It seems like at any given time I’m reading up to five different books. Most of them are specific to either healthcare or have a general management theme. I pick them up – I put them down – I move to another book – and the cycle perpetually continues. I’ve been doing this for years but there is one book that I come back to far more often than any other: Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking when the Stakes are High. This valuable resource was presented for discussion at my first ever “MedMan University” in the Spring of 2009. As a mostly management/sometimes consulting company, we often find ourselves in the position of having to deliver a difficult message to a hospital board, a group of physician owners, an under-performing manager and more. Crucial Conversations has been the most relevant ‘read’ for me in the past several years as it has provided me with the right focus (“Start with Heart”) and easy-to-use tips on starting and managing a difficult conversation. I’m of the mind that just about every conversation we have in the business arena is a ‘crucial conversation’ and I frequently pull my book off of the shelf and flip to the pages that I have tabbed before starting a difficult talk. I’m reminded over and over that it’s not what we say but how we say that it distinguishes us and ultimately impacts whether or not our message is heard at all. If you haven’t yet read (or re-read) Crucial Conversations, I encourage you to do so – it’s well worth the read.
Archive for the ‘Opinion’ Category
High Touch Trumps High Tech
“Why is this doctor carrying around a folding chair?” I asked myself. Mark Fischer, MD had just entered the room for our pre-planning interview at the Port Angeles hospital carrying a folding chair and his EMR computer tablet.
When I did ask why, Dr. Fischer gave me his impactful insight. As a pulmonologist / intensivist he was getting frustrated that in many of the hospital locations where he needed to talk to patients or their families he had no place to sit so that he could be at eye level in order to better connect. After much “due diligence” he selected a $9.95 chair that is now a constant companion on his hospital rounds. He opines, “This $9.95 chair positively impacts quality patient care more than this computer.”
Virtual meeting technology of the future
One of my jobs looking ahead to 2011 includes making sure we’re using the latest and greatest technology to keep our employees connected. We are spread over 4 (soon to be 5) states and three time zones and invest a lot of resources to make sure that our physical distance doesn’t hinder the aggressive transfer of information.
Currently, we use Cisco’s WebEx to meet “face-to-face.” It is such a part of our company, we’ve internally branded it as “Think Tank, MedMan’s Brainstorming Place.” Many companies use this software for sales presentations, trainings, or web demos. We use it as one of our office meeting rooms for all-employee meetings, monthly reviews, educational trainings, and other one-on-one or group meetings.
There are a lot of things we really like about Think Tank, including the integration with Outlook, ability to share our desktop or remote control each other’s PC, and ease of scheduling meetings. I occasionally research other online meeting and video conferencing products (like Polycom) to make sure WebEx is the best fit for our needs, and for now Think Tank seems to be the most affordable, practical solution.
One of the downsides to Think Tank is that it is geared toward one-person-in-front-of-their-computer to another-person-in-front-of-their-computer. With so much work done by teams these days, we’d really like to have the ability for a group of us in Idaho to all be in one room and meeting with a group of people in Alaska (or Oregon, or Washington…) that are also all in one room.
The other day I saw a commercial for Umi, a new Cisco product that is geared toward consumers. It offers crisp, clear, large video via an HDTV and integrated audio, and is not quite as expensive as enterprise video conferencing systems. It also integrates with Google Chat for people on the other end who might not have the hardware.
Imagine the possibilities for a small, virtual business!
It is easy to see how this could be a solution to our needs at MedMan, but at this point I’m just dreaming. Still, I’d like to know what other virtual companies out there are using. How do you stay connected to remote employees? What are the limitations of the technology you are using today? What kinds of advances do you hope are coming down the pipeline, and how would it improve your business model?
It’s Not About the Enchiladas
Having had time to reflect on a recent practice assessment in Pocatello, Idaho, I now know that I did learn something very valuable while working with Jason and Nicole……the cream cheese and crab enchiladas at Mama Inez are as good as I remember!
Actually, what I learned was much more important than that…see if you can guess:
What do accountability, discipline problems, self-motivation, employees spread too thin, process improvement, and financial analysis all have in common?
You’re right if you guessed that these are all issues that medical practice administrators deal with every day. But what if we didn’t have administrators or managers? Think about the structure at your current organization and, if your position was not available, who would perform these tasks? Would they get done at all? It is so important that you know clearly who you report to, and who reports to you, allowing you to define roles, maintain expectations, and hold others accountable in your organization. Without good managers leading organizations, things tend to fall apart.
Similarly, in a restaurant everyone knows their roles and expectations. The waitress, cook, and dishwashers all made those enchiladas an unforgettable experience.
Each person in the process is important, and what you do every day is invaluable. The need for quality practice managers is more important in today’s healthcare environment than ever.
Project Management Never Seemed So Cool
One of our newest “MedMan Ways” is mind mapping. We’re rolling MindManager9 software from MindJet out to our entire company this week after early adopters decided they couldn’t live without it. Once when I was on the phone with a MindJet technical support representative, she pitched it as the “missing piece” of the MS Office suite and I’d say all of us at MedMan would agree.
Why do we like mind mapping so much? Here are my top three reasons:
- Project Management – our corporate team uses MindManager for our annual operating plan. We can add tasks, task information like resources and due dates, attach documents, link to websites, and move things from one area of our plan to another with the click of a mouse. Once you add your information you can view it in an integrated Gantt Chart or filter by resources. For example, anytime I want to see what has been assigned to me (and make sure my due date isn’t creeping up) I just do a power filter on my name and less than two seconds I have what I’m looking for.
Annual Op Plan
- Presentations – we recently used a map for the first time to give our marketing presentationto a new client. I think everyone was a little nervous at first to change from our trusty ol’ Power Point, but the whole idea of a map just makes sense. You can see the starting point and ending point at the beginning, but as you move through the map, you can focus on a bit of information at a time with the “walk through” view.
Presentation Map
- Visual organization – my personal use is where I really get the most out of mind mapping. I am one of those people that has to get the crazy, disorganized thoughts out of my brain before I can start to make sense of it all – from “operationalize technology plan” to “tell husband to pick up dog food.” Which leads me to another MedMan Way – GTD, or Getting Things Done (based on the book of the same name by David Allen). But that is a topic for another day…
Personal Brain Dump Map
Learn More By Doing
This week I learned that the bathrooms on flights are international. When you enter you’re Russian, when inside European and when you leave you’re Finish.
I was exposed to more important things this week but that seemed to stick in my memory. And, so I wondered why. I’ve heard it takes over 20 repetitions for something to be remembered or for something to become a habit. While that is hardly scientific it does illustrate that it takes many times over for something to become ingrained in one’s memory. So, why then am I able to remember a silly joke after one repetition but many other more important things I have to hear over and over again to internalize?
Often it is because we choose to recall some things we hear shortly after we hear them while others we just put in our reserve memory to tap at a later time. As an example, in my sophomore year in college one of my jobs was to tutor students in accounting. While that may not seem like a stretch today, as a sophomore in college there were other extracurricular activities that demanded my attention than being scholarly. I learned more about accounting through my tutoring experience than I did in all the accounting classes during my undergraduate combined. So, I am suggesting that we should do more instead of just studying more. We learn much faster that way.