Author: akshay
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Objective Assessment of Primary Healthcare Leadership
In our primary healthcare leadership fellowship that’s been running for 2 years now, we’ve only used self-assessment by fellows as a measure of impact till now. While self-assessment is the easiest to perform and also gives a good sense of subjective measures like confidence and readiness, bringing objectivity to the measurement of impact is important…
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Be Irreplaceable Workers And Replaceable Leaders
A good worker is someone who produces so much value that they become irreplaceable. As Cal Newport writes in the book “So Good They Can’t Ignore You” knowledge workers who have the most satisfying careers don’t just “follow their passion”. Instead, they build rare and valuable skills that they leverage to negotiate better career…
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Why I Shaved Beard
Well kempt, clean shaven man dressed in a coat, pant, shoes, and a tie. That’s the typical figure of leadership. Anarchists hate that. Feminists hate that. Why should leadership look a certain way and act a certain way? Who is excluded from the ideal image of a leader? In medical school, for example, it was…
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How To Live With Opposition
There are enough number of people in the world who will tell you that the world is becoming “increasingly polarized”, that respectful political debate is “a thing of the past”, that people talk past each other “all the time”. You will also be forced to pick a side. “You’re either with us or against us.”…
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On Leadership
One can be a leader only when one desires something to happen in the world. This something can be called “change”. Leaders want to change the world (or a part of it) in some way. The change that a leader wants to see in the world – the impact they want to make – that…
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Power is Useful
In my post about giving up ideological purism, I talked about how it felt like activism was weak resistance, and not something powerful. I still hadn’t discovered an answer as to how to engage with and change the system powerfully. I have an answer now. Power. To make powerful change, one has to have power.…
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With Great Power Comes Great Accountability
Where should the line between ‘doctors should be held accountable for medical malpractice’ and ‘doctors are humans and they can make mistakes’ be? [Source] There is a world where this dichotomy/binary is not entirely false – medical negligence/malpractice jurisdiction. And the courts in such cases have a very nuanced approach to this question. For example,…
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Merit is Entitlement, not Privilege
In debates around reservation and merit, there is a recurring pattern. First, someone will say “There is no level playing field. Someone starts from privilege, someone starts from lack of it. Therefore, merit is just privilege.” Then, the opponent will say “What makes you think I’m privileged? My parents struggled to make their ends meet.…
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Why Would Conservatives Change when Liberals Don’t?
In the debates around “merit”, the conservatives have a very straightforward view – “hierarchy is natural, one should only care about oneself and getting ahead in one’s life”. The liberals, on the other hand, are the confused bunch. They have a hatred for hierarchy, but they live and breathe hierarchy too. They hate that people…
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The Academic Publication Industry is Modern Day Feudalism
Even if the cost of journals were low and affordable, open access to scientific knowledge is the ethically correct and practically useful position for humankind. Internet has made publishing costs near zero. Why do journals still continue to exist? And why are they so expensive to society? A common defense of journals is that “peer…