Regina speaks and draws eloquently about the movement: The growing number of us who are taking charge of our health, our family’s health, our community’s health, and ultimately our country’s health. At the Health 2.0 conference, I met an engineer who also is an MD, an MD who is a geek, a geek who is a healer, and a healer who is a patient.

Alexandra Drane proclaimed: “We signed up to help people be healthy,” which I found remarkable coming from the founder of Eliza, which I thought of only as a robo-call company but now appreciate as a company committed to using technology to promote healthy behavior.

Michel Nadeau confided that his years as a telecomm engineer were nowhere near as fulfilling his new gig as head of a startup that makes an obesity app. “A teenager sent me an email. She was writing at midnight on a Sunday, asking for help because she couldn’t bear to go to school the next morning and face the teasing because of her weight. How can that not affect you? I know what we’re doing has real impact on people.”

Ob/gyn Jeff Livingston is motivating teen girls to take care of themselves by engaging them on FaceBook. Chris Cartter is trying to make health challenges go viral through his Change Reaction program. Physician Richard Wexler was talking to video game designers for insights on patient/doctor communication.

A few days later I was with my brethren at Kaiser Permanente for our annual gathering of communicators and marketers. We saw research that shows the marketplace is ripe for a health movement. Americans know that the health care system is broken, and they don’t trust the industry or the government to fix it. They know that ultimately the solution starts with them.

They just need a nudge.

The main point: Fear, facts and force are the favored approach for those who want to facilitate change, but they never work. Doctors know that even the threat of death is not enough to influence eight out of nine heart attack patients to change their lifestyles. Instead, successful change agents rely on a mixture of:

• Relate – Establish a new, emotional connection with a person or community that fosters hope.
• Repeat – Use this new relationship to learn and practice the new skills and behaviors you need to sustain change.
• Reframe – Allow this new relationship to help you see your situation and the world in a new light.

Good doctors have the first one down. To reframe, they need to help patients see the benefits of healthy changes today – healthy food can be delicious, exercise can give them more energy, meditation can reduce their stress symptoms. And they need to help them savor short-term wins so that they will repeat the behavior over and over until it becomes their new habit.

Best part about this book: The writing. Deutschman is a magazine writer (Fortune, GQ, Fast Company) and book author (The Second Coming of Steve Jobs) who has a raft of stories at his disposal. He never tells, he shows. He has spent quality time with the change leaders he profiles — so much so that you find out, for example, that 35 years into her successful program to rehabilitate criminals at San Francisco’s Delancy Street, Mimi Silbert still has days when she doesn’t have that fire in the belly. Her solution: act “as if” she does, and eventually the fire comes back.

Favorite quote:

I don’t think a leader can accomplish major change without being willing to slice yourself open and become part of the change. I say, ‘You guys force me to be my best self because I live in a glass house.’ — Mimi Silbert

Bits that stuck:

• Quick wins reward the hard work of change, nourish the faith and keep critics at bay.
• When stuck with a problem I haven’t been able to solve myself, the first step is to seek out a new relationship with someone or some group that has had success in this area.
• When the spirit flags, “fake it until you make it.” Act “as if” you have the spirit and it will come to you.

Diane Gage-Lofgren, our national VP of communications and PR, had asked a poet/performance artist  to bring life to our communication team’s new vision statement. A stroke of genius. I will forever have a visual and resonant image to add soul to our vision: To be a model for communication excellence as Kaiser Permanente is a model for the future of health care.

How did Sekou Andrews do it? By story, of course. He became Health Care. He was big, powerful, essential. He was the most important issue of our day. “But no one seems to be impressed with all this,” he said. “Because to the average American I am intimidating, extraneous, inaccessible and even bewildering.”

And he himself had no voice. He needed us to tell his story. He needed us to tell it in 140 characters, in video, in wikis — whatever it took and wherever the audience. And we communicators at KP have the special responsibility and opportunity to tell his story on behalf of an organization that is “offering a solution to the leader of the Free World.

I could see myself in the story — as the hero, of course. “Not observers. I need visionaries who can see as far as I can reach.” He needs me. I’m in.

And that’s how leadership storytelling works.

