www.silkinmanagementgrp.com

March 9, 2010

MORE ON HEALTH CARE REFORM

Filed under: Legislation — Scott Barnard @ 9:15 pm

We all know that the number one issue of the day, at least the number one issue being pushed by Washington is reforming health care. Since Silkin Management Group delivers practice management consulting and training to private health care practices, this legislation has been something that we are watching closely. As a consultant for Silkin Management Group I want to stay on top of this issue so I can advise my clients appropriately.

Today I read an interesting article in the New York Times that pointed out how the possibility of federal regulations on the cost of insurance premiums could end up conflicting with what insurance commissioners in each state are mandated by law to do. I believe this is part of why many are arguing for health care reforms to be decided and instituted at the state level rather than a sweeping “everybody is the same” approach on a federal level.

You can access this article at nytimes.com: State Insurance Experts See Flaw in Obama’s Plan to Curb Health Premiums

The essence of the conflict, as the author points out is, “Federal officials will focus on holding down premiums while state officials focus on the solvency of insurers, the ultimate consumer protection.”

I think you’ll find the article presents an interesting way to look at one aspect of the health care reform debate. I’ll be referring my interested Silkin Management Group clients to the article to get their feedback as well.

Scott Barnard
Consultant for Silkin Management Group

Silkin Management Group has delivered management consulting and training to over 4000 clients since 1982. For more information about Silkin Management Group and its services, visit our website at www.silkinmanagementgroup.com or contact us at info@silkinmanagementgroup.com

March 2, 2010

GLOBAL WARMING

Filed under: Global Warming — Larry Silver @ 7:03 pm

SOME FASCINATING DATA

PART 1 & 2 & 3
I ran across an extremely interesting and fascinating article about global warming, climate change, bio-fuels, etc. that I thought I would pass along to readers of the Silkin Management Group blog sites. This is a fairly long article so I will split it up into several sections that can be read over the following several days. Part 1 was posted on February 26th at: silkinmanagementgroup.blogspot.com. Part 1 & 2 were posted on March 1st at blog.silkinmanagementgroup.com For ease of reading, Part 1, 2 are repeated here with Part 3 following below them. The next several sections will come out over the next few days. Part 4 can be found on March 3rd at practicemanagementblog.com

What is written here is likely to be taken as either very controversial, a “conspiracy theory” or hogwash by many. I am not taking sides one way or the other on it, but I thought it was interesting and relevant and well documented enough to present it to our readers to take a look at for themselves. I certainly found it eye opening.

Silkin Management Group is a management consulting company that has delivered management consulting and training to thousands of health care practices and small businesses over the last thirty years. Our blogs tend to be about relevant business issues such as marketing, dealing with staff, hiring and training, etc. But, when we run across them, we also like to present big picture items that effect us all. This is one of them.

For more information about Silkin Management Group and its services, visit our website at www.silkinmanagementgroup.com or contact us at info@silkinmanagementgroup.com.

Here is PART 1, 2 & 3 of this article, entitled “Anatomy of a Con Job”.

Larry Silver
President, Silkin Management Group

ANATOMY OF A CON JOB

“In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.” —George Orwell

PART 1:

If you look with your understanding, the crimes against humanity are written across the rotting visages of Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Like a couple of aging prostitutes, these leading architects of twentieth-century evil still sell their wares to those with an insatiable lust for the power of the crown.

THE CLUB OF ROME

Birth Mother of the Environmental Movement

The moldy twosome have something else in common. Both have been active members of an international think tank from the dark side of the force called the Club of Rome. Founded at the Rockefeller’s estate in Bellagio, Italy, in 1968, some of the other fraternity brothers and sisters include Al Gore, David Rockefeller, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, and Mikhail Gorbachev.

And there is no one better to give you the short version of the Club’s agenda than Gorby himself:

“The threat of environmental crisis will be the ‘internal disaster key’ that will unlock the New World Order.”

Who let this guy out of Lubyanka?

Their more precisely stated goal is population control. The solution? Create an environmental catastrophe like, oh, say, “global warming” and blame it on the planet’s most heinous villain—man himself.

But I should let them tell it:

“In searching for the new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. . . . But in designating them as the enemy, we fall into the trap about which we have already warned, namely mistaking symptoms for cause. All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changing attitudes and behaviors that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.”

Sounds like a good plan . . . if you’re Darth Vader.

In 1972, the Club took the world stage with the publication of a book they had commissioned to be written by a group of MIT scientists. It was called The Limits to Growth. Examining the planet’s population growth in relation to available resources, the report concluded that the planet would run out of resources sometime in the next 100 years, resulting in a catastrophic decline in population and industrial production.

As one reviewer put it, the authors examine

“. . . the impact of humanity on the world ecology and of steps taken toward remediating the accelerating approach to a train wreck that is mankind’s ill-managed and uncontrolled ‘footprint’ on this planet’s environment.”

Still, these trends and their consequences could be altered, it argued; we had to be less, do less and have less. The brand for this Orwellian path to planetary salvation was sustainable development.

Heavily promoted, the book reached opinion leaders in political, scientific and economic circles as it exploded around the planet like the Harry Potter of environmentalism. It sold 12 million copies in thirty languages despite the fact that the research had all the scientific rigor of a plagiarized term paper for a freshman biology class.

