Boston Sports Medicine and Performance Group, LLC Blog

I attended the Seth Godin conference this past summer in Boston where Seth shared his thoughts on ordinary people and ordinary organizations.

“Organizations hire ordinary people to do ordinary things and get paid ordinary money; but, if you build a team, an organization, or a staff with extraordinary expectations, to do extraordinary tasks, this will be rewarded with extraordinary pay.”

Do you work in a place that’s ordinary or extraordinary?

Do you expect extraordinary pay while working in an ordinary environment?

Extraordinary work means you shipped.

What did you ship this summer?

Art Horne is the Coordinator of Care and Strength & Conditioning Coach for the Men’s Basketball Team at Northeastern University, Boston MA.  He can be reached at a.horne@neu.edu.

I’ve been blessed my whole life by having unbelievable mentors by my side showing me the right ways to do things, and more importantly being  there to tell me when I’m clearly off track.  Below is a quote from a mentor I’ve been lucky enough to cross paths with.  Joe Donahue is not only a true historian in sport and performance but he is also considered one of the very best throwing coaches in all of track and field.

“You will be a better coach if you write an article, or two.  It helps your mind focus on what it is that you do and how you do it.  Clinics are also a fine way if you combine them with practical result.  It sharpens your skills and helps you to define objectives. You don't need a "string of athletes," (to be successful) you start with one, watch the result and go to the next one always refining what you do.  In the end your success will be on the field.  Did your athletes run faster, throw further, jump higher?  If they did not, what you believe has no basis in reality. There is marginal effect from the weight room on an athlete's result the further you remove yourself from specific event needs.  It is more likely how you train than how much you lift.

It is a new beginning every day.”

Thanks Joe.

Art Horne is the Coordinator of Care and Strength & Conditioning Coach for the Men’s Basketball Team at Northeastern University, Boston MA.  He can be reached at a.horne@neu.edu.
 

Imagine you move into a new community and sign a four-year lease agreement just to find out you are only allowed to see a certain local dentist.  The decision has already been made for you.

You’re a plumber so you go see the dentist for all the plumbers. 

This might not be a problem at first since all dentists are the same right?  The trouble however is that the dentist now doesn’t really have to be that good.  They don’t have to keep up to date on the newest cleaning technologies or the research on gum disease because they know that you have to see them.  Sure there are other dentists in the community that you could see, but they’re busy taking care of waiter teeth or the gum lines of taxi cab drivers and really don’t have time for you.

Sound crazy?

The same scenario eerily exists on a college campus near you. 

In college athletics, there is no real incentive to be great. It’s about getting by and fulfilling your job description.  You don’t have to be a really great athletic trainer or strength coach because your “customers” already signed up for four years. They’re locked in.  There's no competing with your fellow office mates, or even other colleges once they've signed up.

Your customers HAVE to see you. There is no other choice. In fact, if they get upset and stop making an effort to see you, life actually becomes better not worse, doesn’t it?  More free time to play around on Facebook right?  By the time the college athlete gets so upset at the way they were treated, they are walking at graduation and are soon forgotten.  Bring on the new batch of freshmen!

The challenge then, is developing a community of dentists that not only appreciate their customers, but also strive to collectively raise the level of care in their community while also fostering an environment that promotes the sharing and referral of complicated and interesting cases in the search for better education and healthcare for everyone.

But that just seems too difficult, forget I even mentioned it.

Art Horne is the Coordinator of Care and Strength & Conditioning Coach for the Men’s Basketball Team at Northeastern University, Boston MA.  He can be reached at a.horne@neu.edu.

What does it matter?

Your doctor wouldn’t ask you what field you work in before taking you on as a patient.

“Sorry, I prefer to treat only plumbers with hernias.  You work in finance.”

I’m still amazed that we continue to advertise jobs that emphasize what team you’ll be working with, i.e. job descriptions that read “primary job responsibility is working with women’s soccer and tennis.”  When did treating low back pain of a volleyball athlete become so different than treating that of the soccer or tennis athlete?  Shouldn’t our job descriptions read something more like, “primary job responsibility is to practice patient centered care and evidence based medicine”?

If all your work environment has to offer is working with one or two sports in particular, then maybe you haven’t created an environment worthy of the best professionals.  You know, the ones that like to solve interesting problems, continue to develop their skills and pursue best practice. Maybe you just want someone to come in, put their head down and work with that sport.

