Mitch’s Blog

Tomorrow is Blog Action Day. Its purpose is to highlight the problem and issue of poverty around the world. A Blog Action Day website has been set up to help track everyone who says they’re going to participate in this action. I’ve decided not only to participate, but I’m going to write a different post for each blog tomorrow, which is the 15th, in case you’re reading this from elsewhere.

For an idea of what your page might look like, though I’m certainly not going to this kind of extreme, check out this post. By the way, you can also donate money to the cause or help promote it in other ways also. Just click on that first link above.

Why not take a stand and have a say? I hope all of you participate in some way.

I’m basically staying non-political on my blogs, because I figure I have my positions and I know who I’m supporting, and why. However, that doesn’t mean that when there’s something that just doesn’t sit right with me that I’m going to let it go, and I don’t really care who it is at that point.

In this case, I’m addressing this issue of wolf hunting in Alaska. I don’t mind there being a hunting season, even though I’m not a hunter, and I know people have their reasons for wanting to hunt, let alone governments having their reasons for allowing specific types of hunting. And I’m not a big animal rights buff. However, hearing that hunters are allowed to shoot wolves from airplanes, and that they’ll get paid a bounty if they turn in wolf paws, just smacks of indecency to me.

Anyway, mixing serious stuff with some entertainment, this little video, though funny in a way, addresses this topic, and pretty much expresses my thoughts on the matter. So, without further ado,…

I’m presently at this convention in Chicago. Today I met up with a guy I’ve known for a long time. When he asked me how I was doing I told him that a representative from his company had contacted me about a possible contract last week, and how I’d written her back then never heard anything again. I told him that if I’m treated that way, and I’ve known him for many, many years, just how are other people being treated? Since it’s his business, and of course it was something that could have affected my business, I felt I needed to let him know.

This seems to happen to me often; it’s like my business and my home are black holes to other businesses. Quite often I get calls from people asking me questions about availability, then I never hear from them again. If I gave them a blanket “I’m not available” or just said no, I could understand. But when I say I’d like to discuss it or something of that ilk, quite often after I’ve sent them some information, I may never hear from them again. Sometimes I try to call back, and I get an answering machine, and still nothing.

The same happens at home, unfortunately. We contract with people to come do an assessment and send us a quote, and we never hear back from them. In early September, we had contracted with a guy to replace a window in my wife’s house, which he’d measured and said he’d even bought the window, scheduled a time to make sure I’d be home, and then nothing; no phone call, no visit, nothing. About 4 hours later I called to complain and he said he’d forgot but was going to get to it, and I canceled, because I had something else I had to do, and said we wouldn’t be needing his services.

Contractors are bad, but why is that? And, more importantly, why do we let them get away with it? For that matter, why do we let anyone get away with these types of things, especially when it concerns some type of business? Dr. Phil is often saying “we teach people how to treat us”, and I fully agree with that. Earlier this evening I wrote another consultant who’d sent out a call looking for people who could do a certain type of project, and asked him why he never got back to me in some fashion because I’d told him I would be interested in hearing more. I know him, and as another independent consultant one would think he’d know better because he hates when the same type of behavior comes back his way.

As a sidebar, I often receive resumes from people who don’t know I’m a sole proprietor, and most of them wouldn’t have the experience to work in my field anyway. Yet, I always get back to these people in some fashion, either by email or by picking up the phone, just to let them know I received what they sent and to tell them just what kind of business I’m in. Part of me wants to ask them why they didn’t research my business online first before sending me something, since I’m all over the internet and, if I were a large corporation, would probably not take seriously someone sending me information that couldn’t help my business, but the other part of me acknowledges that it’s a tough job market, and I just want to get back to them because I know most of the companies they actually apply to, possibly even interview with, will never get back to them. The way I see it, if I treat them as personally as possible now, who knows if they might remember it when they get somewhere else, are possibly in a position of authority, and may need someone who provides my services.

Do you or your employees tend to black hole your customers or contacts? Are you really so busy that you can afford to turn away potential customers or clients by not acknowledging them? Do you like it when someone else does it to you? Something to think about as you consider how your business is being run.

