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All of us want the best healthcare for our families, our communities, and our country. But Legacy approaches and technologies in the United States often stop our healthcare heroes from being able to deliver the legendary care they want to deliver. So let us have a dialogue about this and much more with our guest, Dr. Ashwini Zenooz.

Dr. Ashwini Zenooz is a radiologist who became the chief medical officer of the United States Department of Veterans Affairs. She then joined the technology industry, and became the chief medical officer at Salesforce.com. Dr. Ash is now the CEO of Commure, a venture-backed startup on a mission to produce a breakthrough in digital health. Her achievements thus far have been incredible, and we hope that her personal story will inspire you.

You’re listening to Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different. We are the real dialogue podcast for people with a different mind. So get your mind in a different place, and hey ho, let’s go.

Dr. Ashwini Zenooz on the current state of COVID

The conversation starts of with a question for Dr. Ash on the current state of COVID, particularly if we are past the crisis part of it.

Dr. Ash responds that there’s still a lot of things to look into, as COVID has not only affected our healthcare, but different parts of society and fields as well.

“I would say it’s yet to be seen. I think it’s not just the healthcare part. There’s a lot of other implications from the pandemic that were seeping into with the economy. There’s a lot of stuff that’s happening around us that’s related or as a result of the pandemic. So it’s yet to be seen. But yeah, I would say that at least the crisis is over.”

– Dr. Ashwini Zenooz

On how the US fared in the COVID pandemic

As much as it hurts to say, Dr. Ash shares that there were things that the US could have done better on. She thinks its partly because we try to “reinvent the wheel” every time there’s an epidemic or pandemic. As a society, we have had a lot of ways to learn how to properly respond and mitigate the damages, yet we tend to commit the same mistakes over and over again once it happens.

What’s even more frustrating from a healthcare standpoint is our lack of concern for future occurrences. When a major healthcare issue is resolved, it appears that no one is interested in researching how to prevent the next case, or what to do if the next one would be on a larger scale than the one before.

It’s like we only care to look back once the current one is already at our doorstep.

Dr. Ashwini Zenooz on masks and vaccines

On the topic of preventive measure, Dr. Ash was asked about what she thought about wearing masks and taking the vaccine.

For mask-wearing, Dr. Ash shares that for her, it is a personal choice. Even if airlines and public spaces don’t require you to wear them anymore, she opts to wear them because she wants to. For her, having that extra precaution for a little inconvenience is not a big deal, but she wouldn’t be offended if she sees someone not wearing one in a public place.

For vaccines, her thoughts as a layperson or a simple mom is that there would be more documentation or data available to the public on the tests that were done that passed the approval of the FDA, and have  someone who can explain it to the general public. This avoids confusion and misinformation from spreading out, and less hesitation for asking assistance when someone eventually decides to finally get their vaccines.

To hear more from Dr. Ashwini Zenooz and the future of American healthcare, download and listen to this episode.

Bio

Ashwini Zenooz, M.D.

Dr. Ashwini Zenooz is the CEO of Commure, a venture-backed technology company dedicated to building a health ecosystem rooted in collaborative care and connected innovation.

Prior to Commure, Dr. Zenooz was Chief Medical Officer at Salesforce.

Dr. Zenooz was also the Chief Medical Officer at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) overseeing the national EHR modernization program, where she was responsible for organizational change management, business process redesign, and implementation of a new digital health platform. She has also held senior policy development and operational roles including serving as Deputy for VA Health Policy and Services, Legislative Health Policy Fellow with U.S.

Senator Richard Blumenthal, Committee Staff on U.S. Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs, and Chief of Imaging Services.

Dr. Zenooz graduated with summa cum laude distinction in undergraduate studies and received an MD in the Medical Honors Program at the University of Florida.

She completed radiology residency at Henry Ford Health System and an Abdominal Imaging fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Dr. Zenooz is board certified in radiology and continues to practice medicine today.

Links

Connect with Dr. Ashwini Zenooz!

Commure | LinkedIn | Twitter

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different™! Christopher loves hearing from his listeners. Feel free to email him, connect on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and subscribe on iTunes!

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Almost everybody wants to design a legendary life and make a difference, but it can be harder than it sounds. On this episode, you’ll get a very different conversation about designing a life with meaningful work that works for you. And who better to have this conversation than with our guest, Ollie Henderson.

