Patrick Soon-Shiong is a knight on a crusade to heed an ailing and hurting humanity that beckons to him, but that is challenged and thwarted at every step by too many not-so-ailing or hurting humans and special interests furthering their own personal agendas.

He makes a case that there is currently no incentive to keep patients healthy. Even at UCLA where he focuses many of his efforts the wonderful mission is “healing humankind one patient at a time.” Shouldn’t we be promoting wellness one patient and one family at a time?

In his interview Dr. Soon-Shiong raises the need for more integrated health care with the patient at the center and focus on the cost of not doing so vs. the current focus on what things cost. He is also a realist about the need to incentivize all parties toward promoting health. That includes the receivers, givers and takers. It has been my experience that people don’t do what is important to them, they do what they care about (for example, healthy eating is important to me, but I don’t care enough about it to do it that well).

If you read between the lines of Dr. Soon-Shiong’s interview you get a sense that he is coming to the conclusion that most global change agents come to which is: “You can’t solve a transformational imperative from a transactional paradigm.” The challenge and others face with transactional people (are you listening Washington?), is that most of them are not able to give up control sufficiently to embrace an as yet to be created paradigm that will be necessary to be the rising tide that lifts all boats.  Until that happens, we are all sunk?

I have heard it said that the measure of a civilization is how it treats those who have hurt it, Soon-Shiong furthers the definition to “how it treats those who are hurting in it.” Thank you Dr. Soon-Shiong and Godspeed.

FOR READERS: In your comments, please suggest ways that might cause the receiver/patients, giver/provider-payers, taker/opportunists-inefficient healthcare providers and institutions to care enough to actually take action on the health and well-being that most of us already agree are important. I would also be interested in your suggestions that would cause siloed specialized interests to care enough to want to work together towards a shared future more than further their own agendas. I would appreciate your focusing on solutions as opposed to finger pointing.

Let’s face it.  Many men are masters at baiting, in that they know how to easily bait you and press your buttons in a way that causes you to take the bait, go off balance, become submissive or defensive and then in that moment of imbalance, vulnerability and reactivity when you can’t think clearly they go for the jugular and with little difficulty find it.

And then my dear lady you are “toast!”

Don’t they know that is no way to treat a lady or certainly motivate or inspire one to want to give their all for you?  Apparently not.  It’s bad enough that so many men do this, what’s worse and even more outrageous is the delight they take in doing it.  When that happens it becomes very difficult to remain a lady, when everything inside you want to tear their heart out.

What to do?

1. Never expect such a person to not act that way when they want you to do something or don’t want to do something that you’re asking them.
2. Instead always hold a little of yourself back when they go infantile and inside you go scared or ballistic.
3. Keep looking at them in their left eye (their left eye is connected to their right/emotional brain) in a calm but steady way and look for the insecurity and even fear underneath whatever they are saying.  If you practice this you will always be able to see it as their paranoia.
4. After they act up here are a variety of responses that will keep you centered, reverse the provocation and then send them through the roof, while you just demurely look at them in a puzzled way:
   • Pause – just doing that calmly will communicate that whatever they did to provoke you didn’t work
   • Say in an inquiring and non provoked way, “What was that (the hyperbole in their tone) all about?”
   • Or say, “Do you really believe what you just said?” (great if they have used words like never, always, etc.)
   • Or say, “Would you please say that again in a normal voice, because I can’t think clearly when you use the tone you just used on me?”
   • Or just tilt your head, look puzzled and say, “Huh?”
   • They will probably become agitated, but don’t become scared just see them as a tantruming infant who didn’t get their way and wait for a few moments.  If they don’t stop say, “I guess we’ll need to continue this at another time,” then get up and leave.
   • A more sophisticated and deft intervention and response is to say the negative that they are thinking, but haven’t said yet. For example, if you’re dealing with a man (such as a financial type who only cares about the bottom line and can’t stand people being verbose – perhaps because he had to listen to his mother or wife be that way), as soon as you in a conversation where he is demanding or venting something at you, firmly and calmly raise your right hand in a stopping gesture and say, “Stop!” By interrupting him he will be taken aback and go off balance.  Then say, “Given that you are only interested in the ‘bottom line,’ could you please tell me what ‘bottom line’ you want me to address so we can make this conversation as short as possible which something we both want to do.” When you do that, you will have not just taken the words out of their mouth, you will have taken the wind and bluster out of their sails.

BTW if you can do this all in a playful (not to be confused with ridiculing) manner, not only will you stop (and even retrain) a bully in his tracks, you might even find some of them wanting to become your friend.

Why?

Because inside, many of these bullies know they go too far and know they need someone to stop them when they can’t stop themselves.  It’s like the mouse taking the thorn out of the lion’s paw.

