You might know Adam Bosworth. He worked at Microsoft and really pushed a ton of developer initiatives there, like XML. He also has done a bunch of other things in his career and launched Google Health at Google. But he learned from that experience that just giving people access to their health info isn’t enough to change their behaviors.
At Keas he’s discovered a good gaming system where you compete against your coworkers. He explains why this works in our interview.
Some things he’s learned:
1. You can not show negative info about health. People turn off. So, saying “Scoble you are 50 lbs overweight” isn’t going to happen here.
2. The perfect team size is six or fewer people. Bigger teams don’t work.
3. Social pressure is important. Why? Because you can’t game your coworkers. They can see whether you are doing the work.
Anyway, I find talking with Adam really interesting. You can tell he’s a guy who looks at the world differently than most of us and has had experiences that most of us haven’t had.