Ollie Henderson is an entrepreneur, CEO, and bestselling author of the book called “The Work/Life Flywheel”. He is a great guy, and we really get into a heartfelt conversation about how we can all design the legendary life for ourselves. By the end of this episode, we hope you’ll have some new tools for living your life, your way.

You’re listening to Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different. We are the real dialogue podcast for people with a different mind. So get your mind in a different place, and hey ho, let’s go.

Ollie Henderson on Work/Life Balance

The conversation starts off with the two agreeing on how much they “love” work/life balance. Ollie responds that he had kept a few choice words in the book that his editor would rather not have, but it was important to the point Ollie was making.

That being said, Ollie shares that his issue with Work/Life balance is just a term people used to oversimply a supposedly complex matter in our lives, mostly due to laziness and have something easy to adhere to, like a schedule or a task to do.

“I think the thing about work life balance is that it’s a lazy feeling that we all have. It’s something we think we should adhere to. Like, ‘yeah, we should all have better work life balance’, and it kind of makes sense. It has the best intentions, but it’s frankly, wrong. It doesn’t make sense.”

– Ollie Henderson

Work vs Life

Another thing that Ollie pointed out is that the semantics of the word is also all wrong. Work/Life Balance conjures up the image of you pitting up Work versus Life; that you cannot have both at the same time, and that one of them is better than the other.

“I think when people say they aspire for work/life balance, what they’re saying is, ‘I am going to place work in life against one another, because work is bad and life is good. And if I can’t find this equilibrium, then my life is not complete’.”

– Ollie Henderson

The issue is that statement is not true for every individual, and there is no one-and-done balancing to be done. Nobody has achieved that precise equilibrium, because it doesn’t work like a countermeasure of one over the other.

Work/Life Flywheel

Christopher adds that we have to reject the notion of work and life are compartmentalized in different sections, and we somehow need to balance them on weighing scales. There is only “Life”, and we do a lot of things in that life.

So if not Work/Life Balance, what then? Ollie shares that there are some who use the term “integration” to add a new perspective to it. For him, he prefers to use the term “Flywheel”, because it entails that everything he does in life are interdependent of each other.

“It’s this idea that there isn’t a single part of your work your life that is any more important than the other; they’re all interdependent. For me, when I’m doing great work and I’m happy at work, I’m a better person, I’m a better dad, I’m a better partner. And when I’m a better partner and a better dad, that manifests more in my work.”

– Ollie Henderson

To hear more from Ollie Henderson and the Work/Life Flywheel, download and listen to this episode.

Bio

Ollie Henderson

Experienced founder and CEO, Ollie Henderson, pivoted his career while juggling the pleasures and pressures of raising a young family.

He believes work/life balance is a myth. Rather than seeing career and personal life as two opposing forces, Ollie argues that the secret is to design an integrated approach that allows them to work in harmony.

Ollie’s weekly newsletter and Top 10 Careers podcast, Future Work/Life, provides news and analysis to thousands of people interested in the future of work, covering subjects like creativity and innovation, data and technology, peak performance and workplace culture.

He’s the author of the Amazon bestseller Work/Life Flywheel: Harness the work revolution and reimagine your career without fear.

Links

Connect with Ollie Henderson!

LinkedIn | Future Work/Life Newsletter | Work/Life Flywheel

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different™! Christopher loves hearing from his listeners. Feel free to email him, connect on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and subscribe on iTunes!

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Have you ever had a conversation with someone where you feel very lucky to have been able to meet and talk to that person? My conversation with our guest, Dr. Simran Jeet Singh, felt like just that.

Simran Jeet Singh, PhD is the Executive Director of the Religion and Society Program at the world-famous Aspen Institute. He’s also the author of a new national bestseller, called The Light We Give: How Sikh wisdom can transform your life.

You’re listening to Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different. We are the real dialogue podcast for people with a different mind. So get your mind in a different place, and hey ho, let’s go.

Dr. Simran Jeet Singh on Sikh Wisdom

The conversation starts with one of the major proponents that Dr. Simran shares to everyone, which is Sikh wisdom. He defines it as such:

“I think Sikh wisdom is these experiences and insights that people before us have developed and we have access to if we want. And one of our choices is do we want to learn all the lessons the hard way, or do we want to step into these treasures that are already available to us. It is the Sikh philosophy and traditions that I didn’t really learn to appreciate until I got older and started meeting real challenges in my life.”

–  Dr. Simran Jeet Singh

Dr. Simran used these Sikh wisdom in moments of his life where he felt huge struggles and difficulties to guide himself into the person that he wants to be.