By comparison, my job as an organizational communicator is easy. Still, I have a well-drawn gameplan, thanks to Guber’s article in the December 2007 Harvard Business Review (you can search for it on my public Evernote folder). His four key principles:

The story must be true to the storyteller, reflecting his/her core values:

“He must enter the hearts of his listeners, where their emotions live, even as the information he seeks to convey rents space in their brains. Our minds are relatively open, but we guard our hearts with zeal, knowing their power to move us. So although the mind may be part of your target, the heart is the bull’s-eye. To reach it, the visionary manager crafting his story must first display his own open heart.”

The story must be true to the audience:

Every storyteller is in the expectations-management business and must take responsibility for leading listeners effectively through the story experience, incorporating both surprise and fulfillment. At the end of the story, listeners should think, “We never expected that – but somehow, it makes perfect sense.”

The story must adapt to the moment:

Intensive preparation and improvising are two sides of the same coin. If you know your story well, you can riff on it without losing the thread or the focus.

The story must elevate:

Even in today’s cynical, self-centered age, people are desperate to believe in something bigger than themselves. The storyteller plays a vital role by providing them with a mission they can believe in and devote themselves to.

Tellingly, the guy from Hollywood says the story has its own power, regardless the medium:

It isn’t special effects or the 0′s and 1′s of the digital revolution that matter most – it’s the oohs and aahs that the storyteller evokes from an audience. State-of-the-art technology is a great tool for capturing and transmitting words, images, and ideas, but the power of storytelling resides most fundamentally in “state-of-the-heart” technology.

The stories are more compelling: We all know someone whose breast cancer was caught early. That one life is real to us. The hundreds of false-positives are not. Even if we know an individual who got a clean bill of health after a suspicious mammogram, we don’t question her decision to get a mammogram in the first place.

The stories have and will prevail over the facts, and that is an important lesson for any of us who ever want to change someone’s mind. You want to improve service at work? Get your kid to drive safely? Pass a health care reform bill? Find yourself stories that resonate with the people you want to convince.

Key idea: Public Relations today means attending to relationships. Good PR starts with listening to the desires, needs and pain points of our customers and potential customers. It also starts with an excellent understanding of what our organization can offer to the customer and potential customer. Then, engage in a conversation with the customer and potential customer. This is the crux of what Brian Solis has called PR 2.0.

Ah-has for me:

• Solis draws a distinction between “PR 2.0″ and “Web 2.0.” In fact, he says his PR 2.0 predates the advent of social media. He wants PR practitioners to think first of the relationship, then choose the tactics that are helpful to that relationship.
• The truly excellent thing about Web 2.0 is that it unearths conversations we haven’t heard before — or that we had to spend a lot of money to hear. Think of  Twitter, blogs, Facebook, etc. as free focus groups.
• While it’s great to land your company in one of the top-ranked blogs, your bread and butter is the “magic middle” of the blogosphere — those in the middle of the bell curve who as a group have influence over vast numbers of readers who trust them.
• We have to get away from using the terms “messages,” “audiences” and “users.” Think, instead, of conversations with customers.
• Measurement of success can include “number of conversations.”

Favorite quotes:

• Don’t speak in messages. Instead, spark conversations based on the unique requirements of each market segment and the people within them.
• The ideal PR professional of the twenty-first century is not only a market expert, but also an informed, socially adept conversationalist — and we all know, or should know, that listeners make the best conversationalists.
• PR is evolving into a hybrid of communications, evangelism, and Web marketing, strung together by the teachings and benefits of sociology, anthropology and psychology.
• You must realize that the metrics for transforming one person into an evangelist far outweigh the resources required to repeatedly throw spaghetti on the wall in hopes that it just might stick.

What I liked: Parts II and III. Lots of specific advice on converting our old PR practices into PR 2.0 ways. I recommend the first chapter of Part III to those of you who are intimidated by the new media and despair at ever getting a handle on it. The authors do a great job putting it in perspective.

What I didn’t like: Awful wordy. I love Brian’s blog posts, even though they always are the longest ones in my feed. The book is loquacious on a grander scale. If you are a reader of Brian’s blog, I recommend speed-reading through Par I to get to the good stuff.

