This is the business blog of T. T. Mitchell Consulting, Inc. I will talk about any topic that pertains to all the aspects of my business, though I will diversify from time to time.
So, you can expect me to talk on subjects relating to Leadership, Management, Diversity, Healthcare, and anything else that has to do with businesses, good or bad.
Today is Blog Day, but this year I have two blogs with different focuses. So, I’m going to recognize some blogs here that have to do with one type of thing, then some blogs on my other blog that have to do with what I talk about over there. I’m not sure it’s cheating or not, but hey, recognizing people is always a good thing in my opinion. And, just like last year, I won’t be highlighting any blogs of my friends, so I can be objective. Finally, here’s last year’s entrants.
Stereohyped is basically a source of news for and about black people, but sometimes with a comical vent. There’s actually a team of people who write this blog, but I find it very entertaining.
WWE Characters may seem out of character to people who don’t know me well, but for those who do they know that I love professional wrestling, especially the WWE. This blog gives some information that’s actually available on the WWE website, but the writer of the blog also gives updates and opinions on all things wrestling, and I love that. I don’t always get to watch it, so I can easily catch up on all the happenings by checking this one out.
Along those same lines, we have J.R.’s Place, which hosts the words of the Hall of Fame wrestling announcer Jim Ross, as he talks not only about wrestling, but anything else that hits his fancy at the time.
This year’s leadership blog to highlight is Leader Business, written by Tom Magness. I just like the way he writes about leadership; relatively easy principles that most people forget about, couched in a story; who doesn’t like stories.
By now, my regular readers know I’m diabetic. This year, I found Diabetes Mine, written by Amy Tenderich. It’s a mixture of what’s happening to her in life as well as information about diabetes.
The final blog I’m going to mention here is one that seems more suited, on its face, to my other blog. But Barbara Ling’s blog is more than just a blog about blogging. This woman gives away information on almost anything, and lots of it. Her blog is so comprehensive that there’s almost no way one can take all of it in at one time. And if you only stick to the new entries you’re not doing yourself any favors. Check this one out, but make sure you have some time to take in a lot of it.
And there you go. I hope you enjoy some of these as much as I do. See you next year for more.
Yesterday Michael Jackson turned 50 years old; 50! Talk about defining moments on one’s life. I’m not ready for MJ to turn 50; it means that I’m that just closer to reaching it myself, and I’m certainly not ready for myself to be 50.
Michael Jackson is my favorite performer of all time. I don’t care what he looks like or what anyone has to say about him, he’s still my favorite. He was my favorite when he was with the Jackson Five, and he remains so today. There have been so many defining moments in my life that I can tie a song done by a Jackson to my life that it’s scary.
What many people don’t remember today, through all the talk and scandal, is that Michael Jackson basically saved the music industry. Sales were flat, music companies were suffering, artists were suffering, and no one knew there to go. Sure, MTV had been on only a couple of years, and at that time they weren’t playing any black artists on the network (I know someone’s going to say there was one somewhere in there, but no solo artists). CBS Records, which Michael Jackson recorded for, had the Billie Jean video and pitched it to MTV, which initially rejected it, but then CBS said if they didn’t put it on then they would never be allowed to broadcast any CBS performing artists ever again. MTV capitulated, and the Billie Jean video hit the airwaves. And it was popular, though not earth shaking to many at the time.
However, when the performance below came on, which was supposed to be a tribute to Motown, suddenly the roof blew off the sucker, and the age of the mega-superstar was launched. The performance below helped Thriller sell over 50 million records, and was ultimately responsible for acts such as Bruce Springsteen, Prince, and U2, to have albums that helped make them icons in the world that they still are to this day.
I couldn’t handle MJ being 50 yesterday, but I can handle it today. I hope you enjoy this video; how could you not?
I got this from one of the Twitter faithful I follow. It’s called the $20 Million Dollar Man, and it starts with a video, which I’m posting below, and an opportunity to get a free report on how this man, who made it big, lost it all, then made it even bigger after he’d retired, did it. First, watch this video, then think about going to the site to order the report. I already have, and I hope to check it out later today.
