Reasons to work

Reasons to work: "

1. For the money


2. To be challenged


3. For the pleasure/calling of doing the work


4. For the impact it makes on the world


5. For the reputation you build in the community


6. To solve interesting problems


7. To be part of a group and to experience the mission


8. To be appreciated

Why do we always focus on the first? Why do we advertise jobs or promotions as being generic on items 2 through 8 and differentiated only by #1?

In fact, unless you're a drug kingpin or a Wall Street trader, my guess is that the other factors are at work every time you think about your work. (PS Happy Birthday Corey.)

"

Where do ideas come from?

Where do ideas come from?: "

1. Ideas don't come from watching television


2. Ideas sometimes come from listening to a lecture


3. Ideas often come while reading a book


4. Good ideas come from bad ideas, but only if there are enough of them


5. Ideas hate conference rooms, particularly conference rooms where there is a history of criticism, personal attacks or boredom


6. Ideas occur when dissimilar universes collide


7. Ideas often strive to meet expectations. If people expect them to appear, they do


8. Ideas fear experts, but they adore beginner's mind. A little awareness is a good thing


9. Ideas come in spurts, until you get frightened. Willie Nelson wrote three of his biggest hits in one week


10. Ideas come from trouble


11. Ideas come from our ego, and they do their best when they're generous and selfless


12. Ideas come from nature


13. Sometimes ideas come from fear (usually in movies) but often they come from confidence


14. Useful ideas come from being awake, alert enough to actually notice


15. Though sometimes ideas sneak in when we're asleep and too numb to be afraid


16. Ideas come out of the corner of the eye, or in the shower, when we're not trying


17. Mediocre ideas enjoy copying what happens to be working right this minute


18. Bigger ideas leapfrog the mediocre ones


19. Ideas don't need a passport, and often cross borders (of all kinds) with impunity


20. An idea must come from somewhere, because if it merely stays where it is and doesn't join us here, it's hidden. And hidden ideas don't ship, have no influence, no intersection with the market. They die, alone.

"

"Thank You" Goes a Long Way

From Fast company

"Thank You" Goes a Long Way: "

A basic management tool that Nancy Lublin argues is all too often underused? A simple phrase that you learned as a toddler--'thank you.'

Here is what I know about Thanksgiving: It's less about focusing us on giving thanks than it is about gorging on turkey and stuffing. Ironically, perhaps, during the same week as our Thanksgiving, the British mark National Thank You Week. It's not just about this vague notion of thanks -- it's aimed at helping us thank the people we encounter every day.

Thanking people isn't simply a matter of common courtesy. A 10-year study by leadership experts Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton of 200,000 managers and employees showed that saying 'thank you' correlates with bigger profits. This isn't surprising, because giving thanks is a great motivational tool; who doesn't like to be thanked? What is surprising is how hard it is to do the thanking. (Even the Brits, with their thank-you week, apparently still aren't good at saying those two words; in another survey, 30% of respondents said they don't even bother anymore, instead opting for a much less gratitude-filled 'cheers.')

As a not-for-profit CEO, I say lots of thank-yous -- to sponsors, donors, staff, volunteers. So in this season that purports to be all about the giving of thanks, let's muse on who to thank and how to do it effectively.

1. Interns. Brewing coffee, making copies, stuffing envelopes: On life's totem pole, the intern occupies a lowly station somewhere below the lunch lady (who is at least typically guaranteed a paycheck and benefits). Obviously, interns do grunt work in the hopes of carving out a higher niche, but most interns, despite their millions of hours of labor, get not only no money but also little thanks. This makes no sense. For one thing, it's rude. For another, your interns -- past, present, future -- are out there talking about you and your office. If they love you, they're your brand champions. If they don't, they'll trash you. All it takes to ensure the former is a small gesture -- or a series of them. Perhaps it's a handwritten note that mentions a specific thing they did to positively affect your workplace. Maybe you could invite them to your next holiday party. Or, perhaps best of all, help them line up their next job.

