The Monday Morning Quote #118

“There are two types of education.

One should teach us how to make a living and the other how to live.”

John Adams

The four horsemen of media–here comes tiny media. Seth Godin

More wise words from Seth Godin

The Four Horsemen of Media – here comes tiny media.

The first is when you talk about yourself. Directly to people who care to hear you out.

The second is when you pay someone to carry your message. Media for hire, we call it advertising.

The third is when you cajole the ‘editorial’ side to talk about you, with authority. Publicity is often worth more than advertising, but it’s pesky in that it doesn’t perform on demand.

The fourth, the fourth is all the rage right now. That’s when unanointed kings of tiny media, when bloggers and tweeters and others talk about you.

Why do we persist in believing that these four have much in common? They don’t. Being confused about which is which is expensive, or worse.

You know you’re in trouble if someone on your team says anything like, “But how do we do this quickly? And at scale? Is there a way interns can churn through names? We have money to spend, hurry!”

There are some that would be delighted if PR and social media would just own up and start playing by the rules of advertising. In other words, you ought to be able to buy this sort of buzz. It’s more efficient, more convenient and more predictable.

Of course, it doesn’t work that way. Buying your way into the fourth horseman doesn’t work. Professionalizing it doesn’t work so well either. What works is making something worth talking about.

As it should be.

If you’re hoping that this now important form of media is going to sit there and promote your average stuff for average people made in bulk but pretty cheap product merely because you’re used to paying media companies to run ads… I think you’re wasting a lot of time and money.

This goes deeper than that. You’ll need to take that money and change the product and the service instead.

Link to the original article here.

The Monday Morning Quote

“The problem in my life and other people’s lives is not the absence of knowing what to do, but the absence of doing it.”
Peter Drucker

Books – this is how they work

I love this from de-motivation, thanks to The Word for pointing it out.

Help Make Dental History, UK

A project to build a comprehensive living history of dentistry, the John McLean Archive, is seeking participants from across the UK to help make dental history. Participants are required to participate in the project’s next witness seminar in October; and to take part in an ongoing series of oral history interviews across the UK.

The second witness seminar for the project, which will take place at the British Dental Association’s (BDA’s) London headquarters on 26 October 2011, will focus on changes in dentistry since 1948. Discussion is expected to concentrate on topics including the introduction of the NHS, payment and contracts, developments in equipment and evolution of private practice. Participants in the project’s first witness seminar, which took place in March and looked at the development of the regulation of dentistry, included past Presidents of the BDA and General Dental Council, three former deans of dental schools and a former dean of the Dental Faculty of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. It was chaired by Professor Nairn Wilson, Dean of King’s College London Dental Institute. Deliberations from each of the witness seminars will be published and placed in the John McLean Archive and will be publicly available via the BDA Museum’s website.

Volunteers are also being sought to carry out oral history interviews with dentists and dental care professionals across the UK. The transcripts of these interviews, which will focus on different aspects of the development of dentistry, will also be published as part of the project. Volunteers must have a connection to dentistry, good listening skills and an interest in dentistry. Volunteers selected to take part will receive training in oral history and the use of the recording equipment that will be used in the interviews.

Individuals interested in participating in either strand of activity contact Sophie Riches, the John McLean Archive project co-ordinator at the BDA Museum. Email sophie.riches@bda.org or visit the BDA Museum stand at the 2011 British Dental Conference and Exhibition.

The John McLean archive has been jointly established by the BDA Museum and the Unit for the History of Dentistry at King’s College London Dental Institute. It is funded by a bequest from former BDA President John Walford McLean OBE. It aims to fill a void in the profession’s recorded history.

Notes
1) John McLean was a leading dental practitioner and internationally renowned dental materials scientist, author and lecturer. He was appointed an OBE in 1978 and was the recipient of numerous awards, including the John Tomes Prize for research. He served as BDA President from 1994 to 1995.

Source:
British Dental Association (BDA)

The Monday Morning Quote – 116

‘The pursuit of a goal that is not values-based is drudgery.’

Thomas Leonard

The Monday Morning Quote #115

“Dental Protection has been voicing its concerns for some time now that certain aspects of the GDC’s work left a lot to be desired. The Fitness to Practise procedures were a case in point, as recently confirmed by the largely critical CHRE report, while some of the recent policy decisions also suggested a fundamental lack of understanding of the dynamics of the profession and its relationship with the public.

“The dignified departure of Alison Lockyer as GDC Chair, and the measured but pointed terms of her public comments as she left office, should set alarm bells ringing that something profoundly disturbing has been happening at the GDC. It is clear that the departing Chair has formally raised concerns with the relevant authorities about the internal operation of the GDC at a senior level, and these concerns surely warrant thorough investigation if public and professional confidence is to be maintained. Divisions are self-evident between some of the lay and professional members, and also between some Council members and the GDC Executive and staff. This is not good news for patients, and coincidentally it is not good news for the profession either at a time of such enormous challenge.

