20/20 Hind Sight

That 20/20 article started Bash crowing!

There are only four of us in our tiny company, Brenda, Tiffany, Melinda and me.  Collectively we spend more than one hundred hours a week working with dozens of veterinarians and veterinary professionals, all of whom are driven firstly by their interest in earnestly helping animals and their human companions.  So, it’s especially infuriating to watch ABC’s sensationalized...read more

Exploring Mission Statements in ACTION

Animal Medical of New City's Mission Statement has actions that speak louder than words 

Striving for something more than our day-to-day existence feels great.  Getting out of bed early on your weekend to coach the kid’s baseball team; squeezing in 30 minutes on the treadmill to meet a health goal; making a difference…perhaps even randomly…by assisting a stranger with something they dropped are the substantive parts of our memory. These acts or thoughts, that exist above our efforts to just get-by, underlie our humanity and most importantly our individual sense of worth and goodness.

Company Mission and Value statements identify these higher-self goals that are important to us as individuals and deepen the value of our company to our clients, our employees and…if we’re able to truly realize these aspirations…the world.

Many organizations have taken the time to write Mission Statements, but fail to integrate them effectively into their day-to-day operations.  Take a moment and review the companies below that have shaped their workplace cultures, products, services and their community involvement around looming Missions and Values.  As you review each, ask yourself whether you’d be inclined to apply for a job with them; whether working there would be fun; whether you would work harder to help such a company be successful; whether or not customers would be more likely to enjoy the company’s products and services; and whether or not the company is more likely to be competitive.  

But don't stop there...companies that have successfully disseminated goals and values that extend beyond mere growth have set a tone for all decision making at the company.  These companies better understand what questions to ask when interviewing candidates, what to look for in resumes and behavior.  Their training programs are written and executed through the filter of underlying principals.  Stalemated management decisions can be resolved by examining the issue against the backdrop of the Mission.  One fine company even selected their stationary based on their Mission, deciding that if their values are to bleed through all they do, perhaps their Mission Statement should as well; so they selected a paper with their Mission Statement as a watermark.

Whole Foods:  Here’s a link to Whole Food’s Mission, Vision and Values page.  Take note of a plan that loans money to small-scale farmers to help them be more productive.  What kind of an impact does this outside-of-the-box thinking have on Whole Food’s supply chain? Its reputation in the community?  Its visibility?  In an age when some consumers are making drastic changes to their eating habits and life style based on sustainability, what does this move do to client loyalty?  How do you presume this idea came about?  Do you believe it was the brainchild of their CEO or a product of a brainstorming session in a management meeting?  What jump-started the thinking process?

Chipotle:  Their latest video has had over 6.6 million You Tube viewers and has been covered widely in global publications like the LA Times and the Washington Post. It has been identified as a ground breaking advertising campaign.  After watching the video, look at this clip that describes how the project was conceived.  Do the film producers identify the Chipotle Mission Statement as a source of inspiration for the film?  What about the advertising company; is there anything in the video that suggests that Chipotle’s commitment to its Mission informed which advertising firm to hire?

Apple:  In an article entitled Greatest Business Decisions of All Time, the choice to bring Steve Jobs back to Apple to replace it’s management board is cited as a game-changing milestone in the company’s journey to world-wide dominance.  With or without a Mission Statement, what is the impact of choosing a leader who deeply understands the company’s reason for being and who can bring the same largess of mind to its daily operations that it did to its company’s creation?

Samsung: In the 90’s Samsung paid some of its employees to move, live and immerse themselves in diverse cultures all over the world.  They didn’t have to work there; they just had to live and observe.  Their feedback helped Samsung understand the needs of people all over the earth. Years subsequent to this, Samsung embarked on a successful global marketing plan. The chairman of the time, Lee Kun-Hee was responsible for this novel decision. Do you believe that Mr. Kun-Hee intrinsically believed in the value of understanding a consumer and their needs?

Starbucks:  This company’s Mission is ‘to inspire and nurture the human spirit, one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time’.  Starbucks has a policy that everyone who sits in their café can have a free refill of coffee.  How does this business decision dovetail with their Mission?  Follow the Mission page link above and review the additional ways Starbucks brings their goals alive each day.

Calvert Investments:  While most of Wall Street’s financial companies are grabbing at financial goals, this company is underlining a set of very different values.  Review this company’s Mission and Values page.  Take a look at the picture that’s positioned at the top.  Where was this taken?  Who is in it?  Does this page present a company that is talking about responsibilities or acting on them?  What do their actions say to their employees?  To their clients?  Based on what you’ve read on this page are you more or less likely to consider their services?  Review the ‘five key strengths’ on the right side of their Mission and Values page, then follow through the hyperlinks.  Once you have reviewed each, ask yourself whether or not these five, ordinary terms they’ve listed have been thought through or only provided cursory consideration.  How did this company come to understand each of these strengths in the terms described?

While a successful Mission Statement might be difficult to articulate, its contents are already inside of you.  Stating what you want to accomplish is essential, but the words ultimately pale to the actions required to make your Mission live.   If you are struggling with finding the right words and phrasing to state your Mission, focus on actions within your company that might do the talking for you. Once you see these higher-self goals playing out, inspiration will teach you how to say them to the world. 

