Seth Godin comes up with brilliant marketing concepts.

But at times, I find myself on the opposite side of the fence with his opinions.

This is one such instance – primarily because of the choice of his examples. In his recent post, “Why you might choose to be in favor of transparency“, Seth refers to:

1. Why doctors should encourage transparency in their results.

2. An Indian bureaucrat’s argument in favor of legalizing bribery in some instances.

The variable being ignored or brushed aside, in this over-simplification of what is in reality a rather intricate and involved interaction of ‘action’ and ‘reaction’, is the dynamic impact transparency (or the risk thereof) can have upon the action being performed itself.

A surgeon whose operation is transmitted live to a patient’s family sitting outside the O.R. (something that’s technically possible) is bound to be nervous and jittery, even to a point where he may make more mistakes or errors of judgment.

‘Anonymous’ transparency, as when an institution reveals aggregate data of medical performance statistics, is free of this effect.

As is internally audited information that is initially perused only by competent and qualified experts who know how to interpret the technical data.

Most hospital departments have weekly or monthly audits to monitor performance, even sub-stratified by specialty or individual practitioner. But this is NOT made public – for good reason!

When patients post reviews, they are conditioned and influenced (not unreasonably) by emotion, personal feelings and incomplete technical knowledge. Having that in the public domain, where it may adversely impact the general perception of a highly skilled and qualified technical specialist, isn’t quite good practice.

How many of us are competent to judge intricate economic decision-making, or the rightness of protocols to shut down nuclear plants in a melt-down situation, or merits and drawbacks of a cutting-edge technological innovation like stem-cell therapy, or cloning, or nano-tech?

Not many. In fact, precious few. Yet transparency in these processes is being called “desirable”.

Exactly why?

‘Empowerment’ is not making data available willy-nilly – but more of allowing access to it by qualified experts who are able to make sense of it.

The paper by the Indian bureaucrat is intriguing… though also whimsical.

In this instance, it is presumed that the bribe-taker has ethical standards, and will cringe or worry about being outed in his bribe-taking. Reality, though, is different. Everybody concerned KNOWS already that these folks are taking bribes. It isn’t as if making this information public will change much, if anything at all.

And the bribe-taker knows it’s possible to bribe one’s way out of being prosecuted – unless you’re small fry! See this interesting cartoon from a recent issue of ‘The Hindu’.

The risk, then, of being too transparent, is that you become invisible!

The Pain is a living thing.

It lives in the left corner of my lower jaw. Every four hours or so, when the effect of medication wears off, it celebrates its existence with joyous energy.

Just like any newborn, it cares little for my convenience. It wakes me up rudely at 4 a.m., demanding immediate attention with an insistent throbbing beat that mirrors my own heart, or decides to party when I’m in the middle of composing an article, or seeing a patient, or reading a book.

It tires quickly (thank God!) – but even the calm it leaves behind is agonizing for the anticipation of an unwelcome, unexpected return.

Like a tolerant (if helpless) old man may acknowledge the exuberance and enthusiasm of youth, while resenting its blatant reminder of his own past, now lost forever, I mutely suffer the fireworks it sets off inside my mouth… and try desperately to focus on the happier days before it was born, or the soon-to-come afternoon where I hope to have it eliminated.

The Pain was born from a curious constellation of oral epithelium, which left a wisdom tooth lying flat, as if asleep, when all others were standing.

All might have been well if the sleeping tooth stayed that way. But like everything else in nature, it too got restless. Discontent. Unsatisfied.

It wanted, perhaps, a little excitement in its lonely, dark, quiet life. And so it gave birth to The Pain… little knowing what a monster it would become, or that it would bring about its own ruin and destruction.

Without this terrible offspring, I may have ignored the parent completely. Now, I cannot. This problem child is making my very existence a cycle of misery and merciful relief, the latter only brought about by the marvels of modern pharmacology.

And so, both parent and progeny will have to go.