See, here’s proof that it’s never too late to achieve success; I want to get there also.
Who would have ever thought the day would come that came, well, late last night, with the acceptance speech of Barack Obama of the presidential nomination for the Democratic Party? And, how prophetic it was that it came on the 45th anniversary of the Martin Luther King, Jr speech in Washington D.C., when he said:
“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’ I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.”
Tonight, Barack Obama said this:
“You know, this country of ours has more wealth than any nation, but that’s not what makes us rich. We have the most powerful military on Earth, but that’s not what makes us strong. Our universities and our culture are the envy of the world, but that’s not what keeps the world coming to our shores.
Instead, it is that American spirit — that American promise — that pushes us forward even when the path is uncertain; that binds us together in spite of our differences; that makes us fix our eye not on what is seen, but what is unseen, that better place around the bend.
That promise is our greatest inheritance. It’s a promise I make to my daughters when I tuck them in at night, and a promise that you make to yours — a promise that has led immigrants to cross oceans and pioneers to travel west; a promise that led workers to picket lines, and women to reach for the ballot.
And it is that promise that 45 years ago today, brought Americans from every corner of this land to stand together on a Mall in Washington, before Lincoln’s Memorial, and hear a young preacher from Georgia speak of his dream.”
To me, this wasn’t a political moment; this was a cultural moment. I think Dr. King would be proud.
I don’t have call waiting on my cell phone or on my home phone. I have it on my business line, but not because I wanted it. My business line is cable phone through Time Warner, which I got because it has the all-important voice mail, which is much clearer than any answering machine I ever put on there, but it also comes automatically with call waiting, which is really irritating because it breaks into the line and is constantly barraging you, and then you know when it’s kicking into voice mail because suddenly all sound ceases, including the words of the person talking to you, for about 2 seconds. Irritating as anything.
I bring this up because something I hate is when I’m talking to someone and they suddenly have to see who’s on the other line. It’s as if they’re saying “you’re not important enough to me because someone else might be more interesting to talk to that’s now calling me.” If they have kids, I can understand it a bit more, but not much. No matter who it is, though, I have a 10 second rule; I wait any longer than that for you to get back to me, you’re going to have air when you come back.
I might have thought I was alone in this thought until I saw Tom McMahon’s blog, where he quoted a piece from Burt Prelutsky’s article titled Time On My Hands.
It’s a very good article of his thoughts on why people keep you waiting and not apologizing for it. I fully understand, as I’ve written about different things concerning both courtesy and customer service that have irritated me. My house is like a blanket of invisibility at times. It’s happening again lately, where people make appointments to stop by the house for some kind of business we’re hoping to do with them, then they never show up. This time around, at least both of them finally called to apologize, but usually it seems like we never hear from them again.
In this circumstance, the first one forgot because his daughter and grandchildren stopped by for a visit unannounced. I can understand excitement over seeing the family, and a quick phone call would have been all I needed to move on with my day. Instead, my wife and I waited 90 minutes before deciding to leave; after all, we didn’t want to be rude hosts by leaving if all that had happened was that he’d gotten caught in traffic. But he did call; 7 hours later, while we weren’t home, but at least he called.
The other guy? We need a little construction work done, and this guy is the contractor of one of my wife’s best friends. Supposedly he does great work, but can go missing from time to time. My wife still invited him over to evaluate our needs. He said he was coming on this particular day, and he did; he just never said when, so we waited in the house all day and, just as we’d decided to leave because we had to get some things for me, since I was leaving town, that’s when he finally showed up. He did his thing and left, and now we haven’t heard from him in two weeks, just to give us an estimate as to how much it would all cost, let alone schedule the work. I’ve asked my wife to call someone else; summer’s almost over, and we’d like to get this thing done some time before 2010.
An interesting article popped up on the ESPN website. Written by Jemele Hill, the article titled For the black community, a Redeem Team gold is especially important indicates that the group most hurt by recent poor performances in the Olympics are black basketball players and the black community in general, and that, by winning the gold medal, the Redeem Team, as they’re known by, not only redeems American basketball but the entire black community as well.