As a white guy committed to social justice, the best thing I can do is help other white guys see they have a role in erasing inequality. I firmly believe that the moment I was born a white male in the U.S., I started down a path much different than the one followed by Barack Obama or by my sisters. “Normal” always lo0ked pretty much like me , my life, my style, my tastes. My sisters didn’t have the sports choices I had, nor the array of things to be when they grew up. I didn’t stick out in a crowd, wasn’t watched with suspicion, and had a middle-class upbringing. I am the product of Austrian ancestors who came to this country freely to work the Leadville mines and who raised families in accordance with the dominant Euro/Christian tradition.

The GI Bill helped my dad buy his first house — as it had for many other, mostly white GIs.  Though we were not rich, the middle-class platform helped me become a first-generation college graduate. Throughout my career, I have mingled well in a society where most decisions still are made by other white males. I do not pretend to know what it is like for people who are not white and male to navigate this tilted playing field, but I acknowledge the tilt and do what I can to even things out.

I’m trying to figure out the language I can use to help my fellow white guys perceive the tilt without being defensive. I know from personal experience that words like “racist” and “white privilege” put us white guys in that fight or flight place.

People hear different things when Jimmy Carter talks of “racism” in the health care debate and when a white cop in Cambridge, Mass., is called a “racist” for arresting a black professor who mouthed off to him. I think most white guys think of white hoods when they hear the R word. I also think they hear people being overly sensitive.

So I suggest the people who are fighting for social justice quit throwing those words around. They carry heavy baggage and they don’t give us white guys anywhere to go but on defense. Rather than name-calling, consider talking about feelings. There’s no reason for a white guy to go into the familiar defensive mode when he hears something like:  ”when I see parents yanking kids out of school to avoid a speech from our President, I take it personally because he is the first president of my race and I’m reminded of all the times people wouldn’t listen to me because of the color of my skin.”

And I suggest my fellow white guys stop telling others that they are being overly sensitive. We cannot know the feelings that are sparked in others nor can we simply tell another to swallow them. I know this is a hard one, guys, but open up to others’ feelings. Nearly all of us have friends who aren’t white and male. Wouldn’t you learn something from them if they shared their feelings?

Did Jacqueline Kennedy and a fawning press create the myth? Kass makes a pretty good case for that. But no matter how it started, the myth caught on and remains alive today because it speaks to many of us who believe an individual can make a difference. It is a myth that empowers all who believe our country stands above all for justice and equality. JFK was president for only three years, but the new narrative he launched for the country resulted in civil rights reforms after his death. Bobby’s murder, as horrible as it was, served to add to the heroic inspiration of the myth. Rather than scare us away from the cause, Bobby’s assasination emboldened many, including Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Teddy tarnished the myth with Chappaquiddick and his narcisism. Only in his later years did I begin to forgive Teddy and allow him into the story. His rebuke of Senators who refused to raise the minimum wage — “What more do you want from the working men and women of this country,” he bellowed — demonstrated a deep-seated commitment to the ideals of equality and justice.

I spent the last week watching Teddy speaches and learned that his ideals were there, even as he hypocritcally leveraged the life of privilege. Days after Martin Luther King Junior’s murder, he urged Americans to look inside themselves for the seeds of such tragedy. His message: Apathy allows people to think it’s OK to kill and OK to burn down cities in response. His eulogy at Bobby’s funeral was artflully put to a slide show in a 2008 YouTube video. The images of suffering in Iraq and New Orleans set against words spoken 40 years earlier depressed me. Has anything changed?

Kass’ column brought me up from that funk, though. The myth hasn’t changed. As long as it endures, I know that it is being kept alive by people who will continue the journey toward peace, equality and justice.

When you stop to think of the resources an organization invests in meetings, you realize what a tremendous return is needed to justify them. Unfortunately, very little attention is paid to the conduct of a meeting and this valuable tool is largely wasted. Lencioni’s fictional leadership team wrestles with meetings that run too long and fail to address important matters. A new team member watches for awhile and offers observations that put the team on track for more efficient use of meeting time.

The solutions achieved by this fictional team provide excellent tactics from which a leader may pick and choose. There should be different kinds of meetings for different purposes, Lencioni argues. There are meetings in which short-term, tactical issues are handled, and there are meetings in which quality time is devoted to strategic issues. Participants are more engaged and the follow-through is more likely when meetings follow a routine familiar to the group.