The decision to order termination was easy. Like any assassin knows only too well, the logistics of the process are elaborate. And so I will have to suffer the juvenile’s playful torture for a while longer, hoping my agonized wincing doesn’t insult or annoy someone at a family wedding I’m obliged to attend today.

Wish me luck!

If you’ve been trying to read “Do You Even Care?“, you’ll realize it needs a password to unlock the post.

Want one? Email me. info (at) ezinemarketingcenter (dot) COM

I’ve been reviewing some things in my business, non-profit and other online work, found areas that needed modification, and came up with this set of tactical steps to take – starting right now!

1. Focus on offline fundraising, rather than devoting all my time to online efforts.

2. Take a break from all active social networking (except on Fridays).

3. Re-build my info-product portfolio, and integrate the 50+ relevant ones I have created/licenced into a catalog.

4. Enhance my affiliate program to allow many others to become ‘instant infopreneurs’ (by reselling my infoproduct catalog).

5. Work on growing my contact list much bigger, as the existing one has become abysmal in responsiveness. Target: 100,000 in 2 years.

6. Focus a lot of time and energy in blogging at “Information Marketing Made EASY“. Keep it tightly themed on infopreneur topics.

7. Update and share the dozens of special reports lying idle on my hard drive with budding information marketers.

8. Negotiate joint venture co-promotions for my best work, ‘Think, Write & Retire‘ – to get it into the hands of 25,000 people within a year.

9. Stop thinking about having a large following, or being mentioned on various lists – and focus on growing my business, step by step (like I did at the beginning, in 1995).

10. Use multiple channels to reach prospects, and test multiple marketing messages. Heavy emphasis on testing paid media traffic, and other scalable systems.

11. Stop dreaming too big right away. Focus instead of acting on small goals, achieving them, and scaling up gradually.

12. Go back to the past. Do what worked once, and still works for others – except that I stopped doing them now, because I got complacent/lazy!

13. Use Twitter for personal connection, NOT marketing my business stuff. Focus on my non-profit activities and my own interests/passions.

14. Make this list HAPPEN… and not lose focus to move on to other things!

I’m an expert in pediatric heart surgery.

You probably wouldn’t take my professional opinion about obstetrics and gynaecology very seriously.

And I don’t blame you for laughing in my face if I presume to offer technical advice and opinion about designing a microprocessor chip, or programming security software for a bank, or suggesting ideal disinvestment procedures for ailing public sector industries.

That’s because highly specialized, complex, multi-dimensional problems and issues take years and years of in-depth and focused experience and expertise to tackle, address and ultimately solve.

Even in as specialized a field as heart surgery (which is preceded by 5 years in medical school, and usually by another 3 to 5 years in general surgical training), there is a world of difference between ‘adult’ and ‘child’ specialists.

And the difference stems from more than just technical issues – crossing over into philosophical, strategic and social domains.

It takes a certain kind of mindset and reference frame to view treating an 85 year old patient so that he survives for another five years. It takes a radically different approach to plan therapy of a 5 year old girl, who is facing eighty-five years more of life.

So while any qualified cardiac surgeon can probably technically fix hearts in the young or old, it still takes a sub-domain of specialization and expertise to deliver meaningful and top quality care.

Such expertise can be acquired – but not vicariously, through someone else’s effort, or simply by accessing it through them. Sure, you can hire or employ specialists – but you cannot become one yourself through taking shortcuts.

And when one is already a specialist or expert in one area or domain, the ideology, principles and tactical moves that collaborate to engender success in that area are ported ‘as is’ (knowingly or not) to other areas as well – opening up a Pandora’s box of interesting possibilities… and potential disasters!

What set off this thought stream?

This last bit in one of Bill Gates’ Notes, about handling pandemics.

“There are new manufacturing approaches that reduce the lead time and increase the production rate, but government rules don’t allow the vaccine companies to use them yet because of safety concerns. Although governments are right to be conservative about vaccine safety, they have to find a way to help the vaccine industry…”

From the perspective of a business, this is absolutely sound advice.

From the perspective of a public health specialist, it might set off alarms.

