Answer Guy Central

Imagine you’re in business, and you want to keep in touch with all your clients, friends, contractors, and everyone else you’ve ever touched. What do you do, write a newsletter? Do you mail that? Does anyone read it?

Today, of course, it’s likely that you don’t mail your newsletter, or even most of your promotional pieces. You send them out by e-mail (using permission-based standards, of course!). Or maybe you realize that even that’s become inefficient and ineffective, because most of your recipients never open those e-mails. Check out the article “FREE IS BAD” here. I wasn’t kidding when I wrote this!

Enter Social Networking. There’s never been a bigger business change, and I’ve never seen a better starter example of why you must begin thinking about these methods than this one.

Sometimes called “Social Networking”, Social Media has gotten a tremendous amount of attention at sites like Twitter and Facebook. And much of that attention—and rightly so—has been bad. But take the idea of Social Media / Social Networking in the right direction and you see something else: not only is “everyone doing it”, but it’s become the most effective way of keeping in touch with people. And keeping them interested in what you’re doing.

Get it? Want to? If you have any questions, just reach out; we’re here to help.

I don’t get to defend telcos very often. AT&T, Verizon, and the like make up rules, enforce government regulations in a way that hurts their customers, and generally are questionable corporate citizens so much that it’s hard to be on their side.

Today I am. Thanks, Google.

AT&T is all over Google for violating Net Neutrality. Umm . . . AGAIN.

Google’s approach on this particular business change is wrong. No, as pointed out in this article from the New York Times they aren’t obligated to do the same things that regulated telcos do. But in holding themselves out as poster children for “don’t be evil” (this is an actual Google slogan, in case you weren’t aware), they’ve taken on an even more important position.

Very bad move, Google.

Hey, I have an idea . . . let’s all default on our mortgages!

It isn’t really a surprise, is it? Enough people now see this kind of thing as  “standard operating procedure” that the Los Angeles Times is reporting on an epidemic of folks walking away from their mortgages as a strategic financial planning maneuver.

So today’s question is this: Is taking whatever actions are necessary to come out ahead an acceptable way of dealing with your existing contractual obligations?

I’d like to counter-argue this point as “it’s what the banks do, so do it to them!”, but it isn’t, actually; what banks do is work according to existing contracts. And yes, they take advantage of every possible loophole to see that their desire for more profits through business change can be made into your life change. But you signed that contract.

On the other hand, there’s no reason in the world you can’t approach your bank to negotiate a new deal.

And that’s the lesson here: business change often comes about when you look at a contract from a new perspective, and renegotiate. Most people we work with see that as too hard, and so they avoid it. The people who hire us to help create their business change know better.

Ask for what you want. There’s no harm in that.

Sounds like fait accompli, does it not? Google enacts one form of business change or another pretty much every day, and every one of their changes puts someone else out of business. Yesterday, they outdid themselves.

Google’s business change (and business changing) idea o’ the day was the introduction of a feature that lets Google Toolbar users comment on web pages they visit. Interesting? Stupid? A little of both? I say “genius”.

If we start with the very idea of people being interested in other people’s comment on the items they’re reading, we immediately get to what’s driving the Internet. For better or worse, we’re all reading the rantings of strangers who may or may not have expertise in the subject they’re writing about. You’re reading this because you’ve come to believe that I have some expertise in business change, business operations, technology, business ideas, or . . . something. OR: you’re here because you followed a link. And that link may have been one I planted out there to draw you here, or it could have been put up by somebody else who thinks I’m smart. BUT YOU’RE HERE.

(Thanks, by the way!)

There are any number of web page commenting platforms out there, and Google is saying something clear by launching their own: they want a piece of everything we do. Now, tie it to their toolbar. The toolbar drives adoption of the new feature, and the feature drives adoption of the toolbar. This may not be business change for Google, but if they change the way you do business, it sure is for you!

My concern is this: Google is controlling which comments actually get posted. They’ve detailed the rules in typically non-specific Google fashion, which in itself is fine, but by being both the people who show us search results and controlling which results are available for search, they’re going a bit too far. I commented earlier this week about Net Neutrality, and Google’s been a big proponent. Now this?

When technology, business change, and ideology cross paths, this is what we get. Let The Answer Guy help manage your business change.

Did you hear the one about the blogger who lost his job because not enough people were reading his words?

It’s not actually a new idea. The companies that aggregate blogs figured out quickly that if nobody was reading what one of their bloggers had to say that they were paying for nothing of value. The Gawker Medias of the world have been ruthless toward their mostly-underpaid staffers for years.

Now, The Washington Post is in on the act.

