I am a physician by training, an artist by inclination, an educator by temperament and a parent by desire. I tend to work at the boundaries between diverse, and not always apparently related, disciplines. I started my first businesses in medical school, not because I was interested in business but because I envisioned a bridge between concepts from medicine and concepts from industry. While I spend a lot of time in the realm of ideas, my career has largely been based on making things or affecting the knowledge, attitudes and behaviors of individuals, communities or organizations.
I have been blessed at every level of my education from elementary to medical school to have had some extraordinary teachers take me under their wing, encourage and nurture me and I am forever grateful for their generosity of time and spirit. They left me incredibly well trained as a perpetual self-directed learner and knowledge manager.
My corporate career has toggled between entrepreneurialism and executive leadership in global multinational corporations. Becoming a physician remains my proudest and most valuable professional accomplishment; raising my children is the single most important thing I have ever done. I try to live my life by the principles of personal integrity, relentless intellectual vigor, generousity, forgiveness, courage, commitment and play.
My current interests are population health management, systems-based practice, collaboration and interaction design, cognitive software architectures, cybernetics, narrative intelligence, plasticity, structure and function of systems and microsystems, leadership, collaboration, psychoanalytic thought, meaning-making and the calculus of life. My comments in this blog reflect no other opinions but my own.
Steven Merahn, MD
smerahn(at)medcanto(dot)com