P&P April 2016

“A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” –John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley , 1962

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.

April 2016   Policy&Practice 21