Is this bad business, or just another example of necessary business change? More of the latter, I’m afraid, but imagine you were writing a column for a big newspaper, were asked to do the extra work of writing a blog, had that blog promoted via means you weren’t told about, didn’t understand, and had no control over, and as a result of not enough traffic finding its way to your blog entries lost the job you had been doing for years. Ouch.

Now here’s a funny extension to things:

A couple of months ago, David Pogue, the New York Times’ lead technology journalist and the 935th most popular blogger in the world, suddenly became a non-force. His ranking dropped to zero. Why? Because somehow, the forces that make the Internet work got confused and though THIS blog was his. Yes, the problem has been fixed.

Which explains how I know that David is only the 935th most popular blogger. And raise the question: if David Pogue ranks 935, what chance do lesser lights have when their bosses start measuring them?

And firing them.

Watch the way you business goes, and the way you manage business change. Watch very carefully.

I hate textbooks. I hate pedagoguery. And I’m having a hard time finding a way through that in a world where computers and the Internet play such a large role.

Actually, I’m having an incredibly easy time of it, but the models aren’t changing fast enough.

I’m now in my personal ‘year four’ of watching children go to college and be told that old models still apply. Textbooks are mandatory, and not only cost too much, but cost WAY too much. Professors want their feet kissed.

So here’s a business change: outlaw textbooks. Then, outlaw people who tell you how to do things and instead create relationships that run both ways (PC-VIP’s Computer Care is an example). Then, look at your business models, and enact the same kind of business change that what I’ve just suggested would force upon schools and textbook manufacturers.

I haven’t seen a good reason for break/fix services in a long time. No one fixes radios or much of anything that’s designed for consumer consumption any more; they just throw them away and start again. Break/fix computer care? How quaint. Buy a new one.

But is it that simple? No; you need to have you data backed up and you need to have a way to restore everything about the way your computer works to the new computer, or you may as well stay with break/fix computer care.

MANAGE your resources, though, and moving on to a more productive world works, whether you’re talking about computers, human resources, or pretty much anything else.

The Internet makes managing your resources easier. Now, if I only had someone to manage my use of the Internet.

And so it Begins. Or Ends. Or Begins to End . . .

Does the company from which you get your internet access have the right to decide what you get or how fast certain things get to you? Maybe. In the USA, though, that right may be about to come to an end.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, an FCC proposal limiting the way that your favorite bit purveyor moves your information gets outlined. Business Change, indeed! Now, the way your stuff gets to you might become set in stone.

Let’s back up: the Verizons and AT&Ts of the world have been threatening to control our web browsing habits for a few years now. Their rationale is that certain things take up more bandwidth, thereby changing both the economies of scale for their businesses and the overall experience that their customers have. So besides charging more for higher-bandwidth customers (an idea I can get behind as long as there are clear and flexible options), your provider wants to be able to exert some control over what you do/say/see/etc. on-line.

Umm . . . NO!

I could pull out a freedom of speech argument here, but I’ll go even lower than that: I don’t want Time Warner, Cablevision, or anyone else telling me what they think is “right”, even if they have a business case. And that doesn’t even touch the real issue: if telecommunications companies control the prioritization of traffic, they will become the ultimate advertising gatekeepers.

Tell your Congressman, Senator, and any other government figure you can reach that this is not OK. Tell them that stopping this business change is what you want. Tell them today.

So here we go: The government is finally going to do what everyone thought they would do months ago: it’s time to control bankers’ compensation packages. Talk about Business Change!

Start here: I think these guys make WAY too much and there’s NO reasonable way to justify it.

Continue: as “investors”, the government has every right to have and attempt to put forth/impose an opinion.

But combine those statements with federal position when Goldman Sachs et.al. started showing good numbers again. There was an outcry, and they said that the goal of the bailout was SO good results would happen, and the position that the government needs to intervene at all fell down, hard.

What’s lacking is consistency. And even in change, consistency matters

OK, So Computers Don’t Care that the ongoing demise of the printed word is their fault. The Internet doesn’t care either. But there sure is a lot of talk about this kind of change floating around lately!

This week, there’s an article in Time Magazine bemoaning not the death of newspapers, but their new form as they struggle for life. And the answer? Maybe newspapers need to be in the local news business.

I was watching RealSports on HBO the other night, and Mr. Gumbel and Mr. DeFord were bemoaning the death of local sports coverage. And their point was well-taken: where will analysis of local content (like sports) come from if newspapers die?

The bigger question of course, is about the form of change, and not merely that change in business, the world at large, the media business in particular, or whatever is happening. Newspapers have always been best at serving their local audiences; listen to how almost everyone talks about USA Today, for example. Do you know anyone that likes it?