2. Lawyers. For real. The American Bar Association estimates that nearly three-quarters of all lawyers provide free services to disadvantaged people or the organizations that serve them -- about 20 million hours a year. Let's say these lawyers usually bill about $250 an hour. (According to the Laffey Matrix, that's 'reasonable' these days.) That's about $5 billion a year in donated value to the not-for-profit sector -- an enormous gift, and especially for small shops without huge corporate accounts to rely on, a big strain. So think twice before telling a lawyer joke. And if your group gets pro bono help, try to steer your lawyer some business that pays.

3. The little people. Yes, the name itself is a problem, which is exactly why I used it. You know I'm not talking about my 4-foot-10 grandma. The 'little people' are the FedEx guy, the UPS guy, the cleaners, the girl who sorts mail for our building, the repairman who is in our office way too often to fix our hapless copy machine. Here's a test: What are their names? Our office manager, Lauren Singer Katz, recently issued a quiz to our entire team, seeing how many of us could name 10 of the people who regularly interact with us, from the guy who books our flights at the eleventh hour (Albert) to the woman who rush-prints our posters at Staples (Karen). Most of us scored around 50%. Pathetic. Now we make it a point to greet everyone by name. Who are your office invisibles, the support team that makes sure you can do your job? Learn their names. Talk to them. Thank them. You might be surprised to learn that they think of your office as their workplace too, whether they are formally on your payroll or not. Do they know what you do? Lauren took the time to get to know Marlon, our janitor, and to tell him about Do Something's work. This past summer, Marlon's daughter was one of our best interns.

I haven't suggested anything that costs money. I didn't propose that you buy anyone a scarf or a fruitcake. Be polite; it's what Miss Manners would want you to do, but also it's good business. The British one-upped us by having a week of thanks instead of our one day. So let's take their idea and go one better. Let's take time every day to say thanks. Cheers.

Do Something CEO Nancy Lublin is thankful for New York nail salons.

A version of this article appears in the November issue of Fast Company.

[Photo by the Woodley Wonder Works]

"

Sure, but what's the hard part?

Sure, but what's the hard part?: "

Every project (product, play, event, company, venture, non profit) has a million tasks that need to be done, thousands of decisions, predictions, bits of effort, conversations and plans.

Got that.

But what's the hard part?

The CEO spends ten minutes discussing the layout of the office with the office manager. Why? Was that a difficult task that could only be done by her? Unlikely.

The founder of a restaurant spends hours at the cash register, taking orders and hurrying the line along... important, vital, emotional, but hard? Not if we think of hard as the chasm, the dividing line between success and failure. No, the hard part is raising two million dollars to build more stores. Hard is hiring someone better than you to do this part of the job.

Hard is not about sweat or time, hard is about finishing the rare, valuable, risky task that few complete.

Don't tell me you want to launch a line of spices but don't want to make sales calls to supermarket buyers. That's the hard part.

Don't tell me you are a great chef but can't deal with cranky customers. That's the hard part.

Don't tell me you have a good heart but don't want to raise money. That's the hard part.

Identifying which part of your project is hard is, paradoxically, not so easy, because we work to hide the hard parts. They frighten us.

"

Embracing the upcycle instead of the downcycle

Embracing the upcycle instead of the downcycle: "

Does a stressful event start a cascade that ends up making even you more stressed?

If an authority figure corrects your behavior, does the intervention lead you to push back and make the behavior worse?

Does a failure set you on a path to more failure?

These questions seem philosophical or even paradoxical, but in fact I think they get to the heart of why some people succeed and others don't. We can choose to create cycles that move us up or endure cycles that drag us down.

A cop hassles a teenager who is acting out. The kid escalates. The cop escalates. Someone gets shot.

A sales call is going poorly because the prospect doesn't perceive the salesperson is confident. She responds by becoming even less confident. No sale.

A mistake is made. The stakes go up. Rattled, another mistake is made, and then again, until failure occurs...

James Bond is a hero because the tougher the world got, the cooler he got. Symphony conductors don't endure the pressure of a performance, they thrive on it.

If being a little behind creates self-pressure that leads to stress and then errors, it's no wonder you frequently end up a lot behind. If the way you manage your brand inevitably leads to a ceaseless race to the bottom, it's no wonder that you're struggling. A small bump gets magnified and repeated until it overwhelms.

