Small Business Health Care Update: Today 1:30 PM, Eastern

Anita Campbell's Small Business Radio show spotlights the challenge of small companies providing healthcare for their employees. The show is Small Business Health Care Update. Her guest on this show is Dawn Rivers Baker, Editor and Publisher of The MicroEnterprise Journal (http://www.microenterprisejournal.com)

You can listen live: (http://tinyurl.com/2k4rfq). I will.

Taking care of our employees is...as important as taking care of our customers. We can't take care of our customers without our employees first taking care of our employees. Health care is a critical component of this effort to take care, inspire, motivate, empower, unleash our employees to build our company by making our customers happy. Yet, as a small company we face a huge disadvantage compared to our larger brethren as we look to offer healthcare as a company benefit.

The disadvantage is not the fault of small companies nor that of large companies. (I'm sure the large companies do nothing to erase this advantage. )  Insurance companies price a group plan based on both the numbers of potential members and the relative health of each potential member. Makes sense, kinda. Their thinking seems to be that each group plan is its own profit center. Any claims then are considered against the revenues derived by the member premiums. One claim against a group plan of thousands of members has minimal impact on that group's profit. Not so with a small group.

The bigger picture seems  to be that this business model has overwhelmed the insurance industry. They've followed it lockstep to the tune of hundreds of thousands of potential members in each state, employed in small businesses, being locked out of health care coverage and the premiums they would generate for the company. A lack of premiums doesn't mean a lack of health care needs, though.

And this state of affairs means too many small businesses compete for qualified talent against larger companies with one hand and a partial elbow tied behind their back. That's the lack of an affordable health care plan. Small businesses drive job growth. They drive innovation. They always have. They always will if...if a solution for their health care needs, one that recognizes the impact of small business on our economy and the lives of our communities.

Back to Anita Campbell's Small Business Trends Radio and her show today. I'm anxious to hear an update on policy, politics and small business health insurance. Here's to a wonderful surprise awaiting me.

Be Grateful

Keith Ferrazi reminds us to Be Grateful.  It's a great post. Here's a little bit of it:

I am so seriously grateful for you, that you are reading this, that you feel that I have made or could make a difference in your life in some way. Thank you so sincerely. I've spent most of life hoping I would someday find a place where I was making a real difference in this world.

I don't know if I'm doing it totally, probably hardly.  But I'm on my way. For that, I say thank you!

John Jantsch and his group of merry bloggers here at Duct Tape Marketing Blog Channel are folks I'm grateful for. Thank you.

Interview with Mohammad Yunus

Guy Kawasaki links to an Interview of Mohammad Yunus of Grameen Bank. Yunus won the Nobel peace Prize for his work with micro-loans to jumpstart entrepreneurship and achieve financial self-sufficiency in 3rd world nations starting with Bangladesh.

Here's a brief quote from the interview:

AR: Now a lot of other people out there said, ok, well, I can understand why Professor Muhammad Yunus might win a Nobel Prize for economics, but why for Peace?

MY: I have been raising this question about poverty being a threat to peace, everywhere, not just Bangladesh. Because poverty ultimately is the breeding ground for violence, breeding ground for all kinds of political turmoil, breeding ground for terrorism. So this is the argument I made. I said peace is sometimes narrowly interpreted; it's the absence of conflict between nations or something. But peace is more inherent, more basic to human life, human beings, what we feel about each other, what we feel about life around us and what we see in our future. So that has to be addressed in a broader sense, and poverty is one issue that kind of upsets the possibility of peace.

And read his description of how many players, parties, institutions, groups, individuals, what have you...tried to block his progress. All seemed threatened by his simple plan to eradicate poverty and the shackles on the poor, some of those shackles held by those parties most threatened by his solution.

We'll leave with this:

Today, the concept of business is to make money. Making money is the name of the business. And profit maximization is the mission of business. And I'm saying this is very narrow interpretation of human being. Human beings are much bigger than just making money. So I said, to be true to the human nature, we should include at least one more type of business, business to do good to people, without an expectation of making any personal gain out of it.

[Change] is everywhere...

The Allman Brothers once sang:

People can you feel it? Love is everywhere.

Now we're blogging about. David Armano at Logic + Emotion captures some nice riffs on the net about change, hierarcy + Networks...Waking Up Sleeping Giants.

Here's one riff he caught I liked especially:

"The changes that we are all feeling in the workplace and within our industries which are requiring us to think and work slightly differently.   We can no longer afford to over-analyze our challenges. We must try to get things launched—learn from these experiences and refine. - the Fuzzy Tail

People can you feel it? Change is everywhere.

Fixing Our Electoral Process

Mike Critelli, Executive Chairman at Pitney-Bowes, blogs at Open Mike.

And he offers some thoughts on the problems with our current electoral process and some detailed, insightful solutions in his post: Citizen Engagement.

I liked his whole post. Here's two failures he points out along with some solutions:

Our elections are generally held on Tuesdays, for reasons that go back to when we were an agricultural society and farmers needed to travel for a day to get to the polling place. Having an election on a single day and having it on a work day no longer makes sense. It would cost more money to let voters be able to vote over a several-day period as they do in Texas, and it obviously would cost more to have polling places open on the weekends, but voting is so important that expanding the time that citizens can vote is a worthy use of our tax dollars.

There should be a requirement that paper ballots, supplemented by explanatory material about candidates’ positions and issues subject to referenda, be available online and be mailed to every citizen for every election.