“One of the greatest risks of the change from a partly-elected to a wholly-appointed Council at the end of 2009 was a lack of continuity, knowledge and experience. This made the scale of the internal staff changes in the first six months thereafter particularly surprising. Having four Registrars of one kind or another in barely ten months made matters worse. The fact that one of the most longstanding and widely experienced professional members has now left the GDC, coupled with the fact that two such senior Investigating Committee Chairs should also have chosen to resign, suggests that it will continue to be an uphill struggle to reassure protection/defence organisations, registrants and the public that the GDC still has the knowledge and capacity to focus upon the job in hand. We can only hope that it has, but time is not on the side of the GDC.”

Kevin Lewis, Dental Director, Dental Protection speaking about the sudden resignation of Alison Lockyer.

Hands-Off Management Works Best

Throughout my career I have always looked at other industries & businesses and tried to work out what things, however small, were working for them and I could use to my advantage. It was as if the motto of the Round Table organisation was written with me in mind “Adopt, Adapt, Improve” is as good a way of going about things as any.

This article is from the Harvard Business School working knowledge newsletter and struck a few chords with me about the downside of micromanagement. I particularly like the comment at the end from the wonderfully named Elmer Rich III.

What lessons from this can you apply in your life and business?

Casino Payoff: Hands-Off Management Works Best

Published:    May 2, 2011
Author:    Dennis Fisher

At the gambling meccas that employ them, they are called “casino hosts”—essentially front-line employees with nevertheless big responsibilities.

These staffers work to develop one-on-one relationships with high-rollers to make sure they are very happy customers. The main weapon in their arsenal is the “comp,” or complimentary benefit, which can include a free dinner at a hotel restaurant, reduced-priced tickets and good seats to a show, or even free lodging in deluxe accommodations. From paper: Players Club database also tracks all “comps” (complimentary benefits), which may include reduced hotel and entertainment costs, free restaurant meals, or tickets for a show.

In short, casino hosts are the ultimate customer service providers, working with varying degrees of autonomy to ensure that the casinos’ best customers return to play another day.

And it turns out that casino hosts are ideal subjects to gain insight into an ongoing question debated for decades by business management researchers and practitioners alike: What is the proper balance to be struck by a business between encouraging autonomy so that employees can ignore red tape to serve the customer quickly and efficiently, and mitigating the risk that they’ll make bad decisions?

A new paper on the effects of employee monitoring makes the case that if business owners are interested in their customer-facing workers learning and making progressively better decisions over time, they’re far better off taking a hands-off approach and granting more freedom for decision-making.

The findings, presented in the paper The Learning Effects of Monitoring by Dennis Campbell and Francisco de Asís Martinez-Jerez of HBS and Marc Epstein of Rice University, are the result of an extensive study of the culture and management style at six hotels in the MGM-Mirage group, a large gaming concern with casinos in several locations across the United States.

Host controls

The job performances of casino hosts are subject to various degrees of monitoring, even within the same MGM-Mirage organization. The enterprise comprises a number of individual properties that were acquired over time and had their own established cultures and management structures. So casino hosts in some units are more tightly watched than others, allowing the researchers to evaluate results in both loosely and tightly monitored environments.

In what appears to be an industry standard, casino hosts are typically allowed free reign to award comps to good customers up to a value of 40 percent of what the customer is expected to spend, the “theoretical win.” (Casinos, as you might expect, are experts at predicting what their favored customers will spend during a visit). If a casino host decides on her own to exceed that ratio, management information systems automatically issue an exception report to be reviewed by the hotel management. In MGM-Mirage units that tightly monitor their hosts, these reports are reviewed daily, and the employee is subject to a request for more information. In less-controlled units, exceptions are reviewed weekly and quarterly and generally with less scrutiny from higher-ups.

The researchers wanted to test their hypothesis that casino hosts in loosely monitored, more hands-off management structures were more successful in their jobs because they felt freer to experiment with comp awards and were able to learn more because of those experiments. For example, casino hosts felt they had more leeway to overcomp a player based on experience with similar customers in the past, or by reading body language or other telltale signs that the customer was going to be a big spender.

The results confirmed that a casino host’s local knowledge and experience, reinforced by a less-controlled management apparatus, is an invaluable asset for the specific property and should play a key role in the decision-making process for the employees.

“What’s interesting is the magnitude of the results,” Campbell says. “You would think that tighter monitoring would result in less frequent experimentation, and that’s true. But the … question is, what’s the quality of the decisions that these employees make?”

In the tightly monitored properties, when an average employee with five years experience gave away $1.00 in comps to a customer, they got back $1.38 in expected revenue the next year, according to the paper. For comparable employees in loosely monitored units the $1.00 yielded $1.82.

“If I call you every time I see a deviation from the norm, you won’t use that freedom,” says Martinez-Jerez. “What we found is that you learn more from your experiments when you have more freedom. You plan better when you’re going to deviate from the guidelines, and it’s not just when you’re cornered by a customer and it’s the last resort. It’s not absolute freedom—it’s freedom within a framework; they have guidance and a point of reference.”