Customer service falls apart when mutual escalation or non-understanding sets in. Management falls apart when power struggles or miscommunication escalate. Education falls apart when students respond to negative tracking by giving up.

Someone who gets better whenever he fails will always outperform someone who responds to failure by getting worse. This isn't something in your DNA, it's something you can learn or unlearn.

The appropriate response is not to try harder, to bear down and grind it out. The response that works is to understand the nature of the cycle and to change it from the start. You must not fight the cycle, you must transform it into a different cycle altogether. It's a lot of work, but less work than failing.

When the lizard pushes you to recoil in fear, that's your cue to embrace the trembling fear and do precisely the opposite of what it demands. This won't work the first time or even the tenth, but it's the path to an upcycle, one where each negative input leads to more productivity, not less.

"

The Trust Factor

The Trust Factor: "

So here it is, the Spear Framework, which I’ve been discussing and expanding on over the last several posts, summarized in one diagram (refer to the first post in this series if you need a refresher overview).

[click here for PDF]

What you see here is your practice and the forces that drive it, in a one-page nutshell. What you get from this blueprint depends, of course, on the energy and degree of engagement you put into using it. But before we leave this discussion, I want to add one more point about patient trust.

Remember how those four categories of patient fit into that continuum of value? Well, the same applies to the level of trust a patient brings to a practice, which is defined by how they interpret your “brand.”

A “reactive” patient views your brand as the equivalent of a walk-in clinic, and their level of trust reflects that: they see you as no better or worse than any other dentist. They’re just hoping to get in and out without a lot of pain. At the other end of the spectrum, the “regenerative” patients trust you implicitly. To them, your brand represents the Mayo Clinic of dentistry, and they are eager to share their enthusiasm with others of high-end expectations.

So how do you go about increasing this level of trust? It starts with the level of trust you have in yourself; your self-confidence in providing the best care possible to your patients will always come through if it is based on real-world experience. That self-trust will translate, inevitably, to the trust of the team and of the patients. Eventually, as you perform at higher and higher levels, they will come to see you as you see yourself.

Because remember, these categories are not permanent compartments—there is a continuum of trust, and the level of value and trust a patient comes in with does not have to be the level they stay at. It may take time, but you can move people upward to the higher reaches of this continuum. And the value building doesn’t end once they get there—once you get patients accepting discretionary and regenerative care they become ideal ambassadors for the practice, so teaching these now-ideal patients to invite others becomes huge. That’s a subject I’ll be getting into deeper in a future post.

"

How to Instantly Double the Number of New Patients You See

How to Instantly Double the Number of New Patients You See: "

It’s one of the most common—and most costly—mistakes dentists make: believing that a “no” today is a “no” forever. You examine a patient, present your findings, suggest a treatment plan, which the patient turns down, and then…that’s it. The patient goes into the hygiene cycle, and you continue to perform routine care on them year after year.

These patients who say no right from the start to the best care you can offer are a great source of frustration, because once they get into that mode it just becomes ongoing tooth by tooth maintenance. But these Proactive patients are exactly the ones you need to learn to love the most because, as we saw in the last post, they represent your greatest opportunity for growth.

That person who said no five years ago could have a whole new life story today—new career, new marital status, new self-image, new robust economics—and you need to re-present your findings to that new person.

So here’s what you do. Give your existing patients, at least every five years, an opportunity to start over and realign with their possibilities. If you have 1,500 patients, that means 300 a year, or 25 a month.

And here’s how you do it. For every brand new patient you see in the practice—you know, the kind you get so excited about because they’re full of untapped possibilities—select an existing patient with longstanding untreated possibilities who is coming in, and give that patient the same “new patient” energy. Find a way to re-engage them, even if it is as simple as saying, “I think it’s time we take stock of where you’re at.” Diagnose and present to them as if you’ve never seen them before. You’ve now effectively doubled your new patient flow, and I think you’ll be surprised at how the acceptance rates stack up with these two kinds of “new” patient.

The bottom line is that there is so much opportunity during the life of a typical patient, for you and for them, that you simply can’t afford to give up on the idea that their circumstances will change. This is a life-affirming, optimistic way to practice dentistry—and it brings with it the capacity to not only recognize change in peoples’ lives, but to inspire it.