“An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.” —Mohandas Gandhi

Assailed by top scientists, the research was shoddy in the extreme. Population expert and author Professor Julian Simon said, “The Limits to Growth has been blasted as foolishness or fraud by almost every economist who has read it closely or reviewed it in print.”

Yale economist Henry Wallich reviewed the book saying, “. . . the quantitative content of the model comes from the authors’ imagination, although they never reveal the equations that they used.”

But it is a PR world and with the publication of this book, the modern environmental movement was born. Midwifed to life in a blanket of deceit, it was yet hailed as the savior, not of mankind, but of the planet it claimed was being fried to a crisp by humanity’s toxic binge of carbon dioxide.

The scientific fraud is its own malice, but few were able to see the underlying strategy—that the book would serve as the foundation of a global public relations campaign that would mesmerize legislators, educators, and countless organizations of goodwill and would eventually set the stage for the biggest rip-off in human history. But I am getting ahead of myself.

This then was Con #1: The scientific basis of the book that launched the environmental movement calling for “sustainable development” and a reduction of man’s leper-like carbon footprint on the planet was, and is, a scam, a hoax, a falsehood—environmental snake oil.

“Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

Which leads us to the second piece of the puzzle, Con #2. Who’d have thought that . . .

OIL

Is Not a Fossil Fuel

PART 2:

The immigration officer at Sheremetyevo took my passport and studied it for some time. He didn’t say anything; he just thumbed through the passport and then looked at a computer screen for a couple of lifetimes before stamping it and grunting me on to customs.

The KGB was still manning the borders the first time I went to Moscow shortly after the fall of Communism. Letting Americans walk freely into Mother Russia without official surveillance was driving the man crazy but he had to keep a lid on it.

In fact, Communism had been officially dead for only a few months when the shock troops of capitalism started storming the gates of opportunity in the former Soviet Union. The ghosts of Marx, Lenin and Stalin stalked the halls of the Politburo in horror as entrepreneurs from the United States, Japan and Western Europe tried to cut deals for every asset in Mother Russia that wasn’t nailed down. Banking, hospitality, timber and precious metals came under assault by peculiar partnerships of western capitalists and thugs from the once mighty KGB. During those early years, when Yeltsin (God love him) and his vodka were in office, it was a free-for-all.

The Oklahoma land rush of the 1890s had nothing on Moscow in 1992.

But even then, the oil industry stayed under control of the state—directly or indirectly. In fact, as recently as 2003, the bare-chested former KGB colonel and current premier—soon to be president of Russia . . . again—Vladimir Putin squashed a buyout deal between Russia’s Yukos and Exxon, the largest company in the world.

To understand the reason for this, we return momentarily to the early days of the Cold War when an isolated Soviet Union tasked their top scientists to identify the actual source of oil. Not a weekend homework assignment. After considerable research, in 1956, Russian scientist Professor Vladimir Porfir’yev announced that “crude oil and natural petroleum gas have no intrinsic connection with biological matter originating near the surface of the earth. They are primordial [originating with the earth’s formation] materials which have been erupted from great depths.”

If your eyeballs didn’t fall out when you read that, you might want to read it again.

He said oil doesn’t come from anything biologic, not, as conventional wisdom dictates, from the fossilized remains of dinosaurs and/or ancient plant matter. It comes from very deep in the earth and is created by a biochemical reaction that subjected hydrocarbons (elements having carbon and hydrogen) to extreme heat and intense pressure during the earth’s formation.

Russians referred to this oil (any oil, really) as “abiotic oil” because it is not created from the decomposition of biological life forms, but rather from the chemical process continually occurring inside the earth.

I know, easy for Porfir’yev to say. But it turns out it was more than just a theory.

Because shortly after the Russians discovered this, they started drilling ultra-deep wells and finding oil at 30,000 and 40,000 feet below the earth’s surface. These are staggering depths, and far below the depth at which organic matter can be found, which is 18,000 feet.

Interesting, eh?

The Russians applied their theory of abiotic deep-drilling technology to the Dnieper-Donets Basin, an area understood for the previous half a century to be barren of oil. Of sixty wells drilled there using abiotic technology, thirty-seven became commercially productive—a 62 percent success rate compared with the roughly 10 percent success rate of a U.S. wildcat driller. The oil found in the basin rivaled Alaska’s North Slope.

Let’s say they had a good hair day.

But it doesn’t stop there, not by a long shot. Since their earlier discoveries, the major Russian oil companies have quietly drilled more than 310 ultra-deep wells and put them into production.

Result? Russia recently overtook Saudi Arabia as the planet’s largest oil producer.

Maybe they are onto something.

Though there were papers written on this early on, almost all were in Russian and few made it to the West. And those that did were laughed at.

No more. With Russia’s rejection of the Exxon-Yukos deal (Putin did not want this technology and their abiotic oil experts exported to the West) and the access to information now available on the Internet, the word has begun to spread rapidly to the West. Still, it hasn’t taken hold yet.

Why not? This is huge. Oil is not a fossil fuel! And it’s renewable! Wow!

There are a couple of factors at play here.

Big oil has a vested interest in pushing the idea that oil is scarce, hard to find, and thus costly to produce—all of which, of course, means increased revenues and profits. This is a story in itself, but not the primary focus here.