The trouble is, you’ll get exactly that.

Art Horne is the Coordinator of Care and Strength & Conditioning Coach for the Men’s Basketball Team at Northeastern University, Boston MA.  He can be reached at a.horne@neu.edu.

What’s keeping you from doing your job –I mean your real job?

Remember? The job you signed up for – practicing sports medicine.  I know I signed up to provide care for collegiate student-athletes aspiring to make it big. I signed up to help and I know the vast majority of you did too.   Unfortunately, as time passed I found myself practicing sports medicine less and less and spending more and more time filling water bottles, filing insurance claims and cleaning up at the end of the day.
I also remember the day it all changed back to the way I envisioned.  

It was the day I decided to stop doing the “3-C’s” and started practicing sports medicine again.  Tom Cronin, a mentor of mine and the Director of Sports Medicine at MIT in Boston, told me about the “3-C’s” over breakfast as I was complaining to him about all the work I was doing.  He kindly pointed out to me that the majority of my work day was not being spent doing the work that I signed up for, but instead work consisting of the “3-C’s” – Catering, Clerical and Custodial.  If you could manage to take away all the tasks involving any one of the “3-C’s” how much time would you have left in the day to actually practice your craft? No more cleaning whirlpools, filling water bottles or chasing down insurance companies for authorization of services (I had a co-worker who once proudly told me they sat on the phone for over 40 minutes obtaining pre-authorization for an MRI – how many patients could you have seen and cared for during that same time?)

So when you walk into work tomorrow, find just one task that is keeping you from actually doing your job and stop doing it.

There, feels good right?

Now get back to doing your job! The real job you signed up for.

Art Horne is the Coordinator of Care and Strength & Conditioning Coach for the Men’s Basketball Team at Northeastern University, Boston MA.  He can be reached at a.horne@neu.edu.

Though my department does not have a dedicated IT specialist anymore, there is a small group of individuals that services our particular area of campus.  Out of three desktop support personnel, two of them know exactly zero members of our staff, are severely lacking in response/response time, and let's just say that small talk is not their strong suit.  The third individual however knows the name of everyone in my department.  He also responds almost immediately to every inquiry sent his way, even if it's to say that he is working somewhere else, but will be by at an approximate time later.  What is his best quality?  When problems arise he doesn't mutter under his breath and he takes the time to not only address the issue, but to explain to the staff where the problem originated in terms they can understand.  Who do you think is going to get the better reviews when their boss calls around to the various departments for feedback?

One of the things that I always find interesting is when someone says something to the effect of, "Yeah, well I'm not in customer service."  Maybe it's time to take another look at your business model.  Aren't we all in some form of customer service?  Whether they are internal or external, we are all serving someone as a customer base.  How likely are we to return to the doctor that spends 30 seconds explaining what's wrong with us vs. the one that takes the time to break down all the angles.  I think we have all had that fantastic experience AS a customer somewhere whether it's at a doctor's office, with an IT guy, or at a retail establishment.  If they didn't make you a customer for life, then at the very least they significantly increased their positive word-of-mouth.  In an age where information and opinion travels instantaneously to millions of potential customers, how can you afford not to put your best face forward?  I mean, we are all busy, but are we ever too busy to go the extra mile for our customers? 

Can your operation afford not to?

Shaun Bossio is the Assistant Business Manager and ProShop Manager at Boston University FitRec.
He can be reached at sbossio@bu.edu

Ok, you work hard.

You’re in every morning on time, you only take a lunch break during the time you’re suppose to and you never leave early.

Now show me what you’ve shipped.

No, not the emails that you responded to promptly, not the insurance paperwork that you filed away or the suggestions you’ve made for this year’s staff retreat. Show me what you’ve shipped.

There’s a major difference between showing up and doing your job day after day and showing up and “shipping”.  I first heard the term “shipping” during a Seth Godin conference that was held in Boston in the summer of 2010. I used to call it “getting SH*^T done”, but Seth’s term works as well. 

