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"What is marketing?
Put bluntly, marketing is the set of strategies, tactics and tools that make selling unnecessary.
OK, that's a bit extreme. Let's try again...
Marketing is the set of strategies, tactics and tools that help you sell more products and services—more easily AND more often.
There, that's better.
Bad news: Marketing for the sake of marketing is broken. Kaput. Finished.
Smart marketing is all about helping you generate MORE leads, BETTER prospects, and BIGGER sales. Period.
Good news: That also happens to be the purpose of this cheeky, powerful little manifesto you're reading right now."
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"When driving a car, our side and rear view mirrors don't often reveal everything we need to see. We find we have blind spots and have to turn our head so as not hit something. We don't resist the fact that we have blind spots or deny that they exist; we accept their presence and make every effort to improve our vision. We do it to be less of a hazard to others and to ourselves.
Quite similar are the obstructions that prevent men and women from seeing the other gender in the clearest possible light—misperceptions we call Gender Blind Spots. [...]
Considering the implications in our personal lives, at our workplace, and for society as a whole, it's time for a shift in our thinking. We need to step up to a new level of conversation and begin to include each other and participate with each other more successfully. We need a better understanding of why men and women think and act as they do. We need to see the strength in the complement of those differences. We need to be more gender-intelligent."
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"In healthcare, understanding value to the patient customer is too often limited to reviewing patient satisfaction survey scores. ... Not that we think such scores have no value. However, patient satisfaction surveys are only one tool for defining customer value. Another tool we'd like to see doctors, nurses, and hospital administrators use on a regular basis is following a typical patient's journey end to end."
[...]
What we are talking about here is an end to end focus on healthcare delivery processes, which we call value streams, from the patient arrival at an Emergency Department (ED) to discharge or admission to the hospital, from the doctor's decision to schedule a patient for surgery to hospital discharge of the patient to a rehabilitation facility, from application of a patient for admission to a skilled nursing facility to discharge home, from receipt of an appointment reminder to completion of a routine physician office visit. It can also include a focus on the processes supporting delivery of care such as purchasing, replenishment of medication and supplies, and hiring staff.
Why the insistence on an end-to-end focus on workflows or value streams when focus on improving isolated problems, sometimes called point kaizen, has saved thousands of healthcare dollars and improved quality of care? We'll answer with an example from one of our first ventures into healthcare."
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"Employees don't leave companies. They leave managers.
70% of employees don't feel valued by their employers. 64% of Americans leave their jobs due to lack of recognition. This impacts the bottom line because customers feel the effects of employee success and either respond with loyalty, or get turned off by bad service or inferior products. There has to be a better way to improve employee and manager relationships in order to maximize business success. The answer is simple.
Manage the work, not the people."
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"Do we care about talking to each other anymore, or are we settling for mostly texts, emails, tweets, and electronic quickies? Is this like quickie sex, compared to romantic adventures with all the accoutrements of a love making session? Are we too busy to really connect? What is the draw of fast talk?
We often think that quick communication saves time. This is true in some cases. Relying only on cursory communication though runs the risk of misunderstanding, and a lot of hoopla about 'what did she mean by that e-mail?' Once those questions get started, they take on a life of their own and end up as huge time wasters, not time savers, and the intent of the communication may be lost, and so badly misinterpreted that trust goes astray in the translation. Let's regroup and think about the advantages of face-to-face communication, what might get in the way, and types of skills that promote cooperation, even in difficult instances."
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