It’s an intriguing story, one that definitely deserves at least a little bit of thought about, because of some of the facts in her story. One, if not all, the players on the teams have been overwhelmingly black. Two, the way they’ve paraded in the last couple of Olympic games, as though they’re not really part of the entire American experience at all, looked bad. Three, it looked like they couldn’t translate what’s really more of an independent game into an organized and orderly world standard, and therefore looked exposed as overpaid “out for myself” ballers instead of men proud to win as a team.
However, appearances are deceiving. Andrew Bogut of Australia notwithstanding, the truth is that those past teams weren’t put together all that well. Larry Brown being picked as someone to coach Olympians was one of the worst choices I’d ever seen. He’s all about control, and he picked the style of players that work well in the NBA, but didn’t pick the types of players that need to be on international teams in order to win. In other words, Larry Brown fell down where people thought he excelled; he didn’t scout international basketball to know what was needed in order to compete. Oh, by the way, Larry Brown happens to not be black, by the way, and neither was George Karl, who coached the 2002 FIBA tournament team that got embarrassed. And neither is Mike Krzyzewski, this year’s Olympic coach, who was also the 2006 coach of the team that ended up with the bronze medal.
I hate thinking that people might possibly see these games as redemption for black basketball players. Goodness, why do individuals need redemption in team games anyway? True, it’s been embarrassing in a way not to see Americans win every single basketball game they play against international competition, but truth be told those international teams, for the most part, play with each other almost all the time, and the international pro leagues are much like the international games, whereas here in America the rules and the courts are different. That, plus so many players have elected not to go for different reasons in the past. Does anyone really think the 2006 team wouldn’t have won if Kobe Bryant hadn’t been there? What about Shaq in 2006, or 2004?
It’s hard enough for any athletes to have to win knowing they’re representing the United States; adding the pressure on by saying they’re playing for their race isn’t fair. If they win, everyone here wins, and that’s good enough for me. After all, that’s what diversity is supposed to be about.
First, the latest issue of the T T Mitchell Consulting Healthcare Newsletter, CFO Issues, is available.
Let me ask you a question. If you’re a leader in some capacity, how do you affect people you interact with?
It’s a question many managers can’t answer, or may be fooling themselves by answering incorrectly. I would bet that 95% of all managers who might be asked this question would say that they have a great rapport with those who work for them, but then I would bet that at least 50% of those employees would answer it a different way.
As a consultant, I could probably get away with doing some things that many who are employed already, no matter their level, would feel uncomfortable doing. There are consulting companies whose job is to go into other companies and look for ways to reduce expenses, and often it means slashing staff. No one is ever happy about it, but these companies don’t care. Often, the top dogs of those particular companies have either already been relieved or might be on their way out, so it’s the board that hires these people, and since the board doesn’t always know hardly any of the employees, they have no emotional investment with the employees, and neither do these companies. This isn’t meant as a denigration of the companies (though it might be a slight indictment against those types of boards), because they’re only doing the job someone hired them for.
I like to go the other way as much as possible. If I make someone feel bad, I do it with kindness and reality. I’m glad to not be in a career where my main duty is to let people go. I do end up, every once in awhile, being responsible for other people, which suddenly means I’m a manager. Some might think it’s a fine line to walk between being easy on people or being courteous, but I don’t. I feel that the nice approach works best; that, plus I find that if I can strike some sort of emotional bond with people, they respond better, and will attempt to work better with me because they don’t want me to look bad. In other words, I try to open up the lines of communication because I don’t only want to hear about good stuff, I want to know about the bad stuff also. Actually, I really want to hear more about the bad stuff than the good stuff, because the good stuff can take care of itself.