From the perspective of a pediatrician who administers these vaccines to an individual child, this might seem heresy!

Ignoring or bypassing “safety concerns” has frequently created disasters on a scale far greater than any illness or inconvenience the “fast tracked” medications may have helped alleviate.

In retrospect, we know that the H1N1 pandemic wasn’t as dangerous as feared. But what if we had rushed ahead, manufactured vaccines unheeding of “safety concerns” – and ended up creating a tragedy of similar proportions?

Run a search on the Web for “Thalidomide” and you’ll get a heart-rending account of how a poorly evaluated pill to treat morning sickness in pregnant women led to the birth of thousands of children without limbs in the late 1950’s.

More recently, a COX-2 inhibitor (Vioxx) for pain relief was recalled (after a “billion dollar launch”) because of an increase in the risk for heart attack, thrombosis and stroke.

These, and dozens more, are case studies that any student of a related specialty would be intensely and intimately aware of – and therefore be governed by, even if subliminally, in any decision, opinion or advice on relevant issues.

A ‘novice’ trying to speed-learn everything on a highly technical, complex subject (or acquire the knowledge through meetings with experts) cannot be expected to ‘get’ every such nuance, nor blamed for any decisions or actions taken based on such ignorance or misinterpretation.

Also, behavior like this can be poignantly dangerous when the knowledge acquisition is desired in order to be personally involved “hands-on” in intelligent and informed decision-making.

It is that way for ’small’ decisions like deciding whether or not to dialyse your dad whose kidneys are shutting down, or opt for a coronary artery stent instead of open heart surgery, by trying to figure out the relative risks and benefits from a Google search.

And it is too when taking steps to make multi-million dollar decisions about funding research and preventive measures in a speciality like preventive health (or any other).

Business ethics are different from medical ethics for a reason.

And if you disagree with the basic premise of this message, I expect to hear from you asking for my ‘expert’ advice whenever you plan on investing your next million dollars. I’ve read quite a few books and talked with experts about that subject, y’know!

The worst earthquake to hit Haiti in over two centuries has affected over 3 million people and left thousands dead.

Haiti is close to my heart. And my mind has been numb ever since I heard the news, upon returning from a day-long meeting with officials regarding tax-exempt status of my non-profit Foundation.

The work I’m engaged upon has helped 55 little children receive heart surgery over 6 years. But this figure pales in contrast to the gigantic scale and size of the devastation that was wreaked in an instant by a freak of nature halfway across the globe!

As my dazed senses tried to cope with the staggering scale of the devastation, and gain some meaningful perspective on the impact of my own work, a story popped into mind to save my sanity.

It’s the tale of…

“The Single Starfish”

One day an old man was walking along the beach.

It was low tide, and the sand was littered with thousands of stranded starfish that the water had carried in and then left behind. The man began walking very carefully so as not to step on any of the beautiful creatures.

Since the animals still seemed to be alive, he considered picking some of them up and putting them back in the water, where they could resume their lives.

The man knew the starfish would die if left on the beach’s dry sand but he reasoned that he could not possibly help them all, so he chose to do nothing and continued walking.

In a little while, the man came upon a young child on the beach who was frantically picking up one starfish after another and throwing it back into the sea.

The old man stopped and asked the child, “What are you doing?”

“I’m saving the starfish,” the child replied.

“Why waste your time?… There are so many of them. You can’t save them all so what does is matter?” argued the man.

Without hesitation, the child picked up another starfish, tossed it back into the water, and turned back to the man to say…

“It mattered to that one!”

So I will pray for the suffering in Haiti. And do whatever little possible to help. The haunting words of a song that raised $63 million for humanitarian aid in Africa keep playing over and over in my mind…

“There’s a choice we’re making,
We’re saving our own lives!”

When I wrote “Dare to be Different“, I hadn’t read Eckhart Tolle’s “A NEW EARTH“, from which this passage stood out when I read it today:

“There may be a period of insecurity and uncertainty. What should I do? As the ego is no longer running your life, the psychological need for external security, which is illusory anyway, lessens. You are able to live with uncertainty, even enjoy it.