And he practices good blogging with his disclaimer:

As a provider of a secure voting-by-mail solution, Relia-Vote™, we are well aware of the criticality of a secure voting system. We support the philosophy embedded in the Help America Vote Act to upgrade both the in-person and the mail voting systems to enhance security.

And Mike finishes with:

Ultimately, democracies are successful to the degree that citizens feel that elected and appointed government officials listen and respond to them. Regardless of the formal processes in place, citizens respond to being treated with respect and deference.

Amen, brother. And to that I add Democracies are successful to the degree that citizens reward their elected leaders responsible for listening, responding and representing their (citizens') interests by voting for those leaders that do, and voting OUT those leaders that don't.

To date, we as citizens haven't upheld our end of this relationship. We have the leadership now we've earned.

The Business Generation Gap

From Hugh MacLeod at GapingVoid:

2. A young Microsoft employee I was talking to said an interesting thing to me. We were talking about this big cultural change that is going on inside Microsoft. He said a lot of it is generational. The old guard is highly competitive, the new guard is more collaborative. The old guard sees Open Source as a threat, the new guard sees Open Source as an opportunity. He was confident the new guard will prevail, of because, of course, being young, they'll be around for much longer. He reckoned it'll be at least another decade before the outside world starts recognizing the change that's currently happening internally. Interesting.

There you have it. The Business Generation Gap.

Another way to say it is the gap between the haves and the have-nots. Haves are threatened by the idea of open-source and collaboration. They're being asked to share what they have...in the HOPE that something greater will emerge. And the have-nots have nothing left to lose, so to speak, so they're very open to collaborating. Nothing but upside, their future's so bright they got to use shades.

And yes, it's possible the New Guard will prevail they'll be around for much longer. But then again, weren't we the new guard at one point? What happened?

Maybe we didn't use the word collaboration...but the ideals at some point were the same. Today's tools now make it possible, perhaps, to sustain this ideal of open-source, open collaboration, innovation, change, sharing...(trust?). But at the end of the day, will they be used?

Maybe, or maybe the cycle continues...the have-nots become the haves, the first shall be last, the meek inherit the earth (as opposed to the kingdom...), we become our parents. We'll know in less than 10 years. 

Your Staff: They're looking for a few good words from you

There are many reasons a worker decides to stay with -- or leave -- any particular job, but a few simple words from a manager can go far to keep the employee motivated and on the job. -WSJ.

I suggest these two simple words: Thank and you; Thank YOU! .

Here's a quick poem that explains their power used together:

The words are simple,

They number but a few.

And it shows that person,

it's not all about you.

It's that simple really. Thank you.

CEO Version 3.0

“It’s someone who can assemble a team that functions as smoothly as a jazz sextet,” said Warren Bennis, a professor of management at the University of Southern California and author of many books on leadership - CEO Evolution Phase 3

CEO Version 1.0 was The Empire Builder.

CEO Version 2.0 was The Fix-it Man.

CEO Version 3.0 is...The Band Leader.

Makes sense, really. Your band members are your greatest asset. Get them all playing the right notes, playing together, playing the instruments they play best...you maximize your return on assets, your greatest and most unique asset, the asset that sets you apart from your competitors on an ongoing basis, not just a product-cycle basis. That asset is your people.

20 Billionaire's Interviewed

Geoff Smart of TopGrading fame has written another book. It's the result of 2-year project where he interviewed 20 billionaires and 30 CEOs to gather their advice on hiring. Think they might know something? I do. And I'm going to get his book.

Geoff Smart knows something about it, too. We've sent customers to attend his Topgrading seminar presented by he and his brother, Brad, and they've raved about it. We've used the CIDS, Chronological In-depth Survey, approach with 100% success in hiring A players while at the same time avoiding hiring mistakes. CIDS is outlined in book The Smart Interviewer by Brad Smart.

Link from Verne Harnish.

(Sorry, honey. I know I have a stack to read. But this one will be great!)

"Treat People Fairly" Doesn't Mean You Treat People The Same

I watched a bit of Joe Torre's press conference today at lunch where he was introduced as the Manager for the Dodgers. 

What a class-act. He was articulate, clear, personable, real, caring, focused, clear, compassionate. How could anyone NOT want to do their best working for someone like that?

He said something that caught my ear. He's not the only great manager in pro baseball or any business to say this. But I've noticed it's a common theme among great managers:  You treat people fairly. But you can't treat people the same.

I'd heard that before. And it's slowly sinking in.

I remember reading where Red Auerbach, the coach of the Celtics, did not require Bill Russell to practice. The thinking was he played every minute of every game, was the best center in the league on the best team...Nothing would be gained by having him practice except a greater risk of injury. What's more unusual about that is that there didn't seem to be dissent on the team for this favored star treatment. None that I remember reading and with as many titles as they earned, clearly it worked for team harmony.

I read much the same with Phil Jackson's treatment of Michael. Press reports were that Michael was allowed to lift weights in the privacy of his home. (And stay out late gambling, too...Don't get me wrong. I'm from NC. Mike's a lower-case g, god and if he can stay out gambling and still win championships, I say buy him some chips. ) Dennis Rodman got some star treatment along the way with the Bulls, too. Dennis Hopson didn't. Now you understand why.

And it's nonsense to treat your top performers in the same way, with the same time and resource, that you treat a non-performer. As a leader, your time is precious. Where you spend it sends a signal to your staff, troops, teammates, family members, of the behavior and goals you see as important. You spend it with those who deserve it.

Back to Joe Torre. I hope he gets another first-time world series experience with his new team. He deserves it.