I believe asking questions and debating different ideas leads us to better results. 15+ years as technical leader for 3 - 2000 person teams at home and abroad.
Simple tips for technical leaders who want to start communicating more effectively:
- Avoid Jargon
- Practice active listening
- Give frequent feedback
- Share a clear vision
- Overcommunicate
Yes, it’s this easy to improve.
#tech#LeadershipDevelopment#LeadershipMatters
@HCLibertyLab@KatyTalento European docs don't understand why we are so obsessed with jabbing kids with as many medications as possible. They are so much more relaxed about the entire thing.
Katy Talento apologized to RFK. Then Trump publicly questioned vaccine mandates.
POTUS: "I believe in vaccines. But I don't believe you have to have a mandate for all of them. You look at Denmark and other countries - you have 12, 14, I think 17. And we have like 82."
Public discourse doesn't move on its own.
@FDA was not "captured by industry"
It was born captured after a contaminated vaccine killed a bunch of kids and industry cashed in on the opportunity.
Makary's "difficulty" was trying to reform an agency that was formed to protect the companies it's supposed to regulate.
> The 1902 law was lobbied for by Parke-Davis (now Pfizer) to rebuild public trust.
> Then the meatpackers also begged to be regulated after Upton Sinclair exposed their nonsense.
(h/t @jeffreytucker)
Every reformer since has been fighting the agency's reason for existing.
From that lens, what happened to @MartyMakary@VPrasadMDMPH and @TracyBethHoeg was always going to happen.
I wanted to believe the seats mattered. But they don't.
In 2017, one my first tasks at the White House was to keep Bobby Kennedy far away from the West Wing.
Not because President Trump didn't want him there (he'd actually agreed to Bobby's pitch to create a vaccine safety commission).
But others (you can guess who) weren't thrilled, and they told me to get rid of him.
So I protected the orthodoxy I'd been trained to protect.
And it took me years to realize what I had actually done.
Tomorrow, I publish the full confession.
The 2002 autism moms I ignored. The 2017 vaccine safety commission I killed. The 2021 moment I finally broke. The apology I owed Secretary Kennedy. And what I've done to atone.
It's hardest thing I've written.
I'm sending it out to my list at 6am. (link to sign up in comments)
Most people think leaving is failure. I used to believe that too.
Right up until the night a twenty-three-year-old walked into my ER, and I realized I could no longer be a part of what I was watching.
The previously healthy young woman came in unable to speak clearly, with sudden weakness on one side of her body.
Textbook stroke - but obviously it had to be something else, because she was twenty-three.
Advanced imaging showed multiple small strokes. Some fresh. Some hours old, maybe days.
Nothing in her history explained it - except one thing. A pharmaceutical product her university had mandated before she could start the semester. One week earlier.
I could diagnose her. Stabilize her. Get neurology involved. But none of that would touch why it was allowed to happen in the first place.
I couldn't even document it properly. No diagnostic code existed for what I was looking at. She wouldn't become a statistic. There would be no accountability. It was almost as if it never happened at all.
That's how it works.
We don't just harm people. We make the harm invisible.
A few months later, I left. Not because I stopped caring. Because I finally understood that sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is loudly refuse to participate in the dysfunction.
I'm not the only one who's come to that conclusion.
I wrote about what that costs - and what we owe the people willing to pay it.
@RWMaloneMD
Medicine hasn't ignored women's health. It's reduced it to abortion and the pill.
I got to be in a room last week where scientists who've spent careers being ignored for talking about anything else — hormones, fertility, metabolism, bone health — finally got to be taken seriously.
Researchers presenting alongside policymakers and patient advocates. No green rooms, no hierarchy, no performance.
It was unusual. And honestly kind of moving.
@KatyTalento wrote a great piece about it, and about the twenty years of medical gaslighting that preceded it.
We asked the FDA to say no to Pharma.
I do not mean we asked politely.
I mean we built a regulatory agency whose entire function is to tell the most profitable industry in the world that it cannot do what it wants. 🧵
We asked the FDA to say no to Pharma.
I do not mean we asked politely.
I mean we built a regulatory agency whose entire function is to tell the most profitable industry in the world that it cannot do what it wants. We staffed it. We funded it. We gave it authority. We call this public health infrastructure.
The name is the thing we did.
We did not build anything to protect it when Pharma pushed back.
Pharma pushed back. This was not a surprise. This was not a betrayal. A company told no by a regulator will attempt to remove the regulator. This is not corruption. This is a business model. Corruption implies deviation from the norm.
This is the norm.
Pharma funds the media. Not as a side arrangement. As the operating budget. Pharmaceutical advertising is the financial infrastructure of American health journalism. The news about the FDA is brought to you by the companies the FDA regulates. This is disclosed in the fine print.
The fine print is the point.
When the FDA says no, the media covers the FDA. The coverage is not about the regulation. The coverage is about the regulator. This is more efficient. A regulation can be debated on the merits. A regulator can be destroyed on character.
One of those outcomes is reversible.
Vinay Prasad’s job is to tell Pharma no. The media’s job is to make that impossible. The Wall Street Journal ran sexual harassment allegations against him. The allegations didn’t exist. The original story ran everywhere. The correction came nineteen days later. Quietly. On page six. Nineteen days is not a correction. Nineteen days is a strategy.
Prasad is leaving. The strategy worked.
Marty Makary’s job is to tell Pharma no. The media is coming for Marty Makary. Tracy Beth Høeg’s job is to tell Pharma no. The media is coming for Tracy Beth Høeg. The playbook does not change.
The strategy works.
We watch this happen. We call it bias. We write about it. We post about it. We describe the mechanism in great detail to people who already understand the mechanism. Pharma is not threatened by people who understand what Pharma is doing.
Understanding the mechanism is not the same as breaking it.
Two things break the mechanism. The mechanism is not broken.
Leadership cover breaks it.
The President. The White House. Every health agency head. The entire administration standing behind the regulator when the regulator says no. Not a statement. Not a spokesperson. A wall.
FDA leaders who know they will not be abandoned can hold the line. FDA leaders who are not sure must manage their exposure instead. They will do as much good as they can without being shown the door. This is a rational response to an irrational situation.
Public outcry moves leadership.
It must be loud enough to be unavoidable. Unavoidable means abandoning the regulator costs more than protecting the industry. Unavoidable means silence is no longer politically safe.
Neither eliminates the attacks. The attacks don’t need to be eliminated. The attacks need to be survivable. Public outcry makes them so.
You now have a choice.
You can know this, and know that you know it, and watch what happens next. The show is well-produced. The outrage cycles are timed. The corrections run on page six. Nineteen days later, if you’re lucky. There is a version of this where you live a perfectly comfortable life and the FDA never regulates anything that matters and you never have to do anything about it.
Or you can get loud enough that protecting Pharma costs more than it’s worth.
Those are the only two options. Pick one.
What to do with @US_FDA? Options:
1: Don't regulate. Shut it down.
2: Don't regulate, but pretend.
Run it with morally corrupt losers in white coats who serve pharma.
3: Regulate drugs.
Hire competent people & let them do their jobs.
The media wants option 2.