The Roman philosopher Tacitus rightly observed that “the desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise.” If uncertainty is unacceptable to you, it turns into fear. If it is perfectly acceptable, it turns into increased aliveness, alertness and creativity.”

- From Eckhart Tolle’s “A NEW EARTH”

I recently shot some interesting photos of birds in our own garden. One was an Indian Shikari or Sparrow Hawk (which was viewed over 800 times on Twitpic, by the way), and another was a Common Tailorbird.

Those were ‘fortunate accidents’ – but the ones taken today were deliberate and intentional. We spent the day watching birds at the famous Vedanthangal Bird Sanctuary, where over 40,000 feathered friends gather every monsoon season to breed!

Here are some photos from what turned out to be a very interesting and enjoyable day…

Waking up at daybreak…

The grey Night Heron…

The Open-Billed Stork…

Dozens of White Egrets…

Egrets and Black Cormorants…

Painted Storks and Grey Pelicans…

A flock of White Ibis…

A nest of Painted Storks…

Pelicans roosting on a little island…

Twice before I have done “One Day In My Life” style blog posts – here and here. They have been (surprisingly) popular with readers. I guess the curious streak in us all is keen to see how others live!

Anyway, I thought of doing one for 2009 – and this is how one of my days went in the last week of December…

06:45 a.m. – I wake up. One thing I’ve changed over the past few years is the decision to get more sleep. From managing (quite comfortably, really) on four hours a night, I’ve consciously decided to increase that to six – after seeing some friends burn-out from overly stressed lives!

07:30 a.m. – I fire up my iMac, download email, and quickly scan through Twitter and TIMIC (The Internet Marketing Inner Circle) forum, one of very few online communities I’m actively engaged in.

08:00 a.m. – I start working on my first major task of the day, designed to improve productivity in 2010… Setting up dashboards. I’ve blogged about this earlier. In a nutshell, my ‘Dashboard’ is a simple webpage that lists the websites I access often. It saves me HOURS in re-typing URLs of these pages into web browsers, and makes it quick and easy to open up sites in different tabs on Firefox.

The first task was to re-structure the dashboards I had been using for 2 years, as I found some areas of wasted activity, and needed others to be included. In short, I ended up modifying the main Dashboard from having 27 links – to just ELEVEN!

The next part was to create ‘Routines’, which are short lists of repetitive activities to be carried out daily (or weekly). I have routines for business-related work to be done every morning and evening, and these were fine-tuned to fit my current plans.

09:30 a.m. – Short breakfast break, when I also read my current book – a novel by Chetan Bhagat called “The 3 Mistakes of My Life”. I average a book every week, often more. Reading is a passion, and has contributed incredible value to every aspect of my life. I’m a speed reader, and consider that skill one of the most desirable for anyone to develop because it opens up new worlds of mystery and awe… right from wherever you are!

10:00 a.m. – A passage in the novel I’m reading gave me the idea for a blog post. So I drafted out this message about the technique of fiction writing – and titled it provocatively, “If You Think Chetan Bhagat Is NOT A Good Writer…”

10:45 a.m. – Posted a link to the blog post on Twitter. Tagged Chetan (who is active on Twitter) too. He happened to be online, and re-tweeted it… and almost immediately, comments started piling up in queue for me to moderate.

11:00 a.m. – Set out to hospital for morning rounds. Little Abdul, who had a complex heart defect (Tetralogy of Fallot) repaired last week, was recovering well and will soon be back home with his brothers. A bright smile lit up the six-year old’s face when I told him the good news… a smile (like 54 more) made possible by thousands of generous supporters and donors, people just like you!

11:50 a.m. – On the drive to the railway station to pick up my twin nieces who are visiting us for their half-year holiday, I got a phone call from my cousin saying that an uncle is seriously ill. Apparently, he had a cardiac arrest, had been resuscitated, but his condition was critical.

