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April 2016
Policy&Practice
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I
was one of those kids who read
under the covers at night with a
flashlight. The Hardy Boys series
and any books on sports were my
regular birthday and Christmas requests.
In adulthood my interest in reading was
joined with travel, bad golf, sporadic
exercise, watching the NFL Draft, and
wine tasting. I’ve learned that reading
and wine tasting either reinforce one
another, or they’re inversely correlated.
I’m not too sure, so I’ll need to continue
experimenting.
In between sneaking a read and taking
a mulligan, there was John Steinbeck.
Like everyone in a U.S. public school,
I read
Of Mice and Men
and
The Pearl
,
but I kept going. Steinbeck solidified my
belief that books can shape our lives.
The
Grapes of Wrath
set me on my professional
journey through unions, management,
human resources, organizational effec-
tiveness, and now, health and human
service system transformation.
Speaking of journeys, a year ago I
wrote an article for
Policy and Practice
about the transformative Health and
Human Services Value Curve.
1
Since
its introduction in 2010 by Antonio
Oftelie and Harvard’s Leadership for a
Networked World, we are seeing more
and more examples of agencies and their
community partners applying the Value
Curve (VC) and Maturity Model (MM)
2
through a range of actionable strategies,
and winning stakeholder support for
advancing through its four stages.
“A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong
is to think you control it.”
–John Steinbeck,
Travels with Charley
, 1962