Of course it then remains to be seen whether or not you would want to be their friend.  My counsel to you is to just say, “No,” to their invitation unless they start treating everyone with respect.

A: The other side won.

Wouldn’t you agree?

Please share your comments below.

A: Maturity is being able to fully experience disappointment (vs. denying it) and fully “taking the hit,” without becoming angry at someone else or yourself, making excuses, complaining, whining or feeling sorry for yourself and then fully committing yourself to a solution.

Wouldn’t you agree?

Please share your comments below.

A: Possibilities beyond your imagination. 

Wouldn’t you agree?

Please share your comments below.

There are few things more exhausting than dealing with blamers, complainers and whiners.

Why?

Because if at your core, you’re a decent non-hostile person, these people push you past your frustration into your rage and it takes all your energy to keep a lid on it and to not react from it.  And that is exhausting.

You can try – and probably do – avoiding them, but just hearing a voice message, receiving an email or even worse a text message (where they expect a quicker response) still finds it’s way to the knot inside your stomach.

Are you up for a different way to respond?

If so, try the following:

1. Never expect them not to come from that ugly and manipulative part of their personality if they want something from you and don’t want to do something you’d like them to do.  One of the ways these people get to you is that they catch you flat footed, when you should know that this is how they nearly always react.
2. Instead, hold a little of yourself back so that when they go for the gut, you will still have the presence of mind to look them squarely (but not aggressively) between their eyes and do the next steps.
3. Let them punch themselves out verbally and even if they’re aiming their every word at your stomach or between your eyes, imagine that it’s going over your shoulder.
4. When they finish, say in the least provocative or patronizing way to them, “What in your mind’s eye do you want me to do and, I’m not trying to upset you, what have you done that causes you to feel you deserve that?”
5. Most likely they will stop momentarily, because their manipulation has not worked.  However that will quickly pass and they will then reload or get angrier and say something even more infantile.
6. Let them finish what they say and then respond with, “No I’m serious.  What have you done or sacrificed for someone else, in this case me, that earns you the right to have me do what you want them to do? In other words, why should I owe that to you?”
7. They will again most likely become frustrated and agitated and vent something else at you.
8. Again let them finish and then say, “Let me try to make this easier to understand, if you’re asking me to go out of my way to do something for you that requires effort, you are asking me a favor and it means I get to ask one of you.  If you can’t agree to that, then I’m afraid my answer will have to be, “No.”
9. Then remain calm even if they launch a tirade at you and need to have the last word.
10. If you do have the chance to say something try, “Look if it’s really important to you that I do that favor for you then just realize that it’s only right for you to do a favor for me in return.”

If you try the above and since I am always trying to improve how I may serve you, I would greatly appreciate your sharing your comment below about how this worked out for you and how you would suggest improving it further.  If you’d rather do this privately, please feel free to email me your response at:  mgoulston@markgoulston.com.

Want to be like Apple?

Here’s the secret.  Create and then time the delivery (to build up anticipation) of a product (sorry “services” don’t deliver the same “kick”) that puts a smile of delight on your customer/consumer and that fully engages their sight, hearing and emotional and kinesthetic feelings (you might even add smell if you’re in the food business).

When you do that, you not only hit the “trifecta” of the positive experiences of excitement, pleasure and connectedness, you trigger a great outpouring of many of the neurochemicals and experiences listed above.  In addition, it’s bathing people in an escape from a joyless, boring, frustrating life they might be having. It’s also like hitting the jackpot on a slot machine and then guess what happens?  People continue to stay connected to your product and your brand to keep them from experiencing the crash off of all those positive feelings.

How do you go about discovering what triggers those experiences?

Don’t do a focus group.

Instead hire energetic, friendly (not pushy), engaging psychology, anthropology and sociology majors at your local community colleges (if the community colleges don’t have such “soft” majors you might need to go to the colleges, but then you may have to deal with those students’ “attitude”).

Identify your target market and where they go shopping, what movies they see, what coffee house, fast food or other restaurants they frequent and markets they shop at, etc. or just have them visit an Apple Store near them.

Have your cheery scouts then identify when anyone appears to be smiling or frowning and that their smile or frown seems to be related to where they are at vs. a conversation they are having.  Then have them go up to those people and say, “Excuse me I am doing a project (the people don’t need to know that it’s not for school) and I noticed a big smile or look of frustration on your face and I am trying to tune into what makes people happy or unhappy about their immediate environment if you wouldn’t mind telling me.  Also, although I don’t work for this store or theater that we’re in, what is a specific thing they could do to make you even more pleased or that they should stop doing so that you’re not so frustrated with them?”* This information may help answer the wishful “if only” reactions that customers and consumers have right at the moment of having a positive or negative experience. BTW have your “scout” give out a piece of chocolate or something as an expression of appreciation.

