Am I A Producer or A Performer?

A question I've asked myself quite a bit over the years and now found an answer to. Ofcourse, a lot of people think they are both, but they are sadly mistaken. Below is my result of the 'Are You A Producer or A Performer' Test:

You Have PRODUCER POTENTIAL

You show a tendency to use the internal skills — what we call habits of mind — that producers apply to everything they do. They include:

• Empathetic imagination: seeing blockbuster potential in the needs and wants of others
• Patient urgency: operating simultaneously at multiple speeds and time frames
• Inventive execution: bringing together creative thinking and operational prowess
• Taking a relative view of risk: accepting immediate losses if they lead to a better future
• Leadership partnership: looking for others with complementary skills that enhance their own

However, you are also comfortable in the role of a performer, working in an environment where the parameters and rules of engagement are established.

Corporate environments need both producers, who have the ability to imagine entirely new products and business models, and performers, who can navigate known systems to optimize opportunities. Performer opportunities abound in business (and greatly outnumber openings for producers), so many people with producer potential get drawn into a performer mind-set. It is distracting to try to fulfill both roles; it is better to pick one approach, and look for a partner who can complement you.

If you want to see how far you can go as an innovator, try to get involved with a new opportunity at your company and approach it as a producer would. Question standard approaches to a problem. Imagine what different designs to the pricing or business model of a product might yield. Look for a performer who can help it get the recognition and support it needs to come to life.

You can do the test here.

‘Smart Wand’ Wearable Monitors Patients Closely

If you were ever a patient or a family member has been one, then you really do keep your fingers crossed that everything turns out alright, don’t you? You are literally in someone else’s hands and that’s not necessarily God! 

The hospital staff has you and hundreds of others, whom they are monitoring at the same time, and a slip in concentration or just lack of timely attention can be fatal.

A bunch of IIT-Mumbai geeks – Suryakant Thoraskar, Vineesh VS, and Anjaly TR – came up with an idea, to make life easy for healthcare professionals. Vineesh VS told Networked India what inspired him and the others was that, “According to statistics, the number of qualified nurses-to-patient ratio in India, is far less than the required number. There have been many unfortunate incidents where the condition of a patient has gotten worse, or they even die due to the lack of timely attention from the nurses. With the limited number of nurses, hospitals are struggling to give proper care to the patients.”

Knowing this, a wearable like Smart Ward was just waiting to happen. It is an automated patient monitoring system, based on the Android platform, that provides real-time values of the patients’ vitals, and alerts the staff about critical changes in those parameters. He added that the big challenge for them was:

Keeping the price of the wearable as low as possible while maintaining the quality of the signal. Hence, we needed to keep only the necessary vitals which are really required for regular monitoring of the patient.”

Worldwide, there are others as well, who have realised the importance and the need for such devices and apps. Like the students at the University of Wollongong in Dubai, who have designed the MyChol app, which monitors a patient’s health and fitness level and “includes diet logs and step trackers but adds unique features such as cholesterol level logs as well as calculations based on factors specific to the patient.”

Picture is representational and was written for Ericsson's blog.