In the Sunday, January 23, 2011, New York Times magazine, there was an article entitled “The White House Looks for Work,” written by Peter Baker, a reprint of an article that appeared in the New York Times online version on January 19, 2011. The article contains some hard-hitting photos of people residing in Rockford, Illinois, a city that clearly has faced some very difficult times.  The people pictured in the article are all gainfully employed, but they all comment on how difficult life in their community has become, and how many people are unemployed around them.

One of the most difficult things for people in that situation to understand is that the key to reducing unemployment is to figure out how to create businesses and jobs that bring money in from outside the community.  To do this, a community has to come together, figure out what people somewhere else with extra money to spend need most, determine what they can offer those people, and then develop and implement plans to create businesses and jobs to meet the needs of those distant customers.

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The iconic image, whether a photo or video clip, often shapes the perception of events in profound ways.  As I am learning as a film producer, those who market films specifically look for that one still photo or freeze frame that not only captures the essence of the film, but creates dramatic power.  In an article in the January 20, 2011, issue of The New Yorker, called “The Toppling,” author Peter Maass makes the point that the iconic images of Iraqis tearing down the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad’s Firdos Square on April 9, 2003, was largely a media-staged event.

The significance of these images is that they seemed to convey a sense that Iraqis were ecstatic about the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime.  Many commentators compared the statue toppling to the images of Berliners tearing down the Berlin Wall in 1989, or the Rumanians tearing down the statue of their totalitarian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.  However, whereas these other cases were largely spontaneous expressions of joyous citizens of Germany and Rumania reflecting their newly found freedom, the Baghdad celebrations were clearly premature and, as a result, reflected a strange mix of a few Iraqis, a few media people, and few military personnel.  The power of the images of Iraqis celebrating the American liberation by the symbolic act of toppling Saddam Hussein’s statue may have kept Americans from questioning the wisdom of how the Iraqi war was conducted for quite a while.

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On Thursday, January 6, 2011, the Dossia Service Corporation announced that its Board of Directors had elected me as the new CEO.  I am thrilled for this opportunity, but it has also reminded me that I have a more hands-on responsibility to insure the security and privacy of the individuals and families who have entrusted us with their health information.

Fortunately, Dossia is not only in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations, but, having had to market our personal health record system through large employers, we have had to meet much more challenging security and privacy standards than our competitors, who market directly to consumers.  I am very familiar with exacting security and privacy standards from working inside a company that had to manage sensitive financial information for postal services and their customers because of our postage meter business.

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