As I write this, I’m sitting in an airport, on my way to Chicago for the AAHAM ANI at the Hyatt Regency. I’m representing my local chapter as the president, once again, can’t go. I actually like going to these things because it’s the closest thing I get to a yearly vacation these days.

Sometimes I think this particular organization takes itself too seriously at the top levels. For instance, we’re all staying at a hotel where we got a “deal” of $249.99 a night, and for Chicago, like NYC, I guess that’s a deal. However, if we’d stayed on the outskirts of town, we probably could have gotten a deal where we’d be paying maybe $125 a night instead, and then more people would be able to come. But we usually also have a record number of exhibitors, and you need a room large enough for them because that’s where the overall revenue for this event will come from, and if they can reach that $100,000+ level of profit once again, no one else will be complaining.

Oh yeah; just to mention, I’m flying US Airways, and this is my first flight since gas prices have jumped so drastically. They’re charging $15 for the first bag, and $25 for every extra bag after that. I didn’t know about that part, but luckily there’s always credit, right? I’m trying to remember who it was on the commercials that said they didn’t charge for bags still; someone help me. I wrote on Twitter that I wondered if it meant they’d treat my bags better; most people wrote back with some version of “no”.

And, because I’m at the airport, which means I’m on the laptop, I finally got a chance to see what this new blog theme looked like on a smaller screen, and I have to say it didn’t initially pass the test. Beverly wrote in my last post how my Adsense bar was covering 1/3rd of the screen, and I just saw what she meant. Of course, I just upgraded from 2.0.0.16 on the laptop to Firefox 3.0.3, and now everything is in line as it’s supposed to be, but once again it proves just how careful coding has to be when creating sites for multiple browsers. Unfortunately, I didn’t create this theme, only using it, so I’m at the mercy of the creators.

Anyway, if there are any other members of AAHAM who are going to be at this convention, I hope you look me up; should be fun.

I’ve talked about Ryze in the past as a place I’ve enjoyed going to. In the beginning, there was a vibrancy to it, and people were joining in numbers of hundreds a day. I remember reading about it in a Lockergnome newsletter I was receiving at the time.

Ryze was great. There were all these different networks around where people could talk to each other on all sorts of topics. Everyone got a home page where they could talk about their business, and there was this box where people could leave greeting messages to each other. You could even send private messages to each other. You could even start your own network, though you had to be a paying member for that, but it only cost $10 a month, and you could have more than one network; life was pretty good. I belonged to at least 12 to 15 networks myself, and went almost religiously a few times a day.

Then, at some point, something happened. It wasn’t fresh anymore, and management seemed not to notice, or want to do anything about it. There were many suggestions made to management via a network only for network leaders, and it seemed we were being ignored. Someone started another network for network leaders only, and its purpose was to complain about what management was saying and not doing.

Suddenly, networks stopped working, as some owners gave up their paid memberships, and Ryze never had a plan for how to pass a network along to someone else once the leader left. Many long time participants who had tons of “friends” on the site left. Ryze’s answer to this was to set up different paid levels of service, take away some options that had been given to everyone at a period in time, and still not address the problems that people were talking about.

Finally, Ryze started getting more and more competition, and its audience was younger or more focused. LinkedIn, Ecademy, and some others started up, geared towards business owners who had nothing to do with MLM, a negative buzz phrase that probably gets more terrible reactions than it deserves, mainly due to a few people who are over the top, including the ones on Ryze who constantly badgered you with offers to join them in making money when you already had your own business. You had MySpace, then Facebook, and now Ning, different platforms that offer different things that Ryze can’t offer.

Ryze is still in the picture, but it’s fading fast. Just this past week four long time network owners announced that they were closing shop and moving on. Basically, they’re not going to pay for it anymore, and at some point the network will remain, but it’ll be dead. That’s a tragedy and a shame, and these days I’m down to 3 networks that I still belong to, but which I rarely visit. If I get to Ryze once a week it’s a miracle.

Here’s the thing. Just like the premise in the book Squawk, which I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, management has to be ready to change with the times. Old answers that were perfect in the beginning don’t always get it done in the present, and may not work in the future. If you as a leader is more interested in looking good or being right rather than getting things working and moving in the right direction, you’re going to end up with failure. Not that you’ll never recover, but odds are that by the time you’re ready to finally address things the end is pretty much upon you.