More relevant to our story is the fact that a cornerstone of the environmental movement is this: oil is a fossil fuel, a fossil fuel that is scarce, and is in limited and ever decreasing supply. Moreover, its production creates carbon dioxide. Therefore its use, for virtually all productive purposes—agricultural production, real estate construction, auto, truck, train and air transportation, utilities, heating, cooling, communication, ad infinitum (all of them)—must be curtailed.

According to the thirty-year update of the book The Limits to Growth,

“A prime example of a nonrenewable resource is fossil fuels, whose limits should be obvious, although many people, including distinguished economists, are in denial over the elementary fact. More than 80 percent of year 2000 commercial energy use comes from nonrenewable fossil fuels—oil, natural gas, and coal. The underground stocks of fossil fuels are going continuously and inexorably down. . . Peak gas production will certainly occur in the next 50 years, the peak for oil production will occur much sooner, probably within the decade.”

Scary stuff. Frightening. But as false as a hooker’s smile.

Oil is not a fossil fuel.

And it is “renewable.”

While I have never been a fan of Putin the Macho, the Russians have demonstrated the accuracy of their theory in the only place it counts—the oil field. Oil is not only abiotic, it continues to populate fields that were understood to be as dry of petroleum as a desert wind. In fact, some scientists believe it is the centrifugal force of the planet’s rotation that forces abiotic oil toward the planet’s surface on a continuous basis.

“There are some things the general public does not need to know, and shouldn’t. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.” —the late Katherine Graham, owner of the Washington Post

So Con #2 is that oil is a fossil fuel (which it isn’t), that it is scarce and being depleted (which it isn’t), that it is nonrenewable (which it isn’t), and that, as a result, catastrophe looms (which it doesn’t) unless we drastically curtail our use of petroleum.

Lies one and all, which lead us to the granddaddy of con—Con #3:

GLOBAL WARMING—CLIMATE CHANGE

PART 3:

The heart-wrenching icon of a lone polar bear hovering in solitude somewhere in the rapidly disappearing Arctic has become the environmental movement’s most poignant pitchman.

The pitch, however, is bogus. The bears are booming.

According to the Wall Street Journal,

“Nearly everyone agrees that there are more polar bears now than when scientists first started counting: Estimates put the population between 20,000 and 25,000, up from several thousand 50 years ago. In Canada, where two-thirds of the world’s bears live, most populations have grown during the past two or three decades. Arctic residents say they are now bumping into bears wherever they turn.”

The polar bear “debate” cuts to the heart of the foundation on which the environmental movement rests: global warming.

While the Club of Rome’s clarion call for “sustainable development” in The Limits to Growth turned out to be more than a little thin on scientific credibility, and the theory that oil is a scarce and rapidly depleting fossil fuel is untrue, the holy grail of the environmental movement is Global Warming or, as they have renamed it due to the last eleven years of embarrassingly cooler temperatures, Climate Change.

It is the creed upon which the movement is built.

The scripture is as follows: The burning of fossil fuels produces carbon dioxide. This and other “greenhouse” gases create global warming, which will destroy the planet.

To wit, the production of these gases must be “capped.”

Legislation to suppress their use is a first step. Population control, a reduction of the planet’s population, is the real answer because man makes these gases. Fewer people mean less greenhouse gas. Less greenhouse gas means less global warming. Less warming means the earth is saved.

Amen.

Greenhouse gases, by the way, are any of the atmospheric gases, such as water vapor and carbon dioxide, that are said to contribute to the greenhouse effect.

The greenhouse effect is a name for the phenomenon outlined above whereby the earth’s atmosphere traps solar radiation and thereby overheats the planet. According to the theory, these gases in the atmosphere allow sunlight to pass through to the earth, but then absorb the heat radiated back from the planet’s surface.

Shazam! Global warming.

Sounds good. Cut CO2 and you save the world.

A clearly identified evil with an action plan to handle it.

Kind of like the Inquisition—fry the heretics, purify the faith.

Today, global warming heretics are burned in the media not at the stake, but the dogma is no less strident, no less authoritarian, and no less despotic.

SCIENCE SETTLED

Al Gore is the Moses of global warming. He, along with the high priests of the movement, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has pronounced that the science regarding man-made global warming is “settled.” There’s nothing further to discuss: global warming is real; man-made CO2 is the cause; carbon production must be capped. Done deal.

Al and the IPCC are simpatico on this—which is cool. Harmony in the ranks.

THE OREGON PETITION

But here’s the deal: 31,486 scientists have signed a document called the Oregon Petition lambasting the shoddy research behind global warming, stating quite simply that “. . . any human contribution to climate change has not been demonstrated.”

This is not a gang of political hacks, or George Soros–funded “activists.” No, the signatories include 3,667 atmospheric, environmental and Earth scientists; 4,796 chemists; 2,924 biologists and agricultural scientists; 903 math and computer scientists; and 9,992 in engineering and general science.

Of these, 9,029 have PhDs.

The petition states that there is no convincing scientific evidence that the human release of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases is causing or will cause global warming.

