Answer Guy Central

What’s huge, takes up too much of your time, and delivers a constant stream of information you don’t want?

Facebook.

“The” Social Networking Site accounts for fully one in every fourteen pages viewed on the Internet, and if you use Facebook you’ve noticed that a lot of what it thinks should be important to you just plain isn’t. Yesterday, Facebook decided that since I follow The President of The United States, I’d be interested in Lady Gaga and Megan Fox:

At least I hope Facebook had drawn a connection between Barack Obama, Megan Fox, and Lady Gaga. Somehow, that bothers me just a little bit less than the two celebrities showing up on my home page randomly, or Facebook having accepted money to shill celebrity accounts.

Yes: social networking has now come to whether it’s worse that the President of The United States is a celebrity like Lady Gaga or Megan Fox, or whether Facebook is selling placement in my supposedly-personalized stream of information.

A great idea is getting worse, and worse, and worse. I thought it was bad when Jessica Biel’s placement as the most dangerous celebrity on The Internet was NEWS, but if mass-targeted news is unimportant at least the Internet makes it so you can move on to only the things that are important to you, right?

Hmm . . . I guess that’s wrong.

It’s more important than ever that you maintain laser focus on what’s important to your business. And more and more, social networking is the most important part of marketing. Sadly, though, the original purpose of social networking (you know . . . social networking ?) is disappearing, as “your” pages are co-opted by marketing interests.

Now go out there and friend somebody. And if you can pull it off, President Barack Obama is still a good place to start.

When I grow up, I want to be half as adept as President Barack Obama is at the art of business negotiation.

In announcing his agreement with British Petroleum getting the oil conglomerate to put aside $20 billion to fund clean-up and damages from the oil spill from BP ‘s well in the Gulf of Mexico, President Obama pointed out that by law, BP’s liability was technically limited to just $75 million. While there’s no way BP would have gotten away with hiding behind that shield, they could have just waited until the lawsuits started rolling in and dealt with them then. And they’ll have to anyway, so why give up $20 billion ahead of time?

The answer could have been that by giving up the $20 billion now, BP had negotiated for legislation that really and truly capped their liability at that new level. But no; President Obama was clear and specific: no such limit has been set.

So why did BP deal?

Let’s assume there was a public relations angle. The bad press BP has been amassing has been immense, and making the settlement is a damage control filter that makes both British Petroleum and the US Government seem a bit more human and a bit more “on their games”.

But the real answer is likely that Barack Obama spoke to BP and intimated that the US Government would stop buying oil from BP unless they made a gesture. Or twenty billion gestures.

Brilliant, simple negotiating based on non-immediately-apparent leverage. I’ve been disappointed in the way a lot of Barack Obama’s presidency has gone to date, but this business change and the negotiation behind it were simply . . . perfect.

President Obama is in a war or words with Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. I find it unseemly, but that’s not important.

I bring up the subject because I happened across this article in today’s New York Times, and attached to it was a (slightly off-topic) comment on the Supreme Court’s ruling of last January that essentially gave corporations the right to make unlimited campaign contributions. And it asked a reasonable enough question:

If Corporations and People Are The Same Thing, Do Corporations have the Right to Bear Arms?

I referred to this Supreme Court Ruling in a recent post, and now I’m thinking: why is it so important to pick the correct business structure? Are Corporations really the same as people? The Right To Bear Arms example shows pretty clearly that the answer, if there is one, is “no”. But legally, corporations enjoy the same rights as people, don’t they?

A corporation and a person aren’t really the same thing, for a simple reason; it’s illegal to kill a person, but the board of directors of a corporation can end its life any time.

That said: our laws say a corporation has the same rights as a person, so until that changes (not gonna happen!), we work within the system to create change. Business change in this context looks something like defining what “the right to bear arms”—or any other right, for that matter—means to your business.

Something’s gotta give. Something is going to. Business Change isn’t just an idea; it’s become an imperative.

In a world where the health care we provide for people isn’t even good enough for animals, where famous columnists like Nicholas Kristof and economists like Paul Krugman—very different guys with diverse right and left leanings— are stating the same thing, it’s time.

Politically speaking, it’s a hot potato. The number of people you cross by passing health care reform is huge and the number you cross by not doing so is equally high. And not being from California and looking at our left-coast liberal contingency in exactly the stereotypical way that we East Coasters usually do I see the nearly-forty-percent-jump in that group’s health insurance premiums and . . . shrug. But if President Obama fails to get a meaningful health care reform bill passed, and soon, very bad things are going to happen.

Doctors can’t afford to be doctors any more. Remember when you wished you had listened to mom and become one? I do. And I also remember being at a party with a very successful cardiologist over twenty years ago and him complaining that the best and brightest weren’t going to medical school any more. Things haven’t improved.

Be smarter than the US Congress. When things change in your business, have the nerve to do something about it. Watch for Business Change every day, and be fearless about enacting it.

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.

“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.