The only tried and true thing that I know of that continually works in this world are the abilities to listen and the abilities to adapt and change. If you can’t do that, then you and your business might be the next entities hoping for help with a government bailout.

What a week it’s been financially for America. For that matter, what a last three weeks it’s been! Some of the largest financial institutions in the United States have gone under, or merged with someone else, or been bought out by someone else. And, when the president decides to try to intervene, Congress shuts it down. And let’s not forget that some states are actually having problems getting fuel to gas stations; of all things!

President Bush now has his lowest rating ever, at 26%. Hoping not to sound political, but we’re in a major leadership crisis right now, and it’s one of those times where I’m not really sure how he could be doing better at it. The one thing I know is that the blame game has to end, and the president and Congress need to get together to try to figure out what to do, because our financial problems don’t only affect us, but the rest of the world as well.

Or does he, or they? It would seem that there’s no clear cut answer to this one, as some economists believe a governmental bailout is the only way to stem the bad tide of things, and others believing it’s an inappropriate use of the government’s money. If the people who study this stuff are battling each other, then what makes us think that Congress or President Bush have the answers, no matter how many advisors they have?

Of course, the problems we’re now having have a lot to do with some practices in the past. Sometimes, present leadership takes the fall for some practices that previous leaders put into play. I’m talking about the heads of these banks, the men who came up with these funny interest rates and mortgage loans, which put a lot of dollars into their pockets so they could retire comfortably, and then the status quo was maintained by leaders who followed these guys, over and over until we got to the leaders now, some of whom have lost their jobs over this fiasco.

Because, in the long run, new leaders don’t get a pass when they walk into a situation they know is a bad deal and then don’t do anything about it. And they knew about it; all of this was predicted by economists some years ago, because the worst thing deregulation led to was floating interest rates, which has led to many foreclosures and a weak housing market, and banks are foreclosing on houses that they can’t sell, which invariably hurts them and has closed down a good number of them. Wow; who didn’t see that coming?

I’m glad to live in New York state at this point in time. Our state didn’t allow any of those kinds of loans, so we’re not suffering the same type of financial mess that everyone else is. We’re suffering in a different way, though, as it seems our budget is dependent upon the performance of Wall Street, from whom the state gets money because the Stock Exchange is in this state, and we’re facing a major budget deficit. Frankly, our previous leaders seemed to have figured a lot of things out in advance, but missed that one.

“Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown”; that’s from Henry IV by Shakespeare. It’s kind of fitting at this moment in time. Someone really wants this job of president right now? Astounding!

First, the latest T. T. Mitchell Consulting Newsletter, Credibility, and the latest Healthcare Newsletter, Three Things, are now available.

Because I’m in health care, I’ve been reading a lot of things lately that talk about how health care is going to take a tumble in these bad economic days, and how many people are falling into debt because they can’t pay their bills, hospital bills being big among those debts. There are many truths in what I’ve been reading, along with some things that aren’t close to being true. I guess that’s pretty standard, because a lot of what we’re hearing about our financial crisis is the same type of thing.

However, I’m going on record to make one specific point: there isn’t a single person in trouble because of a hospital’s charge master. A charge master is a list of charges that hospitals and physicians charge for. They’re comprised of procedures, pharmaceuticals, and supplies. The reason hospitals and physicians have them is twofold. One reason is because it makes the capturing of charges on patients easier to do because of reason number two, every item that can be captured and billed has to have some kind of codes attached to them in order to get them paid by insurance companies.

Here’s the thing, though. A charge master is only a tool used by medical entities to handle the financial side of their business. A retail business has its list of prices also, but when you go to the store you see either a price tag on an item or above an item. Many other places you go that sel only a few specific things may have their fees listed. In today’s world, there are more hospitals that are going to what’s known as price transparency, which means they’re trying to set up ways for patients to see how much services may cost them. I say “may” because, in health care, the diagnosis you go to see someone for may not be the same diagnosis later on, in which case sometimes the procedures change midstream, and then the prices change. One rarely hears of a patient complaining, especially if the procedure helped them feel better or save their life.

