As is typical for me, I have 2 or 3 books open at the same time. Right now it is In The Plex by Steven Levy, Incognito by David Eagleman, and The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo by Steig Larsson. Each of these contributes to the other, in a weird and unexpected way. Foremost on my mind is scale, a main concern in The Plex. Google owners are described as obsessed with scale; taking what they do or know and making it work bigger and broader. It has to be cheaper, yet work just as well. One example is when Google needs an unbelievable number of servers to support the redundancy, speed, and volume of searches. They build their own using cheap supplies. The failure rate is high, but due to redundancy they don’t have problems with performance. Google works without regard to tradition or standard operating procedures, crafting new ways to tackle known problems. We need to figure this out in health care. The baby-boomers are pushing the scaling issue, and consumerism challenges us to be cheaper and high quality. From the book Incognito we know that our decisions about this tend to be emotional, not rational. We are primed by news flashes and pre-conceived notions about what works and how it has to be done. As leaders we have to bring forward rational analysis and push aside our inclination to dig in our heels. I want the smart, out-of-the-ordinary, throw convention aside girl on my team to innovate and help find new answers (Larsson). These three books are weaving a new fabric for me; I just don’t know what the pattern is yet.