Then have your scouts come back and share those observations.

Why do this?

Too often companies become enamored with their products and fail to recognize if people feel similarly or worse companies will minimize when people are very frustrated with a product and then do nothing about it.

This exercise helps you not only catch people where they spend their money, but where they have experiences they either like and want more of or dislike and want to stay away from.

What Apple, Steve Jobs and now the people who have internalized his way of looking at the world have the ability to do is to see into a future reality that would put a smile on their customers’ faces and trigger the release of all the neurochemicals above.

* BTW, if you’re a young enterprising college student and did this study on your own and sent the results to the CEO of the company, that would be an amazing way to distinguish yourself from your other job hunting peers.  So for all parents of college age students reading this, you might float the idea past them.

And there are few things that cause a wife to lose trust and confidence in her husband than when someone is obviously and successfully b.s.ing him and he totally drinks the Kool-Aid.

This may explain why many husbands are uncomfortable bringing their wives to situations where the b.s. is so freely flowing in both directions and the bravado runneth over.

Cut to the corporate executive or management meeting that is 90 % male, 10 % female.  In that meeting, a psychological process called “projection” is rampant.  In such a case many of the men are projecting on the women that the women are judging the men similar to the way those men feel their wives often judge them.  Believing they are being judged in that manner causes the men to feel nervous, uptight, resentful and because of all these to become brittle.  It is on a shaky foundation of brittleness that men often behave is such a childish and testy way, which then compounds their feeling judged and being even more paranoid.

If you read Calling All Women Executives: Part 1 – How to Win (Male) Friends and Influence Everyone you will get a sense of what lies beneath the behavior between men and women that on the surface so offends each other.

Reading both of those descriptions may go a long way to diminish the reactivity that men and women have towards each other, but what next?

Women might simply say, “If men would just stop b.s.ing others and themselves, everything would get much better.”  In actuality when you find such men, there really is less contention between them and women, because a) the women admire, respect, trust and have confidence in them and b) feeling such positive regard from women the men feel respect, appreciation and admiration towards the women.

Why doesn’t this happen more?  Why are so many men so insecure?  A man’s sense of confidence is directly tied to how competent he feels and how much in control of his life he feels.  One of the realities of our complex and complicated lives is that men feel increasingly less or even completely incompetent in many of the situations they find themselves in and in the abilities that others think they have that they know they don’t.  The less competent and less in control a man feels, the more insecure and paranoid he becomes that he will be exposed as the incompetent and out of control person he feels he is inside.

Why don’t men simply say, “I don’t know that” or ask for help.  Well why is it that men don’t ask for directions? For some reason, probably built into them they feel that expressing either of those is humiliating and is admitting to the world that they are stupid or inadequate.  And there is a fear that admitting those in the open will cause people to ridicule you (again you are projecting on others that they will berate you just as you are doing to yourself at that exact moment).  Ironically, to say those two things without a hint of a whine, complaining or excuse making actually triggers the exact opposite response from people.

Years ago I did a forty person workshop with a $50 million security company that included people from sales and operations.  As I often do in such a workshop, I handed out index cards and had people anonymously write down what would be an amazing outcome from spending three hours with a specialist in human behavior and human communication.  I then began to read the cards aloud.  The answers were what you might expect.

The sales people wanted help with difficult customers that squeezed them on price and help in dealing with operational people who were always slowing down sales by refusing to give them inferior items they had sold that would break down and hurt the reputation of the company.  The operations people wanted to find out a way to deal with the Type A aggressive sales people that always seemed to be condescending, angry and impatient with them.

A heated debate followed where each side kept yelling at the other.

Then I read this card aloud: “Sales think operations are gutless; operations think sales are mindless.  We’re all on the same team, can’t we find a way to work together.”

There was a silence where you could hear a pin drop.

One man from operations raised his hand and said, “I never have problems with sales.”  The room fell silent and then someone asked, “How do you do that?”  And he calmly responded, I simply call them and say, “Hi this is Rob in ______, I need your help with something.  And they always help me.”

The room went quiet again and then one of the more aggressive women in sales piped up, “You know, I hate being part of the negativity all of us get into about operations.  We are all on the same team and I for one am stopping.”

The result was that both sides committed to stopping the name calling and agreed to “ask for help” when they needed something from the other side.  And that has continued to this day.

There is something there for men and women and for that matter all teams to emulate and learn.

As for me.  I now bring my wife to all my business meetings where a negotiation might take place.  She is much better at detecting when someone is b.s.ing me, I am b.s.ing them or I am b.s.ing myself.

My only request to her, “I know that in the past I was very capable of making foolish choices that worked against me and now you’re going to help prevent that.  When you do however, I’m okay with your thinking or telling me I was or was about to be foolish, just please don’t tell me I’m stupid.”

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