​By the time I hit publish on this post, it may already be 2020 where you live.  HAPPY NEW YEAR to our friends and colleagues in Australia, Japan, India, and anywhere east of Riyadh and Istanbul.  For the rest of our US-based team, we still have a few hours to finish up our task lists, our cleaning, and our blog posts before heading out for the night [actually staying in and eating Doritos with 5-year-olds].
 
We here are the Wandersman Center managed to cram a bunch into the final month of the decade. First, we finally put out our Readiness Building Guide. This effort was the culmination of a massive amount of thinking and writing over the past year, informed greatly bu our experiences working on sexual assault prevention in the military with colleagues at the RAND Corporation.  Read all about it and download it at the following link.

I read a lot of books. Here’s my ranking for 2019, from best to worst. There a lot of business books here because a) we have a business, and b) we want to tap into the broader literature to better understand how we can build momentum in organizations. After all, humans have been implementing organization change for at least 12,000 years. Let’s not limit ourselves to the last decade of implementation science literature. 

​If I had to summarize all these books into one phrase: Be open and honest about your work, or, as the Bard says:

This above all: to thine own self be true

The New York Times recently published an article about inequality. Recent evidence suggests that the differences in income do not match measures of differences in actual skills, intelligence, personality traits. In other words, most low-wage workers are underpaid, and many of the highest-paid professionals are overpaid according to these metrics.

“The average African-American adult with a graduate degree demonstrates the same level of cognitive ability as the average person in the top 1 percent of income. Yet 99 percent of African-Americans with graduate degrees do not have incomes high enough to be in the top 1 percent.”

The authors identified several factors contributing to this inequality, including well-connected interest groups manipulating markets for their constituencies’ benefit, professional organizations blocking access to jobs by requiring credentials to perform specific tasks, and zoning boards blocking access to housing markets  perpetuating social segregation.

The year was 1999.  Cher’s Believe and TLC’s No Scrubs were burning up the charts.  It was the best movie year ever. Gas cost $1.17 a gallon.  And, an intrepid group of young evaluators came up with Getting to Outcomes.