It goes on to say that there is substantial scientific evidence demonstrating that atmospheric carbon dioxide produces countless beneficial effects on the plant and animal populations of Earth. (In one of Mother Nature’s most spectacular touches of environmental magic, plants convert carbon dioxide and sunlight into oxygen—you know, the stuff we breathe.)

SENATE COMMITTEE ON THE ENVIRONMENT

In March of 2009 the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works posted a report of more than 700 international scientists dissenting on the theory of man-made global warming. Several of those joining in on this report were current or former IPCC members.

Several other groups of scientists have issued statements blasting the lack of credible science behind the theory that man-made carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere contribute to global warming. Examples include the Statement by Atmospheric Scientists on Greenhouse Warming, the Leipzig Declaration on Global Climate Change, and the Heidelberg Appeal.

THE IPCC COOKS THE BOOKS

You will notice, if you read articles about the environment, that “facts” regarding global warming invariably cite the IPCC as their source

In short, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the planet’s opinion leader on the subject of man-made climate change.

Or at least they were.

On November 19, 2009, one of the largest scientific scandals in history exploded across the international media when thousands of internal e-mails were leaked exposing the organization’s blatant manipulation of climate data. The e-mails revealed that the IPCC had skewed bucketloads of climate information to promote the idea that global warming was a result of an increase in man-made carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

This wasn’t a bunch of stoners in a frat house passing the filched answers to the Geology 101 midterm around. These guys were recognized as the world’s leading “authorities” on climate change, caught red-handed in an intentional plot to mislead environmental groups, governments and the public at large about the current and future state of the planet’s temperature.

This brief excerpt from Canada’s National Post rather tells the story.

“The Climategate Emails describe how a small band of climatologists cooked the books to make the last century seem dangerously warm.

“The emails also describe how the band plotted to rewrite history as well as science, particularly by eliminating the Medieval Warm Period, a 400 year period that began around 1000 AD.

“The Climategate Emails reveal something else, too: the enlistment of the most widely read source of information in the world—Wikipedia—in the wholesale rewriting of this history.”

THE MEDIEVAL WARM PERIOD

Like a cheap Las Vegas lounge act, the pernicious cult of climate change ideologues at the IPCC desperately tried to hide the Medieval Warm Period (MWP)—ditch it, make it disappear. This was the warmest period in modern recorded history and is very well known by climatologists.

Trying a page from Houdini’s playbook, the IPCC created a phony graph of historical temperatures that made the MWP—presto!—vanish.

Cute.

You see, during the MWP temperatures were much warmer than they are today. Agriculture flourished and the Norsemen, taking advantage of the ice-free seas, settled Greenland. There is no evidence of a rise in sea level at that time. None. And ice sheets around Greenland were largely absent. Greenland, get it?

Temperatures soared, but where was the man-made carbon dioxide? Oil had yet to be discovered, factories had not been constructed, and the first Model T was centuries into the future.

There followed a mini ice age, and by 1500 the settlements in Greenland were gone and the Thames froze all the way to London.

There was no “man-made” factor in any of this. These ebbs and flows of the earth’s temperatures were all a product of naturally occurring phenomena, which is discussed in detail below.

But as to the IPCC,

“Research data on climate change do not show that human use of hydrocarbons is harmful. To the contrary, there is good evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful.” —The Oregon Petition

FEARMONGERS

In fact, the same mindset that is now promoting the catastrophic consequences of global warming were using the same arguments, almost word for word, to promote the dire consequences of global cooling just a few decades ago.

In 1975, Reid Bryson wrote in Global Ecology:

“The continued rapid cooling of the earth since WWII is in accord with the increase in global air pollution associated with industrialization, mechanization, urbanization and exploding population.”

Yeah, baby! CO2 is causing global cooling.

Or consider Kenneth Watt, writing on Earth Day in 1970:

“If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder by the year 2000. . . . This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”

Good call, Ken.

There are more, but you get the idea.

These people, then and now, are fearmongers. They get some kind of perverse joy out of frightening people—in this case, frightening them into acceptance of the greatest con job of all time.

Listen to the climate chaos merchants reviewing a book by a global warming jihadist named James Hansen, who subtitles his book “The truth about the coming climate catastrophe and our last chance to save humanity.”

“Dr. James Hansen is Paul Revere to the foreboding tyranny of climate chaos.” —Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

“With urgency and authority, Hansen urges readers to speak out—taking to the streets if necessary—to protect the Earth from calamity for the sake of their children and grandchildren.” —Kirkus Reviews

Calamity, chaos and catastrophe: the cocaine of the global warming media extremists.

STATS

The crisis and catastrophe crowd don’t like to talk about the fact that water vapor (not carbon dioxide) accounts for 95% of all greenhouse gases. This is naturally occurring water vapor—99.99% of “greenhouse gas” water vapor is natural. Only .01% (one-hundredth of one percent) of greenhouse water vapor is man-made.

But carbon dioxide is the anointed villain of the piece. It must really pack a punch, because CO2 only makes up 3.6% of greenhouse gases. And here’s the kicker, only 3% of the carbon dioxide—3% of the 3.6%—is man-made. This means .1% (one-tenth of one percent) is man-made CO2.

This, according to the harbingers of climate doom, is what is driving “climate catastrophe.” International conferences are called, governments allocate billions, and corporate PR departments gush over environmental agendas in a universal tsunami of green.

