Choice.

Uncategorized Jul 05, 2018

In his book Free Market Madness, Peter Ubel illustrates the risk many parents took in the 1970s by choosing not to vaccinate their children for polio. The main reason in deciding not to vaccinate was that 1 in 2.4 million could actually contract the disease from the vaccine. Parents overlooked the fact that the risk of contracting the disease, without the vaccination, was exponentially higher than 1 in 2.4 million. Yet, statistics don’t mean anything if you are convinced that your child could be the one in 2.4 million.

 

We all have a tendency to think more carefully about the potential harms of our actions than we do to the consequences of our inaction.

 

In the U.S. this week, we celebrated our 242nd birthday as a country. Certainly the founding fathers had much to consider in their action of signing the Declaration of Independence. At the same time, they had also considered the dire consequences of doing nothing. Luckily, they overcame their fears of...

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Training.

Uncategorized Jul 05, 2018

In a large study of over 5,000 workers in Spain, the University of Madeira discovered that employer-provided training has the same effect on job satisfaction as a 17.7% net wage increase.

I’ve been teaching for years that your employees don’t always want more money in order to increase their engagement and overall job satisfaction with your company. The ability to learn something new or achieve mastery of a skill they have already learned but have not yet perfected are both critical components to job satisfaction. Our surveys with top clients after in-office trainings and live seminar boot camps that we provide also support this recommendation.

 

Your best people are just as excited as you are to learn new things and push their boundaries of knowledge into new and unchartered territory. Don’t assume they are happy doing the same thing day after day if the paycheck is good enough. It simply won’t keep your best people engaged. Ask me how I...

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Adapt.

Uncategorized Jul 05, 2018

Quincy Jones has been nominated for more Grammy Awards than any other person and has won a total of twenty-seven times in ten different fields. From Children’s to Pop, Rap, Jazz, R&B, and more. He has worked with Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Ray Charles, Miles Davis and the list goes on. He produced the best-selling album of all time: Michael Jackson’s Thriller.

 

Q, as his friends call him, has so many talents in so many diverse fields, including television (The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air) and movie producing (The Color Purple), even as the founder and chairman of Vibe magazine, that it’s hard for him not to find unique ways to work with new people and bring out the best in them, as he pulls experiences from other fields and other genres into each new project he completes.

Jones once said, “A person’s age can be determined by the degree of pain he experiences when he comes into contact with a new idea.”

 

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Fox vs Rabbit.

Uncategorized Jun 20, 2018

John Gribbin illustrates a point in one of his books that should smack readers into attention, like a 2×4 to the forehead: “A rabbit who runs away from a fox is not competing with the fox, in evolutionary terms. It is competing with the other rabbits. The ones who run fastest and zigzag most unpredictably, will survive and breed; the ones who don’t will get eaten. The fox, of course, is in competition with the other foxes.”

 

How often in your business do you think you’re competing with the fox? When you see a large group audiology practice or corporate hearing care chain offering hearing aids, do you think, “Those are my patients going to the competition.”

 

I see a lot of audiologists and hearing specialists doing this with direct-to-consumer hearing aids, retail stores and pharmacies offering hearing aid amplifiers. They think these foxes are their competition. They aren’t.

 

It might sound...

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Messy.

Uncategorized Jun 20, 2018

It’s time to replace the Italian espresso machine in my kitchen. I rarely spend much time researching options. I’d rather make a decision and adjust as I go, but desire quality so I feel a little obligated to replace it with something as durable.

Tasked to my personal assistant, already knee-deep in the process of replacing two other commercial coffee machines in our audiology offices, my only instruction was to make sure it’s durable. “Commercial grade,” I remember saying. Why not kill three birds with one stone?

She came back with options from the distributor that were “much less messy” than my current machine. They all looked like glorified Nespresso machines.

“Messy,” I asked. “What’s messy?”

She explained, “Well, with your current machine you have to grind the beans and then put them in that thing over there and that makes a mess.”

“Yes,” I patiently smiled, “But freshly-ground...

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What They Believe.

Uncategorized Jun 20, 2018

My friend, Dan Kennedy, shared some great inside baseball at at conference in Cleveland recently. If you missed it, I’m not going to give you all of his pearls, but I will share a BIG one with you below.

 

When practically applied to your business, the marketing principle can transform your business. If you look around, you’ll find very few businesses that think and operate this way.

Most businesses stop at what people need to KNOW:

  • We’re a car dealership
  • We sell this kind of car
  • We’re open these hours
  • We’re having the sale of the century
  • You can have a low credit score and we’ll still get you financed

 

Almost no businesses go all the way to what people need to BELIEVE.

 

For example, most weight loss companies look the same. They start with the program, how it works, why it is better than the other programs in terms of cost or features, benefits, competitive superiority. But, the smartest weight loss...

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