The blog of Alun Rees, The Dental Business Coach
From Tom Peters www.tompeters.com
The Ten “Traits of Excellence”:
Dreamer-Visionary.
True to Himself.
Story Teller.
Magnetism.
Inclusive.
Stamina.
Persistence.
Thrive Past Failure.
Politician Extraordinaire.
Actor.
This is wonderful. I saw it on Chris Barrow’s blog do take the time to sit and enjoy it, please – the world will feel like a better place.
Because I haven’t worked out how to embed YouTube videos (another thing on the list) you’ll have to press the link.
“Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker.
Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end.
Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.”
I am not sure who wrote this originally but I read it on Paul Newton’s website. Paul had a very ‘challenging’ 2008, he was in Belfast for the Connaught v Ulster rugby match last Spring and was seriously assaulted. Thankfully he is now close to full recovery.
His website is here.
I am a happy Mac user, they do what they are supposed to do simply and without fuss, they are beautiful to look at and Apple continue to innovate. My experiences with Microsoft have been repeatedly frustrating. If Microsoft made cars you would see motorways clogged with autos that had tried to use their indictors or windscreen wipers but then had to stop due to a fatal error, turn their engines off and restart them before they could proceed with the journey.
Why do I need to know what’s going on “under the bonnet” in order to drive?
John Naughton is of similar mind this is from John Naughton’s Memex 1.1
Microsoft surely anticipated a crowd when it announced this week that 2.5 million current users of Windows Vista SP1 would be allowed to download a free beta of the upcoming Windows 7 starting at noon Pacific today (see “Microsoft offers Vista users something beta“), but it apparently wasn’t ready for the Wal-Mart-on-Black-Friday kind of mob that gathered outside its virtual doors and collectively clicked its servers into whimpering submission. With the Web site faltering under the load, Microsoft called a timeout and said it needed to add “some additional infrastructure support to the Microsoft.com properties before we post the public beta.” No ETA was given, and prospective downloaders have been left to mill about aimlessly, checking their favorite tech news sites for a new go signal and talking among themselves about the benefits of BitTorrent.
For the 101st posting I am returning to my first “professional” blog entry from July 1st 2007 when I was part of the Dental Business School set up. Happy days. My opinions haven’t changed.
It’s great to put the words “The first time” into a search engine and watch what appears. In this case I wanted, and got the lyrics to “The first time ever I saw your face” a wonderful song written in 1963 by Ewan McColl for his lover Peggy Seeger.
“The first time ever I lay with you And felt your heart beat close to mine I thought our joy would fill the earth And would last till the end of time my love And would last till the end of time”For more stuff on this fascinating man who refused to be classified as anything other than himself go to:
wikipedia.org/wiki/Ewan_MacColl
As for myself here’s a brief summary that I wrote for GDP-UK
“I practice very little clinical dentistry, not because I am not good at it, not because I was not successful at it, basically because I no longer enjoyed it, had I been given the options of honesty and the choice of following a different path at a “half-way” point in my studies I probably would have taken it. As it is I was involved in a “vocational” degree and at the end of five years (Newcastle 1978) that is all you can do unless you have infinitely more moral courage than I or any of my contemporaries had.”
It took me a quarter of a century of practicing in hospital dentistry, general practice as an associate and as an owner of two practices to realise that, to use one of Stephen Covey’s analogies, my ladder was beautiful, it was well constructed, it worked well BUT (and it’s a bloody big but) it was leaning against the wrong wall.
Here we have a culture of “Ignore the ideals you may have felt and been taught, get in, get on with it, burn out, blame someone else, anyone else. Well here are some folks you can blame: the principal, the patients, the NHS, the BDA, the GDC, Barry Cockcroft, Ben Bradshaw, Gordon Brown, Maggie Thatcher & Nye Bevan, and yes some or all of them may have done something that influences the totally artificial structure that is imposed upon the relationship between you, the clinician, and your patient.
Every time that you do something that isn’t the best that you can possibly do for that patient, because you have VOLUNTARILY accepted a third party’s rules, then just acknowledge the gremlin that sits on your shoulder that controls the little squirts of adrenaline into your blood stream that will ultimately take their toll on your health.
One of my coaching gurus, Steve Black, asks the sportsmen he works with to imagine that they are being filmed when they are training and playing and then to visualise that they will have to sit and watch the film with their families and colleagues. Mike Wise says something similar “it’s doing the right thing when nobody’s looking that’s important.”
A milestone reached, this is my 100th posting on this blog. Here’s a couple of wise words from others:
Bill Ford is an Executive Coach and you can read his profile here.
He writes a regular ezine and you can subscribe through his website www.coachingdirectors.com.
This is a great little book which will repay a read (or two), it is free of gimmicks, BS and magic tricks. A great read to start a great new year.
Available through Amazon here.
I generally find New Year celebrations to be false, unnecessarily alcohol fueled and associated with the “piecrust” resolutions of which our grandmothers warned us.
I have already faced one disappointment in 2009, having suffered from a persistent chest irritation I decided (with pressure from family) to miss the Glandore Harbour Swim at 10.30 this morning. Yes, it’s a disappointment, but there was a possibility that I would make myself ill for another couple of weeks and, as one of the goals for 2009 is the London Marathon, I am sure that being aware of myself was the correct decision.
One of the good things about a New Year is the opportunity to deal with a brand new diary, a calendar that can be influenced and choices made about how it will be filled.
Don’t burdon yourself with lists of resolutions but do undergo a change of intent. Now is the time to decide how you will spend the coming 12 months, what do you want to have achieved when you sit and look back on the first day of 2010?
There’s a blank page in front of you, what could be more exciting?
Now I’m going to walk to Knockdrum Fort and take in the views to the north and the south, can you blame me?
Wherever you are I hope 2009 will be a great year.
From Seth Godin’s blog which is essential reading for all who either own or work in businesses. Subscribe here.
Should the person who runs the customer service operations at a ski school also be required to love skiing?
Can the CFO of a large church be an atheist?
Does the head of marketing at Kodak have to have a passion for chemicals?
It’s true, “write what you know, write what you love.” The commitment comes through. But does that mean that boring products shouldn’t be marketed? Does it mean that the community theater must limit the list it considers for any job only to people who are ‘in’ the theater, who have paid their dues?
How many worthy causes have lousy operations teams? How many hobbies and sports are staffed by fans, not professionals?
I think if the work is important, it should be done with passion and skill and flair. But the work of balancing the books, or running Google adwords or making sure that customers are treated well at the ski school often has nothing to do with the product or service itself.
It’s more important that you be passionate about what you do all day than it is to be passionate about the product that is being sold.
Give me someone with domain expertise and the passion to do great work any time. Belief in the mission matters (a lot!), but it doesn’t replace skill.
Best of both worlds: someone who has passion (and skill and insight) about their task and passion about the mission. The latter can never replace the former. Organizations staffed with sports fans or true believers worry me, because they often use their passion as an excuse for poor performance. What worries me more are the employees who have neither expertise nor passion.
(All that said, I’ve never met a great marketer who wasn’t passionate about what she sold. In the case of marketing, it’s not just a nice combination, it’s a requirement.)
The Incisal Edge 
