In her workshop to the Greater Lehigh Valley Writers Group last weekend, Laurel Olsen Wenson mentioned her favorite book, Farenheit 451, and added the caveat, “and I’m not a science fiction fan, but that book resonated with me.”
We are living in the science fiction world that Ray Bradbury and George Orwell (1984, Animal Farm) predicted, with watches that do all the medical tricks Star Trek‘s tricorders could do, and headed toward the environmental destruction and obesity/immobility depicted in WallE.
A lot of people say to me that I post too much of my personal life online. Maybe I do, maybe I don’t. But as a journalist, I know that the notion of privacy is not as airtight as people think it is. Do you own your house? Then, I can research property records and find who you bought that house with, how much you paid for it and when, and also the address.
Before the internet, we had yellow pages and white pages. In order to avoid having your name, address and telephone number published for the whole world to see, you had to pay money to have an unlisted number.
Every time you write a check, you are giving random people access to your bank name, your routing number and your account number (not to mention the check number on the top of the check indicates either how many checks you write or how long you’ve been with that bank). We toss around so much private information on a day-to-day basis.
Every time an innovation makes our life easier or touts itself as a convenience, there’s a level of encroaching on our privacy or even potentially interconnecting our personal, medical and consumer live to the extent that no one will know who’s really in control. Is it the government? Is it big business? Is it our strange industrialized medical system? Who knows?!
The Emotionally Intelligent Dental Office
A few days ago I had a meeting with Dr. Steven Hymovitch, who is in the design phase of his upcoming second book, The Emotionally Intelligent Dental Office. I get to worry about details like copyright, ISBN assignment, and brand alignment. I went onto Amazon.com to confirm the size of the book– it’s a key detail we almost forgot.
Here is the material you’ll find on the back of the book for The Emotionally Intelligent Dental Office:
If you have worked for any length of time, no doubt you’ve noticed that navigating office climate and culture may command more energy than the actual work at times. Why are some office cultures humming along like a beautiful symphony, while other work environments feel like pulling teeth (pun intended) just to get things done? Why are some people so pleasant to be around, while we might prefer a root canal over talking to others? Emotional Intelligence. Does your practice and people have it?
Emotional Intelligence is the capability of individuals to recognize their own emotions and those of others, discern between different feelings and label them appropriately, use emotional information to guide thinking and behavior, and manage and/or adjust emotions to adapt to environments or achieve one’s goal(s). Frequently, Emotional Intelligence is more of a driver in office dynamics than intellectual ability or book smarts.
In his follow-up book to the highly successful The Dentist Who Gets It…Endodontist, coach and business owner, Dr. Steven Hymovitch, offers a practical, play-by-play guide to assessing, building and keeping an emotionally intelligent dental practice that is a pleasure for employees and patients. Gain new skills sets that improve individual and group emotional intelligence at work and in life:
- Acquire tools to avoid getting pulled into office drama and how to rise above
- Develop healthy techniques to work with difficult personality types
- Recognize negative repeating patterns and stay off the crazy train
- Stay clear of emotional sabotage and games in the workplace
- Motivate emotionally intelligent conversations and connections
- Maintain good relationships, communicate clearly, inspire and influence others, work well in a team, and manage conflict
- Reduce unnecessary stress for yourself, colleagues and patients
- Learn interview tips and assessment tools, guide dialogue and probing questions that can help you quickly assess the EI of future employees
- Utilize your emotional intelligence skills to turn a patient into a referral source
Welcome to The Emotionally Intelligent Dental Practice. Whether you’re a one-office practice or expanding to multiple locations or markets, this insightful book will help you go beyond academics to build a thriving and enjoyable culture for employees and patients.
His first book, The Dentist Who Gets It, is available in paperback for a reduced price of about $10 on Amazon. But that wasn’t what I was there to see. I needed to confirm the size and some other basic publishing information. But then I saw a seller offering the book used for $1.99, plus $3.98 shipping, and I was intrigued.
Where it gets weird…
I decide for $6.33 I should go ahead and order the book. Yes, ordering a used books reduces author royalties, but in this case, it saves Steve the trouble of sending me a book. And since he’s a client, it’s my job to minimize his hassle. As his editor and project manager, I should have a copy of the other book so this will help me ensure consistency among the product line.
I went to switch the payment method from my business credit card to my business debit, and Amazon offers me a new option. Knowing I have an American Express card, which is the card I used before I opened all my official business accounts, it suggested I used my American Express Reward Points to make the purchase.
That’s right– Amazon knew I had $11.99 in reward points and allowed me to use them directly to make a purchase.
Now, I’ve been thinking about Amazon and its pervasive ways. We now get packages on Sunday (when in the past only specialty services delivered on Sunday and it cost an arm and a leg). Amazon has lockers popping up where you can have packages delivered. And drop off points where you can return items– like UPS, okay, that’s a package service that makes sense but now also department store Kohls, which is a competitor. I suppose the whole thought is to drive traffic in the store.
There is no such thing as free lunch.
So, if you are an author, I don’t need to tell you about the games Amazon likes to play. If you are a small business owner, you also know but you are playing different games.
Amazon for years has brokered deals with Meta (Facebook) to learn what people are on author’s personal and professional social media pages and then uses that list to ban reviews from anyone associated with an author on the Amazon web site. (Unless this has changed. No one has been complaining about it lately.)
Amazon bought Goodreads, which is known to be the place where people want their friends to recommend books, so that’s where those reviews are supposed to go. But Amazon piloted a program to connect these reviews to the books on their Amazon pages. This caused an uproar. Why? Because the grading system on Goodreads is harder than on Amazon because Goodreads is populated by people who like to read and Amazon is populated by everybody.
With Goodreads numbers calculated in, the average review goes down which not only impacts what the quotidian reader selects, but also impacts the algorithm and the author’s ability to apply for certain paid advertising platforms.
But now Amazon has access to our internal account information on our credit cards? People get upset at companies that sell telephone numbers or email addresses, but large corporations buying our personal data on our finances from other large corporations is a transaction of convenience.
These are the sorts of innovations and cooperations I like to see small businesses make– not necessarily selling data, but recognizing an overlap in services that may lead to cooperation. It’s what networking is supposed to lead to.
Just some thoughts about where our data goes and who it serves…
Parisian Phoenix Publishing 
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