As the Internet continues to evolve, we’ll see more and more local content produced. It’s a question of hitting your niche. Newspapers may in fact stop “printing”, but they’ll continue to be needed in some form. And so yeah, computers care about newspapers, because without them growth will stop. And that’s not good for computers, businesses, or you and I.

Imagine someone asked you to completely change the way you do business. Then they offered you insurance to make sure that the business changes you were taking on would work. Would you do it?

Your answer is probably “yes”, if only because of the insurance component. Or maybe it’s still no because change scares you, but the insurance part at least made you consider the idea.

There’s a fascinating article in TIME magazine this week, about how in poor countries where insurance is a new idea it’s viewed with suspicion. The very idea that you are protecting against bad things happening makes insurance a tough sell, even if the ‘price’ is free. Even when, as in the case of poor people receiving micro-loans, it clearly improves their lives! Look; it’s universal: change is hard. Change needs to be managed. But how can you manage something that’s new to you? Seems hard, right?

One part of our company offers managed computer care for small business. Another does traditional break/fix computer care in New York City. The managed computer care option is almost always a lot cheaper and keeps them running better, yet we find that when New York City businesses hire us to handle their computer care they almost always opt for the break/fix model.

Why? Because change is hard to accept, even when it makes sense . . . even when the change is good for you. Even when the change saves you lots of money.

But change is coming. More and more. Embrace change; it’s way better than having change squeeze you.

Q:When is Microsoft just like your wife? A:When they nag you into doing something you don’t want to do.

Did all my female readers just unsubscribe? Come back; I didn’t mean it. That was just the easiest and most-universally understood way I could think of to make my point: Everything has become about influence, and the way you exert it.

Last month, a case in which a Midwestern woman had been accused of a crime that caused a teenager to commit suicide was thrown out of court. Read from the link, and then come back; there’s so much information in that one piece that you’ll want the background.

So now here’s the question: When does intent BECOME intent, and when should the answer to that question matter?

Think about how you feel every time you install a piece of software and are subjected to a license agreement too long to read and too complicated to understand that you have to agree to before you are allowed to install the software. There’s no way to make an informed decision, and you’re being asked to do so under the duress of needing to install the software. Not cool.

Now here’s a court trying to decide on LEGAL grounds (the only grounds they have) whether a woman met the definition of harassment by relating her actions against a little girl to those she took when signing up for a service on the Internet. The two don’t intersect in most people’s mind, and I’d bet money she couldn’t have made an informed decision about the subject even if she had meant to.

So I’ll jump: software companies are bullying you (cyber-bullying you) when they make you agree to those licenses. Maybe you should take them to court on criminal charges. You’d have just as good a chance of beating them as the government had of beating this woman.

Tread carefully . . . or shoot like a loose cannon. Either way, it’s all about change management.

This post may be a bit self-serving; one of the things we do here is medical practice management, and I’m going to talk about a very large problem that many doctors have in running their practices.

We’re hearing more and more stories of doctors who “can’t make ends meet”. And the stories are true, to a point; established businesses are getting into trouble because the manner in which they DO business is collapsing in on them.

Why? Because their business is changing and they don’t know how to use those changes in their favor.

This is an old story. Most doctors didn’t see medicine as a business when they were 20 years old or so and decided to be doctors, and the ones that did see it that way thought they could do business the way existing doctors do it, without making any kind of change. Oops.

But look at the way medicine (as a business) has changed:

Fifty years ago, most people didn’t have health insurance. They went to a doctor, they paid the doctor, and that was that. In the short time that’s passed since then, doctors went from comfortable-but-not-usually-wealthy members of the community to really rich guys to struggling business people who didn’t know what had went wrong changed. Now look at what happened to make this change take place. In short order:

• Insurance Companies starting paying most of their bills
• The Insurance Companies Starting telling doctors how high low their bills could be
• HMOs came along and pushed those payments even lower as a precondition for having access to “their” patients

History lesson aside, when doctors talk about making the same dollars now that they made 15 or 20 years ago for working harder, but having much higher expenses, they’re telling the truth, but remember: the doctors got in bed with first the insurance companies and then the HMOs voluntarily, and now they’re complaining about the outcome.

Now, more and more doctors are deciding to simply not play. And those are the doctors who are succeeding. Several different methods of “not playing” have popped up, and they all work better for both the doctors and their patients than the existing system. If you’re a doctor and want to talk about this, contact us any time.