1:15 p.m. – In the I.C.U., reviewing uncle’s situation, then consoling the family, providing them with the strand of hope that no one likes to abandon, but instead will cling to desperately – even against all odds. I’ve learned, over years, about the power of that delicate strand, and have seen miracles happen because of it.

2:30 p.m. – Back in the office, after a quick lunch, checking on my blog stats… and astounded to see over 900 people have read today’s post about Chetan Bhagat! (It went up to 1,415 reads before the day was out!)

Predictably, many comments were from fans simply raving about their favorite writer, or critics tearing down what they see as superficial writing. All those got trashed. While I use a bestselling author to make a point, the blog post itself is about the technique of writing great fiction – and few comments were relevant to that!

3:15 p.m. – The twins drop by, chattering away nineteen to the dozen, bringing me up to date with what’s been happening in their busy lives over the 4 months since we last met. I got to show them some of the nice photos we shot including the sparrow-hawk and tailorbird. Turns out the girls had seen a tailorbird’s nest – but not the resident!

4:30 p.m. – The kids set off to play, leaving me to catch up on some reading. I quickly skimmed a business e-report by Willie Crawford (a free gift for TIMIC members), a review copy of my V.A.’s book on making New Year’s resolutions, and some medical literature.

5:30 p.m. – With an hour of potentially uninterrupted time to focus on work, I create content for my membership site, “Build Your Online Business” – which members of my Info-Circle Private Group get access to for free.

6:30 p.m. – Quick phone call to hospital confirms uncle’s condition is stable, even a little improved. Remember what I said about hope and miracles?

6:40 p.m. – Short blitz of online marketing, where I did a ‘tag and ping‘ on my recent blog posts. Done regularly, this will always bring in a burst of traffic and even boost search rankings.

7:00 p.m. – Phone call to a representative of our local Rotary Club to arrange an appointment to meet and discuss the logistics of their plan to fund some heart operations through our program. If all goes well, this will help the Dr.Mani Children Heart Foundation carry out an additional 30 operations in 2010.

7:20 p.m. – A question popped into my mind: Why do I blog? So I thought of addressing it in a little blog post – which I published right away!

7:40 p.m. – Sent out a brief email to my list, in which I mentioned the best selling products in my portfolio in 2009 – and indicating the one which I believed would be the most popular in the coming year.

8:00 p.m. – After a nice family dinner, we all sat down to watch a movie (an oldie Tamil flick which I first saw nearly 20 years ago, and still had us all rolling on the ground in laughter!)

11:00 p.m. – Last check. A rapid scan through email, Twitter, TIMIC, forums, online networks and a few other news resources.

00:00 – Plan tomorrow. It’s something I try to do, but sometimes fail to finish. And whenever I fail, the following day is less productive! Think there’s a connection?! Leo Babauta’s ebook, ZEN TO DONE, has been of great value in driving home the importance of listing THREE important tasks to complete the next day. After making my list, I prepare to sleep.

In a broad sense, a typical day in my life would be similar. A mix of surgery and Foundation activities, writing and marketing my Web business, reading, learning and spending time with family.

Some days are different. When I’m operating, six hours or so will be devoted to that, leaving less time to get other things done. But with focus and a structured plan to follow, this won’t impact productivity much.

And while efficiency is a worthy habit to strive for, you can’t move towards your major goals without being EFFECTIVE. And this means not merely doing things well… it means doing the things that MATTER!

Make that your focus for 2010 and you’ll discover how magically your productivity and impact will multiply in the year ahead.

I followed an interesting string of thought as I drove back from hospital today. It’s about five generations of Indians.

I’ll call my grandparents’ Generation ZERO.

They grew up in British ruled India, and had little freedom to do things they might have wanted to. Their primary role in this thought-stream, therefore, lies as people who gave birth to…

My parents’ peers, a Generation 1.0

The folks in their 60’s and 70’s today, who grew up in an India struggling to build itself as an independent nation, bearing bravely the burden of experiments in Nehruvian socialism.