It’s as if someone had turned a programmed cult of global warming druids lose on the planet to shriek the horrors of carbon dioxide to a populace that doesn’t know or can’t confront the blatant lunacy of what they are saying.

In turn, the lapdog media regurgitates the chaos and calamity to millions. Their sole aspiration is to shovel as much death, destruction, filth and depravity into the public’s mind in the shortest possible time. Except somewhere in their collective soul they know . . . and they are sick with shame.

“We allow the most atrocious lies uttered by political and moral prostitutes to go unchallenged. These lies are endlessly recycled in the commercial media until they become ingrained in the public conscience as truth.” —Charles Sullivan, author and philosopher

Can I get an “Amen”?

THE SOLAR CONNECTION

I’m a California boy. I love the sun. During spring break in college, some friends of mine and I would body surf our way down the west coast of Mexico, turning coffee brown in the process, and return to campus as sun-baked bronze gods. The co-eds would swoon. . . . Okay, maybe not swoon, but getting dates was definitely easier.

It never occurred to me in those halcyon days that the sun might play a leading role in an article I would later write about global warming. But it does.

The fact is that Earth has experienced natural warming and cooling cycles all throughout recorded history—cycles that have driven temperatures much higher than anything we are experiencing today.

And what is the source of these fluctuations in the earth’s temperature? Water vapor? No. Carbon dioxide? Eh . . . sorry. Hair spray? You’re joking.

What causes temperature changes on the earth is . . . the sun.

Scientists have discovered that the sun has regular cycles of sunspot activity. Sunspots are regions on the sun’s surface of intense magnetic activity; the more sunspots, the more “active” the sun is.

Sunspots and solar radiation activity virtually parallel temperature changes on Earth. That’s right; it is the sun that is the source of global warming and cooling cycles—not mankind’s “carbon footprint.”

If greenhouse gases were the cause of global warming, how is it that from 1940 to 1975, when there was a dramatic increase in the production and release of CO2, the earth experienced a significant cooling period?

Warming periods on Earth are a direct result of an increase in solar radiation, which prevents cloud formation. Cloud formation has a cooling effect on the planet. This is further borne out by the fact that other planets in our solar system all appear to heat up at the same time. But they’re not driving Chevys on Pluto or burning coal on Mars.

This, then, is Con #3: Global warming is a vast, strategic PR campaign, nothing more. It is not a planetary temperature phenomenon. Sorry, Al.

“Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false.” —Bertrand Russell

So, what gives? Why all the misleading information and climate change hysteria?

Let me introduce you to Con #4. . . .

END PART 3

© 2010 by John Truman Wolfe. All rights reserved.

For more information about Silkin Management Group and its services, visit our website at www.silkinmanagementgroup.com or contact us at info@silkinmanagementgroup.com

February 23, 2010

MORE MARKETING INFO Segmenting Your Customers

Filed under: Marketing, Small business — Tags: — Dave McKevitt @ 5:58 pm

In the Silkin Management Group blog posted February 16, 2010 on marketing there was a great article on marketing from the CEO of On Target Research, a marketing company that Silkin Management Group has used for both our clients and ourselves.

I ran across another article on marketing in an online publication called Small Business Trends. I thought this article was very perceptive and accurate in terms of segmenting your customers so that you are marketing the right thing to the right people. You can access this article here.

The marketing technology the article imparts is very similar to what we teach Silkin Management Group clients. You have to know who you are marketing to, and what their interests are before you market. If you don’t you’ll waste marketing dollars. Surveying is the key to this.

Check out the article, I think you’ll find it useful.

Dave McKevitt
Silkin Management Group Consultant

For more information about what we do at Silkin Management Group, how we help clients with marketing and other practice management issues, visit our website at: silkinmanagementgroup.com. You can also contact us at: info@silkinmanagementgroup.com or call 800-695-0257.

February 11, 2010

Handling a Difficult Staff Member Part II

Filed under: Management, Statistics — Tags: , , , — Lyn Ribisi @ 7:48 pm

In a article posted yesterday on one of Silkin Management Group’s blog sites, which you can access here, I discussed how handling staff is, by survey, one of the areas that doctors need the most help with in their practice. In that blog I gave an example of a doctor running across the following scene:

You (the doctor) round the corner and overhear Jessica, your front office employee, saying to Julie, your assistant, “Omigod! You just have to see Brian! He’s sooooo totally hot! I gotta show you his Facebook page!” Then off they go to her computer and spend 10 minutes looking at Facebook and chatting.

What do you do?

First, you have to be sure which one is the bad apple. Although Jessica might be the one that seems to be distracting the staff, and she’s the one that garners many staff complaints, you better take a moment and examine the situation a bit more closely. Sometimes office appearances just aren’t what they seem. How do you measure a staff member’s worth? It’s easy to get thrown off by a friendly smile, a quick wit or worse, accept one excuse after the other when mistakes are made.

You might hear from various staff such things as, “We like Amy,” or “Bill is a great asset to the office.” Or maybe you hear, “Yvonne isn’t doing a good job. We don’t like her.” Or perhaps it’s, “Fred just doesn’t fit in around the office.” Possibly you go home and tell your spouse that the stress at the office is getting to you and wonder what is causing it. Or you might confide in a colleague. You go to seminars. You read the trade journals. You may even hear similar stories of woe. You just don’t know which way to turn. You don’t want to lose all your hair or take an early retirement. You consider firing the bunch of them, but that could be jumping from the proverbial frying pan into the fire.