Looking at other industries

The gaming industry is a unique setting for this kind of research, given its tight regulation by gaming control boards and the government, and its hyper focus on profitability, security, and loss prevention. Those characteristics might, on the surface, make the MGM-Mirage seem like an irrelevant research subject for companies in many other industries. However, many of the behaviors and policies in place at the MGM-Mirage can be found in other companies, and the findings are also readily transferable to other industries.

“Many aspects of the environment at the MGM-Mirage are quite generalizable to other industries,” Martínez-Jerez says. “There are many decentralized employees with the rights to act on behalf of customers, and that’s quite common in other organizations as well, when you need to make a good decision or the customer will leave. If you look at banks, for example, they have localized decision rights in many cases, where branch managers and even some tellers have the ability to make loan decisions or give customers a better rate than what the guidelines say. In sales organizations, employees have the power to give discounts to customers if they think it will result in more business down the line. You can see this in lots of different settings.”

Though Campbell, Martinez-Jerez, and Epstein found that tightly monitoring employees significantly reduces the amount of experimentation they engage in, and thus the opportunities they have to learn, some organizations may still lean toward this model.

“Clearly there are some benefits to tighter control. If your goal is control and minimizing risk, that’s going to perform well because people will stick to the script,” Campbell says. “If you see each deviation as an experiment, you’re essentially accepting some short-term risk, but there’s a lot of learning. When you loosen up the controls a bit, you see a difference.”

About the author

Dennis Fisher is a writer based in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

Reader Comments:

This is the best HBR article we have seen in a long time. “We are easily convinced by data.”

This makes a lot of information-processing sense.
1. Removing obstacles to both gathering real-time local information gathering 2. Then being able to act on it quickly.

It has always been puzzling how firms hire the best folks — then tell them what to do. Especially the people who make you money everyday.

Think we know micromanagement has more to do with a fa manager’s difficulties in managing their uncomfortable emotions than effectiveness.

“People would rather maintain the illusion of control and fail, then create wealth.” Makes sense.

Elmer Rich III
Principal
Rich and Co.
Copyright © 2011 President and Fellows of Harvard College

The Monday Morning Quote – 114

“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules…

You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Steve Jobs


Another good day to bury bad news?

One advantage to the government of the plethora of public holidays is that many people don’t have enough time to watch what’s going on. I am reminded of the words of Jo Moore who sent an email whilst the Twin Towers were alight on Sept 11th 2001, saying that it was a good day to “bury” bad news. Whilst Ms Moore lost her job, her legacy being the phrase becoming enshrined in the public’s memory, the cynical way that “Special Advisers” behave has not changed in a decade.

Today’s announcement of an effective pay cut (think CQC fees, the investment needed to make practices comply with the evidence free HTM 01-05 and a host of other extra expenses imposed during the past year) dropped into the pool during a week when most practices are going full tilt to keep up with the run of short working weeks has been chosen to be as concealed as is possible.

At least in private practice there is the opportunity to increase fees to accommodate new expenses, such luxury is not possible for those dentists who have taken the Queen’s shilling and are just gearing up for another year (the seventh, any sign of a serious itch?) of targets and “never mind the quality just attain the width”. How much longer will this farce continue?

Here’s how the BDA have viewed it.

‘Uplift’ is really a pay cut, warns BDA

The Department of Health’s announcement today of just a 0.5 per cent increase in contract values for general dental practitioners in England for 2011/12 is a pay cut that will negatively affect their ability to invest in patient care, the British Dental Association (BDA) has warned. The BDA demonstrated in its evidence to the Department of Health that expenses in dental practice are increasing sharply, but that warning has been disregarded, the BDA has said.

Dentists are also being asked to implement new best practice guidance for preventing oral disease in children in support of the Government’s aim of reducing levels of oral disease in younger patients. Where it is considered appropriate, parents will be offered the opportunity for their children to have fluoride varnish applied to their teeth.

John Milne, Chair of the BDA’s General Dental Practice Committee, said:

“The level of this uplift is simply not enough. Dentists across England are working really hard, through a period of uncertainty, to deliver high quality care to their patients. They are contending with a growing mountain of pointless bureaucracy and escalating costs on top of the effects of the efficiency savings imposed last year. They need help to address those problems.

“While we support this prevention-focused activity to improve young people’s oral health, the costs of providing the extra fluoride varnish to children have not been recognised by this uplift. The NHS rightly seeks to improve the quality of dental services and to increase the emphasis on disease prevention, but this cannot be done in an environment where not only are dentists incomes frozen, but the continued failure to reimburse expenses puts practices under severe financial pressure.”

Ends

Notes to editors:

The British Dental Association (BDA) is the professional association for dentists in the UK. It represents 23,000 dentists working in general practice, in community and hospital settings, in academia and research, and in the armed forces. It also includes dental students.
For further information, please contact the BDA’s media team on 0207 563 4145/46 or visit http://www.bda.org.