So then, how does one know how they’ve touched people in positive ways? On two of the consulting gigs I’ve had, I’ve been thrown a going-away party and given gifts. On others, I’ve had people come up to me to thank me for this or that, tell me they wish I wasn’t going away, and give me good tidings on my next bit of adventure. On my present contract, which ends next week, I had 4 different people come to me yesterday, since they’ll be on vacation next week, to say they’ve enjoyed working with me and wish me well. And, at my last full time job, we all threw a party for all of us, exchanged information, and two years later when we met up for a lunch, there were 11 former employees of mine who showed up out of 18 I’d worked with on a Saturday; I’m thinking that wasn’t a bad sign.
Of course, it’s not about being nice when you’re leading people; it’s about getting results. However, I always feel it’s best to get results where one can share the attention, and it’s best to get results that will last longer because people not only know how to do their jobs, but they feel good about it. True, sometimes you have to give bad news, but if delivered correctly, one can only grow. And, if they appreciate how you did it, the business relationship grows.
And wouldn’t you rather have people you work with like you rather than fear or hate you?
Yesterday I received a call out of the blue from someone who’s trying to be a consultant in the healthcare industry. She said that, in her opinion, she has the skills and the knowledge to be a consultant, and in the few assignments she’s been able to get, she’s gotten nothing but kudos from the people she’s ended up working with.
But she had a common lament that I hear often, one that I’ve had myself often enough. She has never gotten an assignment on her own, always subcontracting, no matter how much advertising she’s done, and she wonders if it’s because she’s a minority. I couldn’t disagree with her, and I hate agreeing with her, but I’d have to say that I’m leaning more towards her direction than away from it.
Here’s the overall thing, though. Worrying about why one might have a problem getting a job, when it comes to racial background, is something that white people never have to worry about, but in America black people do. There have been many studies, official and not, that have proven that it’s easier for a white convict to get a job than a black person with a college degree. That’s scary, and if it happens at the lower skill level, it’s happening more at the skilled level. There aren’t a large number of black healthcare consultant to begin with, even fewer in the finance end of things. And when one has pretty good qualifications and credentials, it does make one wonder why they’re not as popular as direct contacts, but very popular with subcontracting companies once you’ve done an assignment with them. So, true or not for each individual, just having it out there as something one has to think about adds another level of pressure, and, unfortunately, it’s something that, in general, minorities can’t do anything to change; not that we necessarily would if we could.
Have I ever not gotten a contract because I’m black? How would I know? I do know that I have barely gotten jobs because I was black; I’ve been told that by those who have hired me at times. When I first had my website created, I debated with myself as to whether or not I was going to put my picture on it. I did the same thing with all my earlier marketing material. I talked with my dad about it at the time and he said that, in his opinion, it was better excluding people who might hesitate because I was black without talking to me first, rather than showing up somewhere and seeing that involuntary “jerk” because I wasn’t what someone was expecting. To be truthful, I still see that involuntary “jerk” from time to time anyway, because, obviously, not everyone checks out the website thoroughly, including my bio page.
I’m thinking about an experiment. I’m thinking about rewriting my bio page a little bit and taking my picture off for a six month period. Right now, it’s fairly personable; you should check it out if you haven’t yet before it’s too late. My website averages almost 40 visits a day, and for the type of site it is, that’s a lot of visitors, and you’d think I’d be getting calls all the time. My bio page is the 7th most visited page on my site, and people spend an average of 90 seconds there, which means they’re at least reading it. But either they don’t like what they read or they don’t like what they see enough to call me for services, and that has to change. After all, I do have dreams and goals to get to.
So, we’ll see. I have some time to think about it some more, but one of the things I’ve learned in reading all this material on internet marketing is that one should be testing things from time to time to see what works best. Since I’m betting that, aside from some of the comments I write, almost no one would automatically assume I was black if they read what I put on my site, it just might be a test worth trying out. The worst that could happen is that things stay as they are; I could live with that.
First, the latest issue of the T. T. Mitchell Consulting newsletter, Dealing With Know-It-Alls, is available.