If you insist on sticking to the old way of doing things, you’re going to have a problem. If there’s a true public option put in place as the USA enacts health care reform under President Obama, you might get away with this (and be paid the kind of salaries doctors earned fifty years ago but also not have to be business people any longer).

But if you fight change by refusing to change, you’re going to be in a lot of trouble.

WHAT?????

With President Obama’s every breath going through the latest round of overexposure reserved for the most powerful man on Earth, let’s take a side trip: Did you know that President Obama’s favorite grass-roots community action group ACORN is teaching underprivileged people how to be prostitutes?

Wow.

First, let me be clear that I have no idea what Barack Obama’s connection to ACORN “really” is. Nor do I care. No one (with the possible exception of Ashton Kutcher) is better connected than President Obama, and owing to his days as a community organizer for ACORN we do know that he had a connection and almost certainly maintains some sort of link to the group. We also know that whatever your politics the idea of community organization is a good one. It helps people better themselves; and more so when they take part in the process.

But columnists and commentators who’d like to seize on any opportunity to disparage the President will be salivating over this piece of news. This guy is one of them. Yikes.

Now, the business question: is ACORN doing anything wrong?

From a “teaching people how to do illegal things is always wrong” perspective, you bet they are. But for everybody who takes that side of the argument there’s someone else talking about the importance of Freedom of Speech. There are, for example, plenty of books and web sites that teach people how to make bombs, and while making them might be a crime and using them almost certainly is, talking about doing things like this is legal, at least in the USA.

And let’s not get started on the implications of statements about how prostitution might be either a good way out of poverty or more broadly a ticket to economic growth for a neighborhood. Amsterdam? The entire state of Nevada? Whatever.

How about this, though: Assuming the prostitutes being taught the trade by ACORN go to Nevada to ply their new trade, and they pay taxes, IS THERE ANYTHING WRONG WITH HAVING TAUGHT THEM BASIC BUSINESS SKILLS?

Take it a step farther: are they being taught to EVADE taxes, or MINIMIZE them? Because the latter is not only legal, but specifically referenced in the US Tax Code. Go ahead; search Google to see.

For me it’s clear that the ACORN people were stepping in pretty odd territory when they dispensed this advice, and again, there should be no attempt to connect President Obama to it. But there’s a really useful lesson here:

Change Takes Many Forms.

“YOU’RE A LIAR”

OK, so that clown has had his moment in the sun under the magnifying glass. Let’s move on.

I’m not sure we’ve really seen much of a proposal from President Obama on Health Care Reform. Oh, he’s given us an outline now, and it goes way farther than we had heard, details-wise, when I last wrote on this subject. But the details are still short, and President Obama’s Health Care Reform Opponents still have plenty to complain about. And complain they will. Out loud. And you’ll listen.

Is “The Squeaky Wheel Gets The Grease” the whole secret?

Allow me to be up-front and proclaim once again that I’m a supporter of President Obama. And I FIRMLY believe that if we don’t reform health care in the USA there are going to be cataclysmic consequences. I’ll go even further: “socialist” as it sounds, I believe that the public option where the government administers health care may be the only one that will work, not because I’m a fan of  that idea but because the existing health care system is SO broken that trying to work within the framework that’s in place won’t yield acceptable results.

None of which is the point.

The point is that if you want to effect change, you need to lead. Vocally. Decisively. Strongly.

Sure, you can try to do things quietly in the background and build consensus, and my internal compass very much prefers that approach. But Machiavelli got it right a few centuries ago: a real Prince accepts his position of leadership and does what has to be done.

Go be a Prince.

I love computers. I especially love how they make my life easier, and I’m willing to pay for the privilege. For example, most of our clients pay us via PayPal, which has the effect of us not having to go to the bank (not to mention cutting down on our collection expenses). We pay for PayPal to handle things for us, in much the same way you might pay your credit card company to handle those transactions.

But what if your employer made non-physical-paycheck mandatory?

Wal-Mart has done exactly that. Now, you can either have your pay put in your bank account via direct deposit, or (presumably if you don’t have a bank account), get it put on account on a pre-paid debit card.

I’d like to call Wal-Mart to task for this, because there are going to be fees involved for the employees who choose the debit card model and they are exactly the kind of people who can afford them the least.

But at the same time, this saves Wal-Mart money, which at some level saves many people money, and also is environmentally sound. In fact, since they are Wal-Mart (and own their own bank anyway) how about if they make a truly free bank account option for their employees, thereby eliminating the problems?

All that’s left then is getting people to accept the change that not receiving a paper check represents. And frankly, that’s an idea whose time has come.

Change is sometimes good in ways that you don’t even need to debate. Embrace this change.