"

Unreasonable

Unreasonable: "

The paradox of an instant, worldwide, connected marketplace for all goods and services:

All that succeeds is the unreasonable.

You can get my attention if your product is unreasonably well designed, if your preparation is unreasonably over the top, if your customer service is unreasonably attentive and generous and honest. You can earn my business or my recommendation if the build quality is unreasonable for the intended use, if the pricing is unreasonably low or if the experience is unreasonably over-the-top irresistible given the competition.

Want to get into a famous college? You'll need to have unreasonably high grades, impossibly positive recommendations and yes, a life that's balanced. That's totally unreasonable.

The market now expects and demands an unreasonable effort and investment on your part. You don't have to like it for it to be true.

In fact, unreasonable is the new reasonable.

"

Arrogance is a bug in signal processing

Arrogance is a bug in signal processing: "

We care a lot about finding people who are brilliant, who get things done, who make a difference. We care a lot about finding a playwright with talent, a surgeon who can cure us, a programmer who can get the thing to work.

Along the way, many of the linchpins who are able to do work like this develop affectations, quirks and even obnoxious qualities. They might demand an over-equipped dressing room or a private jet or merely be a jerk in meetings (or show up late, which is almost as bad).

We often put up with this, because, after all, they're superstars, right?

Somewhere along the way, we confused the signals with the work. Now there are people who start with the bad behavior and the affectations, hoping that it will be seen as a sign of insight and talent. And they often get away with it. 'Who's that?' we wonder... 'I don't know, but they must be good at what they do, because why else would we put up with them?' It's a great plan when it works, but I don't think it's a strategy to be counted on.

The key to getting a reputation for being brilliant is actually being brilliant, not just acting like you are.

"

A Fresh Look at Reduction Guides

A Fresh Look at Reduction Guides: "

Reduction guides are an important part of the restorative process for evaluating our preparations, insuring adequate space for restorative materials. In the Anterior Esthetics and Restorative: A Live Patient Experience course we recommend several types, creating repeated checks throughout the process.

At the most recent course, one of the participants, Faculty Club member Dr. Costin Marinescu, from Tulare, Calif., created a design none of us had seen before. It gave him a view of multiple teeth from different angles. He had additional guides for more detailed inspection of individual teeth, but the ingenuity of this design was unique to our experiences.

Note the excellent adaptation to the tissue on the right of the photo. This was accomplished by meticulous attention to the preliminary impressions so that the wax-up represents actual soft tissue position relative to teeth and makes excellent guides possible. The Live Patient course will be offered only twice in 2011 by application; please e-mail me if you want details on how to apply.

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Identifying Your Four Kinds of Patients

Identifying Your Four Kinds of Patients: "

A lot of dentists spend a lot of time and resources looking for “the right kind of patients.” Any limitations can be attributed to not getting enough of them. Other dentists who are succeeding at higher levels seem to be getting lots of them. But in my experience, just about every practice—from the smallest to the largest, urban or suburban—is populated with the same kinds of patients and the same kind of patient motivations. Within the “value framework” of any practice there are four patterns of behaviors that patients fall into:

Reactive Patients typically only see a dentist when something hurts. They are focused on fixing immediate pain, breakage, or trauma and aren’t much interested in hearing about other oral health options—they even resist regular hygiene care. Fortunately, they represent a small minority in every practice.

Proactive Patients are generally committed to maintaining their oral health and will typically accept routine treatment that years of insurance mindset thinking have conditioned them to accept: fillings, onlays, crowns—usually delivered one tooth at a time. Most patients in most practices fall into this category.

Discretionary Patients are ready to hear a value message. They have an interest in cultivating their self-image, for whatever reason, and they are open to (or even actively seeking) treatment suggestions that include specific esthetic choices.

Regenerative Patients want the best. They want to restore their mouths to the best standards you and modern dentistry are capable of providing, and they are willing to make the investment now (and in the future) to achieve ideal oral health.

The important thing to remember is that these category descriptions are not labeled buckets in which to place your patients. Rather it is a continuum of behaviors, and any one patient can occupy different categories at different times. So, with that in mind, which category of patient do you think is the most important for driving practice growth? I’ll give you my thoughts on that in the next post.

"