If you had a tool for measuring the value of the work a staff member produces, you would be way ahead of the game. This is exactly what Silkin Management Group helps its clients with. The answer is having measurable metrics or statistics for every position in the office. Larry Silver, President of Silkin Management Group states, “The only way you can effectively manage your staff is to accurately judge their production and contribution to the practice. If you have exact statistics for each employee, then and only then, can you make correct, unbiased decisions.”

With such a system in place you might actually find that Jessica, the gal with “extra-curricular” activities during the work day, is your highest producer, and you find that she has generated the most income for the practice. Or you might find that grumpy Jean, does a great job on the phone with recall and reactivates many patients.

Conversely, once production can easily be seen in black and white, you might find that the “most popular” staff member, has the lowest productivity as measured by his/her statistics. And, in uncovering that employee, you have just found the staff member that is causing most of the trouble and wasting most of the time and money around the office.

Now what? You can either train, discipline or fire this person. But which route to take? Silkin Management Group has the answer to that too, but that is a subject for another day. For now, using correct statistics that properly show the productivity of the expected product from each job position, will take you a long way.
For more information about what we do at Silkin Management Group, how we help clients with staff and other practice management issues, visit our website at: silkinmanagementgroup.com. You can also contact us at: info@silkinmanagementgroup.com or call 800-695-0257.

Lyn Ribisi
Silkin Management Group
Appointment Coordinator

February 5, 2010

Benchmarks Part I

Filed under: Management — Tags: , , — Lyn Ribisi @ 5:31 pm

Is your practice meeting all your needs?
Do you have enough new patients?
Is your gross production in the highest range possible?
Is your net adequate?
Do you collect properly for all of your services?

Silkin Management Group has been delivering management consulting services to the health care field for nearly 30 years. The questions noted above are very common questions that we ask our clients and areas that we focus on to help them achieve their practice goals.

As part of working with clients in these areas, and given our extensive experience in the practice management field, we are often asked what are the basic benchmarks in terms of productivity, net, and collection percentages for certain professions.

There is nothing more frustrating than working all week or all month long, only to find that your production didn’t even achieve last year’s numbers. If you have some benchmarks to compare your productivity to, you’ll at least know where you have to go, if you are below them, or how well you are doing if you are above them.
Let’s examine the national benchmarks that we tell Silkin Management Group clients they should minimally be looking at achieving. These are based upon what we are able to achieve with our clients.

In Part 1 we’ll go over Production Benchmarks for a single doctor practice. In Part 2 we’ll look at Net Benchmarks and Collection Percentage Benchmarks.

PRODUCTION BENCHMARKS:

  1. A single dentist should produce minimally $80,000-90,000 a month. Really good producers can produce $120,000-$150,000 a month.
  2. A single Veterinarian should produce bare minimum $50,000 a month, but ideally $80,000 – 120,000 a month.
  3. A single Optometrist should be producing at least $50,000 a month and ideally $90,000 – 120,000 a month.

Silkin Management Group is a 30 year leader in the field of practice management. We can help you achieve your practice goals. If you are not achieving the upper end of the above mentioned benchmarks, let alone the minimum number, we can help.

Part 2 of this article will be posted February 8th on our blogsite located here:practicemanagementblog.com. If you’d like to find out more about Silkin Management Group and its services, contact us at: info@silkinmanagementgroup.com or call 800-695-0257. You can also visit our website at www.silkinmanagementgroup.com.

Lyn Ribisi
Appointment Coordinator
Silkin Management Group

December 22, 2009

EQUALITY FOR ALL

Filed under: Economy, Legislation, Small business — Tags: , , — Jack Hennessy @ 6:07 pm

The Latest in the Health Care Reform Bill

Over the last few months, those of us at Silkin Management Group who have been contributing articles for our blog sites have been watching the progress of the various health care legislation proposals that have travelled through the House of Representatives and Senate.  You can easily find earlier writings on this subject on the various Silkin Management Group blog sites.

As most everyone knows by now, the Senate passed its first major voting hurdle on December 20 by confirming the needed 60 votes to pass their version of the legislation. What I found especially fascinating, but not at all surprising, was the numerous “pay offs” made to various Senators to get their vote.  These “payoffs” benefited specific states and constituencies while leaving out the majority of the rest of the people of the country.   In my mind, this is politics as usual: if you need votes to pass a piece of legislation, give the elected official special perquisites that will make him look good with his constituents and assure him of re-election. Democracy in action.

Gosh, I thought the health care legislation was to help everyone in the country. That’s what we were told. Where did I go wrong?  OK, enough snide comments on the obvious politics as usual. It doesn’t seem to matter which party is in control, they both end up doing the same thing.

I read n article in the New York Times that got me thinking about this.  You can link to that article here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/21/health/policy/21healthcare.html?th&emc=th

Here are just a few of the special benefits given out:

  • Money for people exposed to asbestos from a vermiculite mine in Libby, Montana which secured the vote of Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana (who happens to be the chairman of the Finance Committee.
  • Additional Medicaid money for the state of Nebraska in order to secure the vote of Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson.
  • $100 million to an unnamed “health care facility” affiliated with an academic health center at a public research university in a state where there is only one public medical and dental school.  Who is this for?