Give Me Five!

Five fingers and five minutes.  That’s about all it takes to sweep team members up in the wake of your appreciation and kind feedback.

Last night, I celebrated.  With the help of Brenda Tassava, my business partner, we completed our sole employee’s first performance review.  I use the word ‘celebrate’ deliberately, but it’s not my choice.  Tiffany, the ‘reviewee’, is the one who came up with it.  She said, “You shouldn’t call it a review.  You should call it a celebration, because that’s what this feels like.”

Tiffany, I didn’t tell you at the time, but I don’t think anyone has ever made me feel prouder.

As you can imagine, I spend a great deal of time talking to practice managers and owners about the review process.  When you give a topic that much airtime, it’s incredibly important to your own credibility that you’re able to walk your talk.  Though I had finished the outline for Tiffany’s ‘celebration’ weeks before, on my way to the meeting, I began to doubt my approach.  What would this review accomplish?  Indeed, what was the purpose of it?  Was I really going to sit across from an intelligent, educated, self-sufficient adult and rattle off a list of things I thought she needed to work on?  What in the world was that going to accomplish?  My company is only three years old and though Brenda and I have spent a lot of time reflecting upon our Mission, our goals, and our strategic plan, I can tell you that we are still far from clear on what we’re doing on a day- to-day basis.  How could we be? Everything we touch is new: new technology, new business relationships, new educational venues, new company services.  The only thing routine about our lives is that nothing is routine.  We are continually adjusting to meet the various client demands and technological glitches that all of us face in this modern and complicated age of service.  And from this free falling state, I’m going to dictate to Tiffany where she should be? Come on!

Our review was a celebration because we affirmed what we were doing together, not what she was doing.  Instead of sitting down and saying ‘three nice things for every negative remark’, we reviewed our Mission Statement and goals and asked one another how we were working as a team to accomplish them. 

We talked about the job description I had designed for her.  There were objective bullets on it: “You have to be available to work weekends and after-hours to accommodate our clients’ needs”, but mostly it listed the macro and more subjective points of what we wanted her to do: “Thread our Mission Statement through your work” and “work positively with other members of the team”. We spent time talking about what we believed these sentences meant and how we believed they applied to our day-to-day work. This wasn’t a review for her.  This was a discovery for us.

It wasn’t all a love fest.  Tiffany makes grammatical errors in our print work and it bugs me. When she doesn’t proof her work it can make our company look slipshod and to be frank, it ticks me off.   How do I talk to her about without making her feel bad and ashamed?  Here’s how.  I reflected upon my own ability to produce error-free work and realized that I too have a problem with proofing.  If error-free work is so important to me, then why don't I do it?  I realized that the solution to my problem wasn’t to give her unrealistic direction like, “be more careful”, because clearly that wasn’t working for me.  The solution was to figure it out together. “Let’s agree that we are going to check everything three times.  At least one of the checks will be completed from a printed copy and by another individual” was what we came up with.  Instead of tearing her down, our ‘celebration’ provided us both a chance to build something up.

I’m far from perfect.  Using Tiffany’s annual celebration as a chance to reflect upon all of our efforts, instead of a demoralizing list of personal deficits or a ‘good marks and bad marks’ score card, was a way that I made myself better.  Last night, I formed a stronger relationship with a capable, smart and fantastic individual that I’m so very lucky to work with.  Together we broadened our company’s ability to succeed.  As Tiffany herself said, “These are great!  We should do them more often!”

I don't have time to talk now

I was on the phone with a Pfizer rep the other day and she said to me, “Remember when we used to come home and the answering machine light was on?  That was it!  That was the only thing we had to deal with!” 

Boy, did she take me back.  There I was, 1996, opening the door to my apartment, just praying that that little red light was on…that meant I was remembered and loved…didn’t matter by whom.  It’s hard to believe, but 1996 was 17 years ago and a LOT has changed.

We’re busier, right?  It’s not just me, is it?  I work from home a lot, frequently on the weekends.  I send emails to business counterparts and they reply…in minutes!  Since when did everybody pick up a Sunday shift?

My colleague Brenda Tassava took a snap shot of a dry erase board at one of her practices.  Four out of the six surgeries listed were to be ‘texted’ their pet’s status update.  Now in addition to everything else we do, we have to track ‘preferred method of communication’? 

It still blows my mind that people are keeping in touch with their veterinary practices using Twitter.  One of my hospitals installed a ‘live chat’ button on their website page.  Can you imagine?  When I worked at the front desk, it was EVERYTHING I could do to keep up with the phones, now I have a live chat to work too?!  Someone hand me my nerve pills!  I asked the young maniac, the pert twenty-something at the desk, why she pushed for the feature and she happily chirped, “Oh I’m addicted to my phone.  I don’t want to call people…I don't have time for that.  I want answers now.”

I don’t think that’s what Alexander Graham Bell had in mind, Sweetie, but I suppose you have a point.  We are talking in a whole different way…and in a whole different language.