Next, the heading is an interesting question. Truthfully, I don’t watch Fox News. The only time I did was on September 11, 2001, when I kept switching around to different news channels looking for more information on what was going on. I turned myself off Fox News pretty much after that because, well, if there’s any news channel that actually leans one way politically, without fairness, it’s Fox News.
Sure, I’ve read where most people believe the media in general is biased towards the left, or is fairly liberal, but I’ve never bought that. All the other outlets seem to have commentators come on a show that counter each other’s points of views, and the moderators are tough on both sides. I can’t say that I’ve seen Fox do the opposite because, as I said before, I don’t watch the channel.
However, I came across this little video on another blog, Electronic Village, that I just wanted to share with everyone. The commentators here say some pretty negative and incorrect things about Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, and this video shows those comments, then shows the truth. I’d normally have just posted a link and have you go there, but his site loads pretty slowly for some reason, and I didn’t want you to leave without seeing it. So, here goes; you make up your own mind:
I’ve always believed that two of the most important qualities one wants to have in themselves and see in others is loyalty and trustworthiness; honesty is a close third. If you have these things in your friends, and they see them in you, then life will be great because you know there’s always someone who has your back, and it’s also known that the other party will never put you in a position intentionally where you have to test those qualities.
Sports messes that up drastically. I used to love sports; now I only like them a lot. Actually, that’s not even true. I love my teams, and sometimes players on other teams for whatever reason, but in general I don’t get myself geared up unless my teams are in the playoffs. The exception to that is the Syracuse University basketball team; I always watch those games from beginning to end, and if I could get better seats I’d probably go to every home game.
The thing about sports is that they “supposedly” stress teamwork and trust. They “supposedly” stress loyalty to the team and to the teammates. And they want honesty when it comes to how they’re feeling and doing, and want to express honesty back towards those players.
Yet, professional and college sports are businesses just like all other businesses, and overall, in business, the bottom line is what’s most important, not loyalty, trustworthiness, or honesty. Today’s hero is tomorrow’s trash, and sometimes popular players are treated like chattel and property, used to boost the team and its profile at the expense of the fans and without any regard to whether that player helped the team win championships or not. True, sometimes we don’t know everything that goes on behind the scenes, but when this happens, just like in business, we’re all left to ponder what went wrong and what those at the top are thinking, and we make up our own minds on what we think occurred.
I started thinking about this the other day as I noticed that a blog entry I wrote last year on Barry Bonds got pinged around the same time that Manny Ramirez of the Boston Red Sox got traded to the LA Dodgers for a player I’d never heard of, but someone who many later on told me was pretty good. All Manny did was help the Red Sox to two World Series championships by getting a hit in every single game they played. All Barry did was lead the Giants into their first World Series in over a decade and pass Hank Aaron as the home run king while wearing their uniform.
I heard that sometimes Manny wasn’t the best teammate in the world; I heard that when he was younger, the same could be said of Barry, but his current teammates, at least last year (since the Giants decided not to re-sign him and the rest of major league baseball colluded against him this year), loved playing with the guy. Manny was popular with the fans, but I guess his time was up. Barry was popular with the home fans, and I still think the Giants should have shown more loyalty. And major league baseball has violated its trustworthiness or honesty because Barry Bonds at 43 is still better than half the players in baseball today.
Still, it makes me think about business today. Companies ask employees for loyalty while looking for ways to cut benefits. They reward long term employees by looking for ways to reduce retirement packages. Some reward a loyal workforce, one that often has generational family relationships, by shipping jobs out of the country. Frankly, business has done a lousy job of encouraging workers to remain loyal, and it’s hard to believe that, in so many magazines, they’re lamenting a very transient workforce that won’t stay put long enough to learn their jobs well. Sorry guys, but the employees didn’t start this; you did.
If you’re a manager, or business leader with employees, you need to step up to the plate and decide what it is you’re really hoping to accomplish in business. Do you want loyal employees who’d do anything for you, or do you want mindless drones whom you can replace at a moment’s notice because you don’t want to take the time to invest in something more long term? Because, when all is said and done, loyalty, trustworthiness, and honesty are long term investments; what are you willing to commit to?