What affects prices, and therefore patient’s responsibilities, isn’t the charge master, but the hospital’s financial position and financial policies. Hospitals and physicians in general work hard to base pricing policies on reimbursements from insurance companies and the actual expenses they have. Those decisions are what ends up on a charge master as it pertains to prices. It’s not the charge master specifically, though, and anyone who states this either doesn’t have any understanding of how health care finance works, or is trying to find a tool to inflame the public in some fashion.

Want to know a truth? It seem that most people don’t care anyway, so those people trying to vilify the charge master are beating a dead horse.

True, the price of health care keeps going up, and there does need to be some reform that, unfortunately, I’m predicting isn’t going to happen for a very long time. But let’s blame the right sources.

After four years I have finally decided it was time to update my theme, and so I present the new theme to the world this evening. Okay, it’s 2:30 in the morning, but I haven’t gone to bed yet so it’s still evening.

The other theme was the original theme of Wordpress, and it’s served its purpose in life, but times have changed and I needed more room and a totally different look to try to bring myself into this new age. My other theme was fairly thin, and with only one sidebar, things just tended to look messy and, well, it made the page longer.

Anyway, I owe big thanks to Paul, who created this theme, and a guy known as Copyblogger, who created the original theme, which only had two columns. I had taken the theme and made a few changes to it, and I expect I’ll be making more changes as I go along.

I hope you like the theme and find it more pleasant to view.

Well, this certainly was an interesting day. Because of server issues, I spent a big part of the day reviewing many blogs, just to see what was out on the blogosphere that might interest readers of my blog.

I came across this post on the Electronic Village blog called This Week In Blackness that caught my attention, mainly because of the video that I’m going to share below. The person in the video is a comedian named Elon James White, who supposedly has a series of videos on the topic of “White Privilege.

Personally, though it’s done in a comedic tone, I feel it’s pretty important stuff because I’ve heard some of the same sort of things he talks about, such as this impression that, because Barack Obama actually has a chance to become president this year, that racism is dead in America. Since I don’t feel like quoting statistics to try to prove that comment isn’t close to being correct, instead I’ll just share this video, which has a little bit of bad language, but very little:

I have found that sometimes the best way to get a point across is to couch it into or around a story. When I first started writing my newsletter, I was coming up with a point and then going right at it, pretty straightforward stuff. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t all that much fun to read either.

The one day I started off with a story first, and came back around to the topic of the newsletter. Out of the blue, it seems like I was touching people on some emotional level, and that particular newsletter garnered 20 comments back to me, which was, well, amazing.

It shouldn’t have been anything new to me. I’ve been writing stories of my adventures for a very long time. When email came along I found that it was easier to write it once and send it out in an email rather than having to type up a bunch of envelopes. And the audience grew with the emails, as, it would seem, some of my friends decided they just had to share those stories with other people. One of these days I may put online the story of my first time trying to paint in my present house; it seems to be the most popular thing I’ve ever written.

I bring this up because I’ve just finished reading a wonderful book called Squawk by Travis Bradberry, Ph.D. It was sent to me by a reader of my blog and newsletter who wanted to know my opinion of it. I’d heard the term “seagull management” before, but this is the first book that actually put a full story together to present it to the masses, along with some suggestions on how to solve those types of problems. It’s not a big book, nor is it a difficult book to read; I read it in less than an hour, as it told the story about Charlie, the seagull manager who has some big lessons to learn in how to continue being a star manager after succeeding in the past.

This isn’t a book review, though, but a tale of how, sometimes, it only takes a different way of presenting information to someone to help them understand the concepts you’re trying to teach. Managers can be under a lot of pressure sometimes, and if they have a lot of people they’re responsible for, they’ll usually be so direct and to the point in trying to solve the issue that they leave more confusion than help. Sometimes, taking a little bit more time in coming up with a different way of communicating, something everyone can identify with, might be more beneficial.

Sometimes, though. I wouldn’t want to tell managers that they should sit around writing stories to present to their employees. Instead, I’d say to try to come up with creative ways to educate and teach concepts that might not be easily grasped. It benefits everyone in the long run.