Henrietta

Take, if you will, the humble cell phone.

Oh wait. The cell phone may be ubiquitous, but it’s far from humble. Today’s smarty-pants phones have more power than the computers on the Voyager 1, which was launched in 1977 and 36 years later departed our solar system. Its three computers can process about 8,000 instructions per second. A smartphone swallows more than 14 billion.

The articles in this issue of Hank—articles about how technology is transforming care delivery and about how individuals and Kaiser Permanente are meeting the challenges that presents—would have overwhelmed the Voyager computers’ memory.

For communicating across distances, the string with two tin cans is humble. Even the rotary phone, patented in 1892, seems modest in comparison with today’s devices, which are used more for all manner of modern information sharing than for something as quaint as talking to another human being.

A rapid tech-based transformation, akin to the makeover of the old-fashioned phone, is already sweeping through care delivery. It’s hard to fathom the many ways technology will allow us to decentralize the delivery of health care while improving our connection with our patients and members. The changes will require new skills.

And starting today, the mindset we bring to the workplace is just as important as our skills. Without a willingness to explore new ways of doing our work, we are (to mix a metaphor) like an ostrich dialing the operator for help on a rotary phone, patiently waiting the long seconds for the 0 to return to its starting place while the future creeps up from behind. We’ll never know what got us.

Be bold. Be willing to go where no one has gone before.

I can’t get that old Springsteen song “My Hometown” out of my head: “Foreman says these jobs are going, boys, and they ain’t coming back….” That was a hit back in the early ’80s, when auto, rubber and steel factories started closing in the Midwest.

Looking back from the ditch we’re stuck in today, you can see that economic steamroller of devastation flattening industries and states.

Despite a few bubbles here and there, people keep losing their houses and their jobs, and let’s face it—they ain’t coming back anytime soon. Since 2000, the median income for ordinary Americans dropped by $2,197 per year. Most of us who are working feel fortunate to have any job at all. Those of us who have meaningful jobs—like keeping people healthy and caring for them when they are sick—we’re really lucky.

At Kaiser Permanente, we’ve got more than good fortune on our side. Not only do we have good jobs, with industry-leading wages and benefits, but we’ve got a strategy to make them great: We take value creation to heart.

That’s the point of the Value Compass—creating value.

As we work in our unit-based teams to improve service, quality and affordability and create the best place to work, we create more value for our members and patients, which will protect and improve our good jobs.

The Value Compass is not an initiative, a symbol or a checklist. It’s a shared vision.

It reminds us the sum of team collaboration produces value greater than our individual efforts alone. It reminds us how important our contributions are—and why we work so hard at improvement. It acknowledges that work has meaning not just for the “leaders” but for everyone.