The Challenges of being Different

On such moment was when the events during 9/11 occurred, and the whole country was, in many ways, suffering a collective sense of trauma. It was a vulnerable feeling that people of the United States did not think they would feel. But the feeling of vulnerability was even more so for Dr. Simran and his community.

“In this moment of extreme difficulty for our country, of extreme anger and violence, all of a sudden, I and people belonging to my community fell into the stereotype of how Americans saw their enemy. And so that, I think, is partly what felt so difficult in this moment: on the one hand, I felt like I was an American and belonged here and was going through the same trauma as everyone else. Yet at the same time, so many people around me, my fellow Americans would look at me and be like, “no, no, you’re not one of us here.””

–  Dr. Simran Jeet Singh

It hurts doubly for Dr. Simran, as he understands the pain and vulnerability that they are experiencing, as someone who has lived in the US for quite some time. But at the same time, the hate created by the almost-kneejerk reaction that some had afterwards was something that his community and others did not deserve, simply because they were different.

Dr. Simran Jeet Singh on educating the masses

Dr. Simran believes that this reaction is fear born from ignorance, and is something that could be remedied by educating the people on what the Sikh ideologies and culture really stand for.

Sometimes, he would be surprised that an average American doesn’t know where Punjab is, let alone what a Sikh was. That gave Dr. Simran a sense of where he needed to start. Even before educating about the different cultures and ideologies, they might not even have an idea of where you came from, and they have been making assumptions about your culture based on the wrong information.

To hear more from Dr. Simran Jeet Singh and Sikh wisdom, download and listen to this episode.

Bio

Simran Jeet Singh PhD is Executive Director for the Aspen Institute’s Religion & Society Program and author of The Light We Give: How Sikh Wisdom Can Transform Your Life.

He is a visiting professor of history and religion at Union Theological Seminary and a Soros Equality Fellow with the Open Society Foundations, and in 2020 TIME Magazine recognized him among sixteen people fighting for a more equal America.

His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN, and he is a columnist for Religion News Service.

Author of the award-winning children’s book Fauja Singh Keeps Going: The True Story of the Oldest Person to Ever Run a Marathon, Simran is an engaging guest speaker who delivers keynotes and facilitates workshops.

His message has been described as “critical and essential” and he’s noted for his “unwavering and empathetic approach to anti-racist work.” Simran lives in New York City with his family.

Links

Connect with Dr. Simran Jeet Singh!

Website | The Light We Give | The Sikh Coalition

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different™! Christopher loves hearing from his listeners. Feel free to email him, connect on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and subscribe on iTunes!

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It’s been a crazy handful of days in Silicon Valley. But now that the federal government has made their announcements and has the ball rolling, I wanted to spend a few minutes with you just clarifying some things that seem to be creating confusion in the recent Silicon Valley Bank situation.

There seems to be more confusion about what just happened with the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank and what the federal government just did as there was about COVID. So let me see if I can break this down for all of you.

There is no Bank Bailout for the Silicon Valley Bank

Let me say that again: there was no bank bailout here.

The executives got fired. None of the investors, creditors, nobody doing business with the bank, in that sense, are getting any of their money back, particularly the investors in the board. The Silicon Valley Bank is gone.

The Effect on the US Finance

The President has said that this will not cost taxpayers’ money. You may choose to believe it or not, but that is the current position of the government on the matter. What they’re saying is if there’s any protection money required, it will come from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).

The FDIC is an insurance company managed by the federal government, which is paid for by Wall Street and the banks. They pay insurance fees to the FDIC for drastic instances such as these.

Making that point clear as soon as possible was a good move by the federal government, because if they have wavered in their decision to do so, twisted narratives about bank bailouts and conjuring the past instances of it happening would have been a bad blow to the US government’s image.

The Silicon Valley Bank Depositors will get their money back

White there’s no direct timetable for when the depositors can get their full funds back, the federal government, via the FDIC, came in and said that they will make sure that the people will get 100% of their money back.

Here’s where most of the confusion lie at the moment, because there are some who spin the narrative like this resembles the recent FTX crash. But unlike the FTX crash where the money is in large parts gone, the Silicon Valley Bank’s money is still there. The main issue at the moment is that there were some horrendous mistakes in investing the money, which caused it to be stuck and become inaccessible at the moment. So when a bank run happened, they didn’t have enough cash. And that’s what caused this.