There are several others you can read about in the NY Times article.

As small business owners, Silkin Management Group clients must learn to live on their own production, management expertise and capabilities.  Our programs are designed to help them do so as we all know that we aren’t getting the government handouts.

For more information about Silkin Management Group contact us at: info@silkinmanagementgroup.com or call 800-695-0257.  You can also visit our website: www.silkinmanagementgroup.com

Jack Hennessy

Consultant, Silkin Management Group

December 14, 2009

SOME IDEAS ON WHAT TO DO WITH A PROBLEMATIC STAFF MEMBER (Part 2)

Filed under: Management, Small business, employees — Tags: , , , — Ken DeRouchie @ 6:28 pm

In our December 11th blog, which you can access here, Some Ideas on What to do with a Problematic Staff Member Part 1 I presented the first part of my response to a doctor that had written to us through our “Ask A Consultant” feature of Silkin Management Group’s website. This doctor was asking for help with a problem staff member. The first part of my response had to do with having proper and adequate job descriptions and office policies in place. This is something we at Silkin work very diligently on with our clients. In fact we have a 400 plus page Office Policy and Job Description manual that we provide our clients with that can easily be adapted to their office.

Below is the second part of my response which had to do with hiring and training the right employees. I hope you find it informative and useful.

“The other underlying issue I see here is having the right people in the first place and having them properly trained. There are three key steps in this process.

  1. How to attract the right kind of employees
  2. How to determine who to hire
  3. How to train them to do their job properly after you’ve hired them

When you are looking to fill a new position, the wording of your ad/listing is key. Where to advertise is also key. Utilizing employment agencies that pre-screen applicants to YOUR qualifications can greatly increase the quality of candidates you see, weeding out the lower quality people ahead of time.

Determining who to hire is often a “shot in the dark” for most doctors. A doctor might just read a resume, conduct an interview and then take a shot on that person as they have no other means to evaluate the applicant. No one ever writes on their resume that they are chronically late, don’t take direction and can’t get along well with others. What you see on a resume is only what the applicant wants you to see. Similarly, all you hear in an interview is what they want you to hear. They say the right things or at the very least what they think YOU want to hear in order to get the job.

After a person is hired they usually stay on their best behavior until they get comfortable and then they become themselves. Only then do you know who you’ve hired.

We believe you need a more objective way to screen and hire people so that you have a better idea of who they are, what kind of personality they have, their responsibility level, their aptitude and their work ethic. Corporations have been hiring people this way for years. Small businesses suffer through much higher turnover rates due to their lack of successful hiring techniques.

We teach doctors to test applicants. Personality tests, IQ tests, Aptitude tests are all implemented to get a feel for who a person is and how they will fit in to your practice and interact with the staff and more importantly your patients. Doing all of this as part of your “weeding out” process during hiring greatly increases the odds of you bringing on a good staff member.

Once you have hired the right person, you then need to make sure you train them properly. This is where detailed and up to date job descriptions and office policies come into play. It is vital that you equip your new employee with the proper tools to do their job rather than throw them to the wolves and hope they pick up the proper way to do things as they go.”

As mentioned above, Silkin Management Group provides its clients, as part of our overall management training and consulting program, an Office Policy and Job Description Manual with detailed job descriptions for nearly every position in an office, including the often overlooked job description for the owner of the practice.

If you would like any help with any aspect of your practice, call us at 800-695-0257 or email us at info@silkinmanagementgroup.com. You can also visit our website at silkinmanagementgroup.com/offers/ask.html and ask questions via our “Ask a Consultant” feature on the website.

Ken DeRouchie
Silkin Management Group’s “Ask A Consultant”

Please see our other blog at: practicemanagementblog

December 8, 2009

DID I REALLY HEAR THIS?

Filed under: Economy — Tags: , , , — Larry Silver @ 6:51 pm

As the President of Silkin Management Group I have written many blogs, along with our Silkin consultants, about a variety of topics including practice management tips as well as issues concerning current events such as the health care legislation. Because I like to write timely blogs I keep an eye and ear out on current events.

Yesterday, while driving, I was listening to the news on NPR and didn’t believe my ears concerning a statement made by President Obama. Note: I am a registered independent and have no leaning toward any political party. If anything I am liberal on social issues and conservative fiscally – a viewpoint that doesn’t safely belong with either party. Thus my amazement/bewilderment with what I heard has nothing to do with any political leaning. When I heard this statement I was so stunned that I yelled “you’ve got to be kidding!” so loudly I was very happy nobody was in the car with me.

Here’s the statement I heard. The President proudly said that there was about $700 billion in TARP money (the money that our government so kindly came up with to bail out banks, car companies and other needy corporate conglomerates) that it looked like these corporations didn’t need. So, he said, instead of lending it to the corporations, it could be used for other things including reducing the deficit. That’s right, reducing the deficit. Realize that this money itself came from the government borrowing money from the Fed and/or through issuing bonds bought mostly by China.

