Morning Awkward

I was riding the elevator down to the hotel lobby yesterday morning with a business man who was roughly my age. We stopped on the 11th floor where a younger dude wearing a navy pinstripe suit stepped in the elevator and gave the first guy a forced "hello."

Going against unwritten elevator protocol, he never turned around to face the door. Instead, he stared right at the first man and said, "I heard some men had fun at the casino last night."

Dead silence.

"Were you one of them?"

Pause. Eyes averted. Focus on the floor.

"Well, I was there."

Nothing more was said. The doors opened and the pinstriped man walked away briskly.

Now I want to know: what the hell happened at the casino?! And why wasn't I invited? Had I been prescient enough to feel this man's shame and embarrassment prior to the unspoken reprimand, I could have passionately chimed in (like in the movies), "No, he was with me."

Yeah, that would have been better. What happens in Milwaukee stays in Milwaukee?

DocAdvisor

According to a recent New York Times article entitled "Looking Abroad for Health Savings,"

• A heart operation that might cost $130,000 in this country could cost $18,500 in Singapore or $10,000 in India.
• Estimates of the number of Americans traveling abroad for treatment — “medical tourism,” some call it — vary widely, from 75,000 to 750,000 last year. But many experts consider it a growth industry.

Given the proliferation of user-created content on sites like TripAdvisor and SpaFinder, I think it would behoove us to create a similar site guiding us to the best-of-the-best doctors worldwide.

Better yet, what about introducing an insurance carrier that significantly reduces its monthly (or annual) premiums by coordinating your care with low-cost, high-quality international options? Sure, that would mean even more jobs leaving the U.S. (and, in this case, those associated with highly qualified, well trained professionals) but, really, paying less than a tenth of the cost for a commensurate surgery (and saving $120K per procedure) might just alleviate our nation's escalating health care costs. Or, at the very minimum, provide a serious wake-up call to our big insurance firms.

As always, I'm sure there are major flaws in my logic. Feel free to point 'em out. If it takes a while for me to respond, it's because I'll be in Vietnam getting a face lift.

Happiness as Your Business Model

I thought this was sweet and well done.
Happiness as Your Business Model

View more Tara Hunt. (tags: magnolia worpress)

Yes Sway

If you're looking for a beach read that's business-related (really, and who isn't?), I just finished Sway: The Irresistable Pull of Irrational Behavior by Ori and Rom Brafman. Loved it.

It's an interesting, smart, thought-provoking, page turner filled with research-backed stories that explain how and why, among other things, well educated doctors can send a child home to die, seasoned pilots can cause deadly air disasters, otherwise intelligent students at Harvard would pay over $200 for a twenty dollar bill, the University of Florida Gators rose to the top, etc.

In the midst of the compelling behavioral anecdotes are a number of "lessons learned" that can easily be applied to our day-to-day lives when making pricing decisions, communicating with clients, developing incentive programs, and so on.

And I now know how to effectively get men to call me. Where was this book twenty years ago?!