Then came us, Generation 2.0

Like Web 2.0, we were prepared for something new and exciting. Global capitalism. Of course, we didn’t know how it would explode on the Indian scene in what would soon become a post-liberalization scenario – but strangely enough, we were prepared and ready.

When Microsoft spearheaded the birth of a home computing revolution, we were in high school. Many of my generation embraced, willingly, the opportunities presented by that disruptive shift… and today quite a few executive VPs in the software behemoth are my contemporaries from India.

Contrast this ability to adapt, adopt and thrive against the attitude and behavior of the next group…

Generation 2.4

It’s represented by youth in their late teens and twenties today.

Where just 2 generations earlier such opportunities were completely absent, this population literally has the world as their oyster – yet, for some inexplicable reason, seems steeped in a lot of negativity, fatalism and a shockingly saddening willingness to believe that the worst is inevitable.

True, as youngsters we all eagerly looked out for Number One (moi). But today I see overt tinges of greed and selfishness that’s a sort of hallmark of Gen 2.4. It seems as if this young crowd that’ll be the future of our nation is steeped in a sense of entitlement, and keeps brashly grasping to get what they see as their due… for no better reason than that someone else has it.

Maybe it’s a reflection of the ultra-conservatism of their parents and grandparents, but there’s a surprising lack of enterprise in reaching out to cut their slice of the cake of rich opportunity that exists in an abundant, globally-connected universe waiting outside there.

Five years ago, medical transcription services were hot. They helped average youngsters bank big checks – for doing work that wasn’t creative, innovative or entrepreneurial. To no one’s surprise, profitability of that model dropped – but instead of adapting to change, there’s a bitterness among the downsized that I find hard to explain or understand.

Parents placed Gen 2.4′ers into colleges, counting on the juggernaut that’s the I.T. (Information Technology) industry to just continue to recruit 50,000 or 500,000 new engineers, year after year, forever – and pay them stunning starting salaries of Rs.35,000 and above.

And when it didn’t happen, these engineers are flocking instead to call centers (to help America’s consumers solve complex problems with using their household appliances) or fighting desperately for the few remaining cushy jobs that involve sitting in front of computers 8 to 12 hours every day, trouble-shooting bugs in software that’s being phased out by client’s companies (but needs support until the new version can be deployed).

Are they really so blind that they cannot see the inevitable end coming when this newer software goes live across systems?

Do they believe call centers are future-proof in a way medical transcription could never be?

Is entrepreneurial energy and a willingness to take risks in such a rich, conducive and open business environment so rare and scarce?

In the ‘Licence Raj’, the average entrepreneur couldn’t hope to get a foot in the door, which explains why Generation 1.0 (and even 2.0) breeded only a smallish elite group of ultra-successful business owners.

But in a world where teenagers are building business empires that put even the biggest of industrial giants to shame, why are Indian Gen 2.4′ers not leading that pack? Or caught somewhere in the thick of it?

Even inside India, today’s business and social environment of economic liberalization and public sector disinvestment provides opportunities for the taking!

Generation 2.0, despite having invested years and much of their youthful energy into well-defined paths, are even now exploring ways to bend these promising avenues and blend them into what they’re already doing. My own approach of using e-commerce to fund heart surgery for kids is an example.

Generation 2.4 can do this with so much more flexibility and with much wider latitude – because, literally, they have nothing to lose! (Sometimes, I wish I had been born 10 years later!)

But why aren’t they doing it?

My guess is that it’s a lack of confidence. An unwillingness to give things a go, and try out something unconventional, new, and therefore potentially dangerous.

In 1984, my peers hopped aboard the micro-computer and software carousel. No one knew how that would turn out. It was a heady ride, and has made them world-famous leaders and even celebrities.

In 1995, I embraced the world of the Internet. It provided no guarantees of success. Yet, it has become something special in my life, brought many dreams alive.

In 2010, will we see young Indians of Generation 2.4 take a risk too?

Or will that have to wait for my daughter’s Generation 3.0 to seize the bull by the horns, and tame that bucking bronco, bearing the risks that lead to massive success?

Also see: What Youth Want