Mitch’s Blog

First, the latest issue of the T. T. Mitchell Consulting Newsletter, Good Customer Service Doesn’t Trump All, is available.

This morning I was at a board meeting for one of the groups I participate in. I was describing something I specifically noticed at the SOHO Show (Small Office/Home Office), an annual event in the Syracuse area. It seems that the show went back to something I guess they used to do more often in the older days, which is to have a high number of very attractive women “manning” the booths. Not that I haven’t seen attractive women in previous years, but this year the numbers skyrocketed, and it was something to behold for sure; hey, I’m a guy.

Anyway, I commented on how I noticed, and outside of their being attractive, wondered why I had actually paid attention to it. At that point one of the other board members, the only black woman in the group and on the board, “outed” me by saying that, like her, I probably always count how many black people are in a room when I go to an event and, because I count that, I probably count many other things, also like she does.

I told her laughingly not to give away an inside secret, but then I thought about it and decided to not only go with it, but reveal it to the general public. Yes, I count. For instance, I can tell you that at the conference I went to last week in Chicago, myself and one other person were the only two black males who were there for the event, not because we accompanied our wives. On the other side, there were 4 black women who attended the event. This was out of almost 450 people, by the way. I can tell you how many black people there were on each of the flights I took. I can tell you how many black people there were in every restaurant I went to that wasn’t a conference event. For that matter, I can tell you how many women were in half the restaurants I went to.

Counting isn’t necessarily something that’s instilled in black people, and it may be disappearing in today’s world, but it was something that came naturally in my youth. Whenever a black person was going to be on TV people would get on the phone and call each other. If a black performer was coming to town, the same thing would happen. Whenever we watched the news, we’d be hoping that the really bad stuff wasn’t being done by a black person because we knew that the next day we’d be the ones who’d be asked about it. Even now, we notice what we deem “code words” in this election year as it pertains to Barack Obama’s run for the presidency; if they weren’t code words, there wouldn’t be so many apologies and explanations after the statements were said (and all of them are pretty hollow sounding, by the way).

I count black people in movies; I count them in commercials. I’m not alone. And, it’s not endemic to black people either. Women will count how many other women are at a traditionally male event. White people will count how many other white people are at a predominantly black event. I’m sure other minorities count whenever they’re in a crowd. It’s typical to count when you feel a sense of “onlyness”, if you will. Sometimes it makes one feel uncomfortable; sometimes it just goes with the territory.

Early this week there was a buzz created by a black man named James T. Harris, who appeared at a John McCain event and literally “begged” McCain to bring the attack to Obama. He received a lot of hate email and calls, which was uncalled for in my opinion, but that wasn’t really what struck me. What struck me is that, in an interview he later gave to CNN, he himself indicated that he wasn’t a plant in the audience, as many had claimed, but that he had been ushered to the front of the room once he was inside because there weren’t more than a couple other black people in the audience, and he knew that they wanted to project a sense that there were more minorities in attendance than there were. So, even though his off the cuff remarks on video weren’t scripted, he knew he was being used as a pawn and went along with it. I thought about it some more as I realize that there are events I go to where I’m asked if my picture can be taken, so that it can be put into magazines or news articles to try to show that there was more minority participation than there actually was, and I’ve gone along with it.

The issues of race and gender are scary to deal with. It’s going to happen when the sides aren’t truly equal. I’ve come to terms with my counting issue, and I hope others realize that, indeed, they’re also counting, even if on a less frequent level. I was outed earlier today; now I’ve just outed myself to everyone else. What do you think?

I encountered real poverty head on when my dad went to Vietnam back in 1969. For some reason, when he went overseas we couldn’t live in on base housing; I never learned the reason why. So, last minute we ended up moving to Kansas City, Missouri, to live with my grandmother.

When my grandmother had bought her house in 1957, it was considered a nice, middle class black neighborhood. As the years went by the neighborhood deteriorated, and by the time we got there it was on the fringe of the slums. By fringe, I mean that on our immediate street on the block there were still some fairly nice looking houses, my grandmother’s house included, but in between there were some squalor houses. At the front end of the block was a former Red Ball Moving Company lot, with the remnant of a trailer on a rock lot that had been torched and tortured to the point that you knew what it had been, but it had obviously been used for other purposes. The rock lot was chopped up, as if someone had taken a sledge hammer to it, and the building was empty, though all the windows had been broken out of it.