That struck me as a ridiculous statement and the kind of economic “slight of hand” that is the standard economic policy of this country. As an analogy it’s like borrowing money from one bank to pay for a house, then deciding you weren’t going to buy the house and instead using the borrowed funds to pay off another loan and now saying you are reducing your indebtedness when you still owe the same amount of money!

I hope he handles his personal finances better than this.

Larry Silver
President, Silkin Management Group

For more information about Silkin Management Group, Silkin’s management programs or any questions about practice management contact us at: info@silkinmanagementgroup.com or visit our website at: www.silkinmanagementgroup.com

Visit our other blogs:
practicemanagementblog.com
silkinmanagementgroup.blogspot.com
blog.silkinmanagementgroup.com

December 2, 2009

YET MORE IDEAS ON PRODUCTIVITY MEASUREMENTS IN A HEALTH CARE OFFICE

Several of the consultants here at Silkin Management Group have been writing about various ways to measure productivity in a health care office. You can see what has been written by visiting some of Silkin’s other blog sites including: How do you Measure the Productivity of all Areas of an Office?, More on Measuring Productivity, and Here’s More Ideas on Measuring Productivity. I was invited to put my “two cents” worth on this subject since it is such an important aspect of the management of any business.

As has been discussed, the first thing you need to do with any area or job position is to determine exactly what the product that area or job should be producing. This may take some figuring out by carefully inspecting the job or area in terms of what you really need coming out of the area. Previous blog articles discussed this concept in terms of a receptionist and treatment plan presentations. I’d like to present what Silkin Management Group has found very workable for the management of the collection area of a health care office.

What is the product we’d expect out of this area? How about:

Patient fees collected in a timely manner.

It seems like that would be an excellent product for the collection area to accomplish. If it accomplished this product regularly, the income of the office should be in good shape with very low receivables.

Now, how would one best measure that so one could actually manage the area by a metric? There are several stats that would give you a good measurement of how the area is doing:

  • Total collections received.
  • Total accounts receivables over thirty days. (Graphed as a reverse graph with zero at the top.)
  • Percent of collections to services.

Needless to say, one would have to use some “smarts” when looking at the second statistical graph as it would also to be compared to the production in an office. Obviously if the office’s production was rising, the total receivables would likely be rising too, so a comparative analysis would have to be made. The third statistic above helps with this.

The third statistic is based upon a formula that we’ve worked out that compares several month’s collections to several month’s worth of services, with a time factor built in depending upon the type of practice, how much insurance is used and some other factors.

There are a variety of stats we help our Silkin Management Group clients with so that they can easily and properly manage their practice. The information above gives you more data about one area. I hope it is helpful.

If you are interested in any management help with your practice or business, feel free to contact us at info@silkinmanagementgroup.com or visit our website: silkinmanagementgroup.com

Best regards,
Dave McKevitt
Consultant
Silkin Management Group

November 23, 2009

MORE ON MEASURING PRODUCTIVITY

Filed under: Small business — Tags: , , — Eric Korb @ 8:18 pm

After reading last Thursday’s blog How do you measure the productivity of all areas in an office? by one of my fellow consultants at Silkin Management Group, Bill Hickey, I thought I would carry on the theme he started and add my own insight to this subject.

I can’t emphasize enough how important statistical monitoring is to the management of a practice. As clearly elucidated in yesterday’s blog, without proper metrics, you can’t really see what is going on throughout the business side of a practice.

The first question you might ask yourself is how one determines what the correct monitoring statistic is for an area or job position. The answer to that is something more basic, and that is determining what the actual product is that should be produced by that position or area.

In sales this is usually easy to see. For example, the product of a car salesman is a sold car and his statistic would simply be the number of cars sold.

That one is easy. But what about a receptionist in a health care office? What’s her product? And what statistic measures that?

Here are some ideas you can use for this position in terms of product and statistic for a receptionist:

  • Product: A patient who arrives at the agreed upon time
  • Statistic: Percent of patients kept to schedule
  • Product: Sufficiently full appointment book to keep the office at or above its needed production target.
  • Statistic: Percent of the appointment book filled

I hope this example gives you an idea on how this basic management tool works. If you want to properly manage your practice, you must be able to easily see the productivity in any area or job position and not operate on “feel” or “how it seems”.

Please note: this does not mean that you take the important human element out of your practice. I’ve heard people say that watching statistics takes the “humanity” out of a practice. These are not mutually exclusive activities! The “human element” is more important than anything else as it is people, working together as a team in a mutually created enjoyable work place that makes a practice a fun, pleasant and productive place to work. But, at the same time, you must also be able to logically see how the productivity of each area and job position of a practice is doing or you won’t be able to manage the practice as a whole and take care of your staff.

Letting a staff member flounder around, not really knowing how they are doing, is not a fair way to treat any staff member. Neither is letting a poorly producing staff member attack in subtle or not so subtle ways a good producing staff member. Having a proper statistical monitoring system in place takes helps your staff know how they are doing and protects the good producers. That makes a happy and productive place to work.

At Silkin Management Group, we have researched and worked out nearly every product and statistic in a health care practice and, where we haven’t, we know exactly how to figure them out. If you are interested in more information about how to do this, contact us at info@silkinmanagementgroup.com or visit our website at silkinmanagementgroup.com. View our other blog at practicemanagementblog.com

Eric Korb
Technical Director

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