But the money is still there, unless we learn otherwise after the ongoing investigations.

To hear more updates and suggestions on how Silicon Valley, the federal government, and the FDIC can prevent such a crisis from happening again, download and listen to this episode.

Bio

Christopher Lochhead is a #1 Apple podcaster and #1 Amazon bestselling co-author of books: Niche Down and Play Bigger.

He has been an advisor to over 50 venture-backed startups; a former three-time Silicon Valley public company CMO and an entrepreneur.

Furthermore, he has been called “one of the best minds in marketing” by The Marketing Journal, a “Human Exclamation Point” by Fast Company, a “quasar” by NBA legend Bill Walton and “off-putting to some” by The Economist.

In addition, he served as a chief marketing officer of software juggernaut Mercury Interactive. Hewlett-Packard acquired the company in 2006, for $4.5 billion.

He also co-founded the marketing consulting firm LOCHHEAD; the founding CMO of Internet consulting firm Scient, and served as head of marketing at the CRM software firm Vantive.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different™! Christopher loves hearing from his listeners. Feel free to email him, connect on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and subscribe on iTunes!

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Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse went off like a bomb on March 10^th 2023. And I want to reach out to you and essentially share with you the conversations that I’ve been having with many friends, many entrepreneurs, many VCs, in the last 24 hours or so.

That said, let’s talk about what’s really going on; specifically, what the media talking heads and idiot, ‘thought leaders’ on the internet are getting very, very wrong. Second, we’ll discuss a few ideas on what you can do immediately to shore up your situation if you are a Silicon Valley Bank customer, or even if you are working in the tech world. And then thirdly, let’s talk about the crisis from the perspective of your company, and what you can do moving forward.

The Silicon Valley Bank Collapse

As of now, what is clear is that Silicon Valley Bank went down in part, because of some combination of getting caught in a cash crunch. It appears they made some bad long term bond decisions at low interest rates. And as you know, the US government has been raising interest rates from about 0.25% roughly a year ago, to about 4.75% now a year later. This has caught a lot of people off guard.

This is not to say there wasn’t a mistake on SVB’s part, but what we do know is that there were some combination of over investing in long term bonds, and the interest rates going up that aggravated the problem.

Here’s a link to the Wall Street Journal article breaking all of what has happened so far.

Media and Thought Leaders’ “thoughts” on the matter

First of all, there’s a thread  growing around that says, “Oh, this is the billionaires in Silicon Valley doing corrupt things, and now they’re getting their comeuppance.” This is not the case. If there was something incompetent or illegal that took place in the Silicon Valley Bank, we’ll find out once the investigations are done. But for now, it is affecting a lot of people in the space, and not just those billionaires they are harping about.

This is not some cash crunch hurting billionaires. It is hurting the people who didn’t get paid on Friday, because their employer just froze their bank. This is the entrepreneur who DM me on Twitter yesterday saying they have their entire 20 million of VC funding at SVB, and asking what they can do now. These entrepreneurs and CEOs don’t know how they’re going to pay their people, don’t know how they’re going to pay their bills.

It appears that the FDIC is saying that people will get their guaranteed 250,000 on Monday, but over 90% of the deposits in this bank are in excess of that. So it’s really not much protection. And while it seems that much of this money will come back to its rightful owner, it’s not clear what percentage and in what timeframe.

Running a business with no money is fucking hard. And that’s what’s going on here.

To learn more about the Silicon Valley Bank situation and how your business can cope with crisis of this magnitude, download and listen to this episode.

Bio

Christopher Lochhead is a #1 Apple podcaster and #1 Amazon bestselling co-author of books: Niche Down and Play Bigger.

He has been an advisor to over 50 venture-backed startups; a former three-time Silicon Valley public company CMO and an entrepreneur.

Furthermore, he has been called “one of the best minds in marketing” by The Marketing Journal, a “Human Exclamation Point” by Fast Company, a “quasar” by NBA legend Bill Walton and “off-putting to some” by The Economist.

In addition, he served as a chief marketing officer of software juggernaut Mercury Interactive. Hewlett-Packard acquired the company in 2006, for $4.5 billion.

He also co-founded the marketing consulting firm LOCHHEAD; the founding CMO of Internet consulting firm Scient, and served as head of marketing at the CRM software firm Vantive.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different™! Christopher loves hearing from his listeners. Feel free to email him, connect on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and subscribe on iTunes!