The front end of the block offered some salvation, in its own way. If you turned right on that main road and drove about 15 or 20 minutes, you were in downtown Kansas City, where all the tall buildings were; if you went 15 or 20 minutes to the left, you ended up closer to the suburbs, where there was a Boys Club and actual fast food restaurants, none of which existed where we lived. There was a little general store one block to the left, and two blocks up was the elementary school I went to. The back end of the block began the true slum part, houses with boarded up windows with people still living in them; trash in the yards, beaten up old cars and no real place for kids to play except the streets. There was no baseball or football, or even basketball; the only basketball court was at the school, and it was fenced off except during gym class. It had to be; this was a dangerous neighborhood where fights and gunshots went off all the time. The Black Panthers had a purple van with a black paw that they used to drive down the streets from time to time. And we even saw a man running from the police this one time, who decided to run down the side of our house, and as the police officer pulled his gun and yelled something at the man, we all thought the gun was being aimed at our window and we jerked back; talk about being scared as a 10 year old kid.

At my school, at least a third of the kids came to school often wearing the same clothes every day. Our teacher, Mrs. Johnson, used to spend the first 45 minutes to an hour taking kids into the bathroom, which each classroom had, and washing them up; she didn’t believe that being poor meant you couldn’t be clean. Some kids had holes in their clothes and in their shoes. Many kids didn’t have money for either lunch or breakfast, but this was before they started having school breakfast programs; luckily, we did have a school lunch program, and for many of these kids, it might have been the only real meal they got during the day. The school was way behind me, so I got no attention in school, but it didn’t matter. There was no homework ever, because the school didn’t want to take a chance on the books not making it back to school. They had a library that was rarely used, mainly because they had a hard time teaching many of the kids to read. They weren’t dumb kids, they were just unmotivated; what did they know? What did they see everyday when they went home?

I learned a big lesson one particular day. My best friend, named Odell Jones, used to come over to my house to play my games. Seems I was the only person who had any games; I didn’t know that at the time. One day we went for a short walk, and for the first time I ended up on the street at the back end of my block. We walked up about halfway, and he pointed out his house. It was a tiny ranch house, no glass in the windows, only a curtain pulled across. His parents were sitting out front in rocking chairs. His father was blind and didn’t work; his mother didn’t work either. Both were sitting on the porch in dirty clothes. There were 4 other children around them, but they weren’t playing in the yard, but sitting on the porch with their parents; until that time, I thought he only had an older sister, as he’d never talked about his family. As I looked up the street, I saw many other houses like this one; I was confused and scared, and we didn’t go any further. I’m usually a curious sort and like to look around, but I decided not to take any chances. I didn’t fit in already, and I didn’t want to draw any more attention to myself than I already had in school, where you can believe I wasn’t overly popular. We weren’t rich by any means, as the military doesn’t pay great, but comparatively, I was living well.

Or was I? Sure, I had some things, but my grandmother’s house had deteriorated in its own fashion after so many years. It had rats and mice, roaches and huge water bugs. My mother spent all her time in her bedroom upstairs; she rarely came out and rarely went downstairs. She drove to the air force base nearby for her foodstuffs, and kept everything in her room so she didn’t have to leave. You know she wasn’t used to living this way either. My grandmother is the type who can get by anywhere; all she wants is a place to sleep at night, even now.

After a year of that my dad came back from Vietnam, and we moved to Maine, where we encountered a much different kind of life. It took me a long time to get adjusted to it; how does one go from a predominantly black slum area (we had one Mexican kid in school, otherwise it was all black) back to military living, where there are no hardships because food and supplies on a military base cost less, life is easier, the grounds must be maintained so there is no squalor, and of course I was once again back in the minority? It was tough, for sure. I always thought back on my experiences in Kansas City, and it gave me a better appreciation for what I had, as well as a compassion for those who don’t have as much as I have. I have always given money when I can, though I admit that I don’t volunteer as much as I probably should. I feel I have a unique point of view whenever I hear someone talking about poverty and sloth and the educational system and Medicaid and food stamps and putting people down who live in these kinds of conditions. Nobody asks to live like that; sometimes, those are just the circumstances people face in their lives.

In 1999, I had an opportunity to go back to Kansas City for the first time in almost 30 years, and I said I wanted to go back to the old neighborhood. It might not have been safe, but I wanted to go anyway. Oddly enough, it’s probably safer now, though it’s no less a ghetto area. More than half of the houses on my old street have been torn down, and all that remains is a paved over area where basements used to be; one of these houses was my grandmothers. The school I went to is also gone; I can’t believe they tore down an entire brick building, but they did, and there was nothing there at all except more slab. The store was gone, but, oddly enough, that same lot was sitting there empty, the one with the old Red Ball trailer; that was gone, though. It was summer, but I didn’t see any people. Then I had to think back; I rarely saw people when I lived there. So, it was a different kind of poverty; this poverty could hide behind doors, but it was still there.

I was sad; after 30 years, it wasn’t actually worse, but it wasn’t better. How does that happen in America? For that matter, how does it happen anywhere in this world of prosperity? I guess I’ll never know, and no one else will ever know, but it always reminds me of that one line from Jesus Christ Superstar, which is not a direct quote from the Bible, though many people think it is: “There will be poor always.”

If you get a chance, please go to my other blog to read what I wrote there on this same topic today.

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.