Who reads ads any more?  We don’t read ads.  When’s the last time you opened a phone book and thought to your self,  “Hmmmm, now there’s a nice quarter page layout on a plumber.  I think that’s my man!”  We don’t do that.  We get on the old Facebook page and we holler out into cyberspace, “Hey, my five hundred friends…who knows of a plumber I can trust”.  I could drive you past the same billboard for a week and you’d be hard pressed to pass a test on it’s content, but if I ‘friend’ request you on Facebook, I’m willing to bet you pick up that puppy in less than an hour.

The good news is, provided we strip away the antiquated work systems that we have in place to handle communication (“Mary Ann, you sit up front and answer the phones, Jessie and I will be in the back waiting for the pets to come in”), this way of interacting is not only manageable, it plays directly into the hands of the small business owner.  Online communication provides an extraordinarily intimate and personalized way of reaching our clients and if it’s one thing that small veterinary professionals have in spades, it’s an interest in caring.  Right?  I mean, let’s get honest here.  We GIVE the stuff away because we care so much.  When big business sends us entreaties to ‘like us’, we smell a sales pitch.  Done right, the same entreaty from our veterinarian is a welcome invitation to know someone better that we’re already in love with! 

Social Media and the communication tools of the 21^st Century have the ability to give your practice unheard-of visibility and exposure.  Get busy talking.  I’ll be interested in reading up on your progress…on my phone (!)

California Social

It was during a VHMA conference in San Antonio...I was sitting next to Brenda Tassava, author of Social Media for Veterinary Professionals and we were listening to a lecturer asking the group for a show of hands:  "How many of you have Facebook pages for your business?"  A smattering of arms rose into the air ahead of me.  I thought to raise my own, but I thought, 'what for? Yes, I have a Facebook page for my practice, but I don't know what I'm doing with it.'  And by the lack of enthusiasm with which the attendees ahead of me were holding their arms up, I could tell they weren't much better off.  That's when I turned to Brenda and asked her, 'you have a Facebook page for your practice?'

Brenda gave me a quizzical look, "Of course I have a page for my practice. I wrote the book, Social Media for Veterinary Professionals didn't I?  You think I made that junk up?"

Well, then we should put together a class where we teach people how to do that"

Brenda shook her head and looked up at the ceiling.  "Bash, that's what I do.  That's what I do all the time.  Where have you been?"  She grabbed an arm of her eyewear and wiggled them a bit.  "See, purple glasses. I do these kinds of lectures all the time.  I'm the very definition of a Social Media Maven."

Yeah, but we should put on a real class.  Not one of those ones where people sit around and listen to you talk.  We want them to learn."

"Are you outta your cotton pickin..."

"Shhhhhh", Debbie Hill (two seats over) hissed.

"Are you outta your mind?", Brenda began again, this time softer but all the more angry.  “I pack houses, Buster Brown and don't you forget it.”

"I'm not talking about that.  I'm talking about a class where people have hands on experience.  We should teach them all the big applications, Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, blogging.  Provide them with computers to play with.  Walk them through the process in real time. Make the class accessible to the most computer unfriendly veterinarian around. 

“Call me when you put it together, Einstein, but remember,” she added turning back to the lecturer and clearly ending the discussion, "I'm booked through April of next year."

Well, I'm here to let you know that this 'Einstein' did put it together.  And we got Brenda to help us all right.  Even added the inimitable Brie Messier and Phillip Barnes to the mix. We put sell out classes together at Pace University in New York City, the award winning Northstar Veterinary in Robbinsville, NJ and the gargantuan Oradell Animal Hospital in Paramus. Later we rebooted our tour for the gregarious and fun-loving Hodges’ at Valley Central in Allentown, Pa and the Pennsylvania Veterinary Medical Association at their annual region-wide veterinary symposium, the Keystone Conference.  At each location, you could see that we had achieved our goal.  All around the room, the 'lights' were going on in people's heads.  We had given them the information they needed to really understand what they were doing with Social Media marketing.

Now we're headed out West to Los Angeles and San Diego.  We've added Pinterest to the list of important applications that you'll learn and jazzed up our instructor roster with the addition of Vincent Gimenez, a teacher whose experience in technology is outmatched only by his willingness to help his students.  But probably best of all is this:  because we are partnering with our good friends, the PVMA, and because of educator's expertise int he area, California attendees will receive SIX Continuing Education credits from the California Board of Veterinary Medicine.  That's SIX continuing education credits, breakfast, lunch, a midday snack and a full day of education for the price of just one ticket!  How can you beat that?

Brenda...never one to be undone, has an idea.  "I know how you can beat that."

"Oh yeah", says I.  "How?"

"Well if you are a current VetStreet subscriber OR if you would like to be a VetStreet subscriber, you could contact your VetStreet Rep for the promo--"

"Hey!  That's supposed to be confidential!"

Brenda smiles and looks up at the ceiling..."well, I'm just saying..."

"Never mind about that.  Here's the link to the ticket page, folks.  And never mind what she said about the VetStreet people.  Forget that she said anything about that." 

See you in Los Angeles and San Diego ;)