When you ship, there is a measurable, tangible and sustainable change or difference that has taken place. It’s not answering the phone; it’s figuring out how to hire a student worker and establishing a student work force to answer the phone for you and your staff.  It’s not licking envelopes and mailing summer programs out to athletes and patients; it’s creating a website that describes exercises and shows video clips that your athletes and patients can access while on vacation 24/7 so they can continue to do their exercises while they’re away from college. It’s not telling your athletes/patients that a lean source of protein at each meal is important; it’s creating a comprehensive nutrition plan that involves teaching them to shop, cook and budget properly so they can make educated decisions on their own when they’re away from the training table. Shipping is about change. Shipping is about pointing to your resume and proudly saying, “I did this!”

I never hired anyone because they fulfilled their job description. I only hire people that ship, and ship on time.

Art Horne is the Coordinator of Care and Strength & Conditioning Coach for the Men’s Basketball Team at Northeastern University, Boston MA.  He can be reached at a.horne@neu.edu.

If your grandfather (first risk factor) walks into his primary care physician for his annual physical and presents with elevated insulin levels (second risk factor), low HDL cholesterol (third risk factor), and abdominal obesity (fourth risk factor), chances are that he’ll be suffering from insulin resistance pretty soon.

Just having one of these risk factors alone doesn’t necessarily predict future disaster. But put them all together and mix them up?  Well, you have a nice recipe for some serious problems.  Assessing multiple risk factors and contributing their sum towards an end pathology or disease is common in all fields of medicine.  Another example would be the patient with elevated LDL cholesterol, high blood pressure, and insulin resistance.  Mix these all up and I’m pretty sure you’ll be tipping the scales with obesity soon.  And yet another set of risk factors predicts hypertension and so forth.

In Sports Medicine and orthopedic screening, this concept has been lost.  Let me elaborate.

So, a tight achilles with a loss of dorsiflexion compared bilaterally without pain by itself surely never deserves a referral to an orthopedic doctor? Neither does a weak right glut medius muscle, a single leg hop discrepancy left to right, right knee valgus collapse during an overhead squat, and of course a tight right psoas muscle from sitting all day surely doesn’t deserve orthopedic referrals when observed by themselves.  I mean, your athlete can run and jump just fine, right?

Again, all of these by themselves do not deserve a referral, but all of these combined certainly spell future knee pain or other pending disaster, agreed?  Yet, we usually don’t do anything until the knee hurts, or worse, when the athlete hobbles in on crutches after tearing up their knee.

Why are we waiting until an athlete’s season is over to address contributing risk factors?

For example, we measure blood pressure and refer immediately after obtaining an abnormally high reading, but did the heart initially hurt?

What gives?

*Suggested Reading and Inspiration provided by: Why Zebra’s don’t get Ulcers by Robert M. Sapolsky

Art Horne is the Coordinator of Care and Strength & Conditioning Coach for the Men’s Basketball Team at Northeastern University, Boston MA.  He can be reached at a.horne@neu.edu.

That’s the way I was taught so it must be right, and that’s the way I’m going to continue to do it.

Who were the professors that taught these people?

The very best professors insist that their students challenge them.  Challenge what they are teaching them.
Challenge the books, articles and resources that they come across – always continue to search for the truth.  Go beyond the classroom in search of a better way. (I call it my own personal quest for the holy grail).

I remember being taught to do 15 chest compressions and 2 breaths when performing CPR and I’m sure you were too. But we changed that because we found there was a better way to do things. Then we found out that if we get an AED hooked up faster then that’s even better.

Hey, but that’s just the way I was taught.

Art Horne is the Coordinator of Care and Strength & Conditioning Coach for the Men’s Basketball Team at Northeastern University, Boston MA.  He can be reached at a.horne@neu.edu.

Instead of bringing in a consultant to evaluate your workplace, bring an alien in and have it ask you difficult questions.  The alien knows nothing of your job. Has no emotional attachment as to how the way “things have always been done.”  The alien wasn’t taught how to apply a certain rehab technique or strengthening exercise at your alma mater. The alien simply wants to know why.

The Consultant is inherently biased – they’ve done your job, worked your hours, and sat in your desk. And of course, will tell you how to do your job more like the way they did it when they were in your shoes.

I mean, they were the very best at their job at one time – just ask them.

Art Horne is the Coordinator of Care and Strength & Conditioning Coach for the Men’s Basketball Team at Northeastern University, Boston MA.  He can be reached at a.horne@neu.edu.