Guest guest Posted November 6, 2003 Report Share Posted November 6, 2003 Emmanuel, > Regarding self-polling, I used to be a San Francisco cab drive circa > 1979-80. Asking a cab driver how much they make per day is like asking a > fisherman the size of the last fish he caught. I sense that asking people > any personal question without reference to documentation will result in > very little reality. As much as I agree that people entering CM schools should be fully informed, I have two concerns. First, the concern for reliability you note here. Second, the fact that there are many reasons for success or failure in practice, not all of which can be laid at the feet of the schools. While it has been years since I taught graduating clinicians, I once read several hundred student business plans over six years, a large number of which made such unreasonable assumptions that they had no chance of success, regardless of the education received. If we are to poll graduates, it might be more meaningful to quantify opinions, which is what well-formed polls are able to do. It would mean defining the " universe " to be polled in an effective way and carrying-out the poll by direct contact to insure that self-selection skewing was controlled. We could ask questions that centered on whether people had accomplished what they set out to do when they decided to undertake a CM education. If the polling agent were not associated with the respondents' school, the pressure to provide " the right response " would be lessened. An " opinion poll " would be meaningful to prospective students, could be reliable with a properly-selected universe of only 500 or so, and would be at least as useful for prospective students as self-reported income data. Since data about the school from which the respondent graduated would not be gathered, fears that one school or another would gain an advertising benefit would be eliminated -- increasing the prospect of getting the poll financed. To get at income data, I think we might consider an outcomes approach where we measure market activity, rather than attempting to directly acquire the raw data . There are a number of measures of clinical activity: needle sales, herb sales, yellow pages and phone book listings, etc., that indirectly describe the growth of clinical practices. If we were to plot public figures such as the growth in the number of license holders against reliably-gathered market data, we would at least know something about the operative trends. This shares the practical advantages of the opinion poll as regards neutrality. Bob bob Paradigm Publications www.paradigm-pubs.com P.O. Box 1037 Robert L. Felt 202 Bendix Drive 505 758 7758 Taos, New Mexico 87571 --- [This E-mail scanned for viruses by Declude Virus] Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted November 6, 2003 Report Share Posted November 6, 2003 Bob, I greatly appreciate and agree with your assessments. Most of the business people that I know were " trained " to do business ... and not just in school. Or perhaps mostly not in school at all. You can get training by working for someone who will train you on the job. Another way is to join a business group or association and learn to emulate successful business people. It's like learning anything else ... it's a slow molecule by molecule development that takes years of small successes and occasional failures. I would agree that what's learned in school has little if anything to do with business success. However, having said that I would add the following. Once a well trained and intelligent person can see how business works in America, both big and small, they can really navigate and accomplish a great deal. Most of American business and gross domestic product is from small business. Corporate business is another animal that exists nominally to serve the public and mostly to serve its administration. It flies at a different altitude from small business. I would recommend that small business practitioners not wish too much for corporate 3rd party payments for this reason. This could be one stream of revenue ... or several streams if you're a QME. More streams of revenue are available from non-corporate sources. It's better to work in 10 overlapping marketplaces than to be an ace in just one. These are my random thoughts regarding success in business. Emmanuel Segmen Merritt College, Asia Natural - Robert L. Felt Thursday, November 06, 2003 8:07 AM Income polling Emmanuel, > Regarding self-polling, I used to be a San Francisco cab drive circa > 1979-80. Asking a cab driver how much they make per day is like asking a > fisherman the size of the last fish he caught. I sense that asking people > any personal question without reference to documentation will result in > very little reality. As much as I agree that people entering CM schools should be fully informed, I have two concerns. First, the concern for reliability you note here. Second, the fact that there are many reasons for success or failure in practice, not all of which can be laid at the feet of the schools. While it has been years since I taught graduating clinicians, I once read several hundred student business plans over six years, a large number of which made such unreasonable assumptions that they had no chance of success, regardless of the education received. If we are to poll graduates, it might be more meaningful to quantify opinions, which is what well-formed polls are able to do. It would mean defining the " universe " to be polled in an effective way and carrying-out the poll by direct contact to insure that self-selection skewing was controlled. We could ask questions that centered on whether people had accomplished what they set out to do when they decided to undertake a CM education. If the polling agent were not associated with the respondents' school, the pressure to provide " the right response " would be lessened. An " opinion poll " would be meaningful to prospective students, could be reliable with a properly-selected universe of only 500 or so, and would be at least as useful for prospective students as self-reported income data. Since data about the school from which the respondent graduated would not be gathered, fears that one school or another would gain an advertising benefit would be eliminated -- increasing the prospect of getting the poll financed. To get at income data, I think we might consider an outcomes approach where we measure market activity, rather than attempting to directly acquire the raw data . There are a number of measures of clinical activity: needle sales, herb sales, yellow pages and phone book listings, etc., that indirectly describe the growth of clinical practices. If we were to plot public figures such as the growth in the number of license holders against reliably-gathered market data, we would at least know something about the operative trends. This shares the practical advantages of the opinion poll as regards neutrality. Bob bob Paradigm Publications www.paradigm-pubs.com P.O. Box 1037 Robert L. Felt 202 Bendix Drive 505 758 7758 Taos, New Mexico 87571 --- [This E-mail scanned for viruses by Declude Virus] Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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