, how might your marketing team overcome your audiences normal reticence about a new “miracle” product?

5. Write a poem.
While most problem-solving leans heavily on our brain’s logical centers, poetry neatly bridges our more rational left-brain though processes and our more creative right-brain processes. Though it may feel foolish (and getting comfortable with feeling foolish might be another way to think outside the box), try writing a poem about the problem you’re working on. Your poem doesn’t necessarily have to propose a solution – the idea is to shift your thinking away from your brain’s logic centers and into a more creative part of the brain, where it can be mulled over in a non-rational way. Remember, nobody has to ever see your poem…

6. Draw a picture.
Drawing a picture is even more right-brained, and can help break your logical left-brain’s hold on a problem the same way a poem can. Also, visualizing a problem engages other modes of thinking that we don’t normally use, bringing you another creative boost.

7. Turn it upside down.
Turning something upside-down, whether physically by flipping a piece of paper around or metaphorically by re-imagining it can help you see patterns that wouldn’t otherwise be apparent. The brain has a bunch of pattern-making habits that often obscure other, more subtle patterns at work; changing the orientation of things can hide the more obvious patterns and make other patterns emerge. For example, you might ask what a problem would look like if the least important outcome were the most important, and how you’d then try to solve it.

8. Work backwards.
Just like turning a thing upside down, working backwards breaks the brain’s normal conception of causality. This is the key to backwards planning, for example, where you start with a goal and think back through the steps needed to reach it until you get to where you are right now.

9. Ask a child for advice.
I don’t buy into the notion that children are inherently ore creative before society “ruins” them, but I do know that children think and speak with a n ignorance of convention that is often helpful. Ask a child how they might tackle a problem, or if you don’t have a child around think about how you might reformulate a problem so that a child could understand it if one was available. Don’t run out and build a boat made out of cookies because a child told you to, though – the idea isn’t to do what the child says, necessarily, but to jog your own thinking into a more unconventional path.

10. Invite randomness.
If you’ve ever seen video of Jackson Pollock painting, you have seen a masterful painter consciously inviting randomness into his work. Pollock exercises a great deal of control over his brushes and paddles, in the service of capturing the stray drips and splashes of paint that make up his work. Embracing mistakes and incorporating them into your projects, developing strategies that allow for random input, working amid chaotic juxtapositions of sound and form – all of these can help to move beyond everyday patterns of thinking into the sublime.

11. Take a shower.
There’s some kind of weird psychic link between showering and creativity. Who knows why? Maybe it’s because your mind is on other things, maybe it’s because you’re naked, maybe it’s the warm water relaxing you – it’s a mystery. But a lot of people swear by it. So maybe when the status quo response to some circumstance just isn’t working, try taking a shower and see if something remarkable doesn’t occur to you!

source: Dustin Wax

“Best Practice” Issue #1: The Answers Are Outside Us
One issue that became clear in the Twitter chat this week is an issue I raised in The Pollyanna Principles - that organizations have much to build upon, and that when we use systems that build upon a groups’ own wisdom, they are more likely to own and then act upon the results.
Best Practice throws all that out the window. Best Practice assumes the answers have been predefined from outside the group, and that failure to adopt what the rest of the world is doing will be perceived as less than professional.
Best Practice suggests the group isn’t smart enough to come up with its own answers. Best Practice leads to seeing others (especially consultants and academics) as having those answers.

Encouraging a group to rely on Best Practice, then, is reinforcing for the group that they are not as smart as those other experts. Rather than empowering a group, reliance on Best Practice takes their power away.

In a world where boards so often feel like fish out of water, deferring to EDs out of their own sense of inadequacy, encouraging a board to focus on externally imposed Best Practice simply reinforces that sense of inadequacy. Use of Best Practice therefore creates weaker, less confident leaders, who do not own the results of their work, because that work was generated outside them - by experts providing externally developed Best Practice.
“Best Practice” Issue #2: Who Says It’s Best? And What is Best About It?
Blue Avocado points out that what is commonly accepted as Best Practice is more often than not simply common practice - what everyone else is doing. (Can’t you just hear your mother asking, “If everyone else was jumping off a cliff, would you?”)
Board gurus often cite all the Best Practice sources - BoardSource, Standards for Excellence, even the articles at our own Community-Driven Institute Library.
But what makes those sources “best?” Best at what? If, as an example, board effectiveness is measured by board participation and enthusiasm, or by an accountability-for-the-means checklist - but not by the extent to which that board is aggressively pursuing the organization’s vision and mission in the community - is that really “best?” Or have we replaced our vision for what is possible with a set of minimum standards and simply chosen to call those “best?”

“Best Practice” Issue #3: When “Best” is Actually Bad
That leads to the hardest issue to face: What happens when what is touted as Best Practice is actually harmful?

Best Practice in Governance that rewards accountability for the money (means) with zero accountability for community-driven results (ends).

Best Practice in Board Recruitment, that provides a matrix of pro bono roles to be filled (attorney, accountant, PR person, etc.), when in fact, recruiting board members for the purpose of receiving pro bono help is actually a direct cause of micromanagement.

Best Practice in fundraising (and in providing funding as a grantor) that teaches organizations to become more competitive / to sell themselves as “better than their competition” - while simultaneously bemoaning that those groups have trouble working cooperatively with the very organizations they have been instructed to “differentiate themselves against” (i.e. make themselves appear to be better than).

In just these 3 cases, adherence to Best Practice leads to and reinforces

•  a lack of board accountability for end results in the community
• board micromanagement
• the assumption that organizations must treat the very people who care most about their mission as enemies

What To Do Instead?
If we humans are more likely to feel ownership of work we create ourselves, the answer becomes clear: Have groups establish their own “Best Practice.”

For simplicity’s sake, let’s use the board recruitment example. By scrapping the Best Practice board recruitment matrix, we can facilitate the group’s wisdom instead, asking such questions as:

• What are the qualities we want to be sure every board member has?
• What are the qualities it would be nice if some had, but not everyone needs to have?
• What are pro bono positions we wish the organization would attract? (Let’s be sure to recruit those separately as volunteers, rather than assuming we must add these folks to the board)
• What are the characteristics we never want to see on our board, ever ever ever?

From the lists of answers to these and other questions, each group will own its recruitment criteria and from there its recruitment process. And the same method of asking and encouraging the group’s own wisdom could then apply to all the other issues for which groups seek outside expertise.

As you seek to inspire and energize your board, your staff, your volunteers - even your donors - you may just find this lack of Best Practice to be the “best” practice of all!

What This Means for Consultants and Other “Experts”
As consultants, we are used to being asked for our expertise. Everything about the way we do our work changes, however, when instead of assuming the answer is outside the group, we assume the answer is in the room, and that our job as the consultant is to guide the group to find its own answer.

If we see our role as inspiring our clients’ own wisdom, then the consultant will ask instead of telling. Instead of a magic bag of checklists and answers, the consultant will have a magic bag of probing questions.

Instead of enforcing external standards, the consultant will practice eliciting a group’s own standards.

The consultant will still have topic-specific knowledge to inject into the discussion where needed. But that topic-specific knowledge will be a perk, an incentive for the group to want to learn more, rather than the definitive word.
In the end, the approach you choose will come down to a question that is simultaneously simple and complex: How much do you trust your own judgment and ability? And how much do you trust the judgment and ability of your clients?
source: When “Best Practice” is Bad Practice