New graduates especially are familiar with the frustration of looking at an ad for a dream job only to see the dreaded ''experience required.''   In frustration, they argue, ''How can I get experience if no one will give me a job, a chance to gain some experience?'' But such frustration is not confined to new graduates. A colleague who ...

About a year ago I met a very engaging and outgoing young woman. She is a successful business leader and a Harvard graduate. There is not much exceptional about this, perhaps, except she is from a rural village in Jamaica and is the first in her family of nine siblings to graduate high school. I was fascinated by her MBA from Harvard but could ...

  There are so many customer service buzzwords that I thought I had pretty much heard them all. One method that I had not heard of until a week or so is a device advocated by the Studer Group. Called the Five Fundamentals of Service, the method uses the mnemonic AIDET (pronounced Aid it). AIDET stands for Acknowledge, Introduction, ...

Every organization these days has mission and vision statements. We all learn them at orientation. Some companies insist we wear them on name tags or ''buddy badges.'' Others have them plastered in elevators, hallways and in conference rooms. Everyone wants to be the ''provider of choice'' or something similar. Everyone respects patients and ...

We often complicate things. Needlessly.  A seasoned laboratorian had to resign her job and move to a new city suddenly due to a family emergency. She could not find a job at her former level of responsibility or in her preferred specialty. So like most resourceful survivors she took a job in a small medical office building (MOB). The MOB is ...

This morning I accompanied a friend to the emergency room of a local hospital.  They were pretty busy so about 4 patients were being triaged together in a common area. Although there were privacy curtains, none was pulled so it was pretty easy to overhear conversations that should have been confidential. As a  former hospital COO, I was ...

A psychologist friend of mine is fond of telling patients they can always have a second childhood. This seems silly or funny, but is actually based on the fact that many adult patterns derive directly from childhood experiences. Not only are values, morals and perceptions formed, but there is much imprinting of behavior in one's early years. ...