Message From David Falk

Dear Fellow Members of the Cleveland Psychoanalytic Center. I hope you have had a good summer with good weather and relaxation.  As weprepare to return to our work and the usual activities of the Center, I wantto alert you the an important meeting of the Outreach Program of the IPAthat will visit us during the first weekend of November.  I have commentedelsewhere about the interesting and productive ideas now in play at Michiganand how these new activities that may run counter to our usual ways of doingthings have led to increased interest in psychoanalysis in Ann Arbor andsurrounding areas.  Much of this activity is lead and supported by MarvinMargolis who will be visiting us along with Jim Hansell now at GeorgeWashington University. Marv is a wonderfully positive man with great ideas to improve our morale andour bottom line with new enrollments in our training programs.  In myHealthcare MBA program,  I have learned that Marv's ideas are anessential part of an aspect of organizational life called renewal andrevitalization after a period of stability and subsequent decline.  It ispart of what is called marketing. Now I know that this is a bad word for some of you who relate marketing toadvertising or salesmanship.  That is not what marketing is.  Marketing isan idea about what enterprise you are in and knowing who your targetcustomers/patients are and what they want.  In most industries and servicesit leads to a customer driven or patient focused business.  Becomingpatient focused and more integrated with other aspects of medicine andhealth care is a central part of the Affordable Care Act and we arewitnessing movement in the institutions around us to change the organizationof healthcare.  In Marketing, the focus of the organization should not be onwhat we want to do or what is pleasing to us, but on what the customerwants, wishes for and needs.  By thinking of our mission as being "thereducing human psychological suffering business" we can see that our task isgreat and that we have many competing programs and services aimed at thesame problem.  This situation makes it necessary to start a careful planningeffort to make what we offer distinctive and different from otherservices (branding), and it requires an active connection and relationshipwith people who might wish to use our unique services and learn from us howto become one of us.  I think we have not done a good job in making our workunique and sharing that uniqueness with the public in ways that they canknow and understand. Further we have to upgrade our efforts to have socialwork, psychology and psychiatry students come to know of us and ourprograms. This marketing idea requires support of our Board and involvement with allof our members since we all have some role to play in connecting what we dowith the people we see around us.  I have already enlisted the FoundationCommittee to work on designing a development plan but that too is related tohow we see ourselves and how well it relates to what people want to support.I strongly believe in the power of the psychoanalytic experience and we haveto do what we can to promote it so we can attract candidates and find casesfor all of us to analyze.  I will discuss this with the Board and we willform a Center wide committee much like the building committee to address themany issues in moving from where we are to where we need to go. There is a wonderful paper by Theodore Levitt called Marketing Myopia, inthe Harvard Business Review originally published in 1960 and republished inresponse to reader demand in 2000.  In it he traces how once powerful businessorganizations were so convinced that they would be around forever that theywere unable and unwilling to address competing enterprises when they grew upin response to changing conditions.  Organizations are much like the peoplewho lead them.  He cites the Railroad's failure to see itself in thetransportation business rather than just the railroad business.  In a morerecent example we can all recall the fact that in 1965, the restaurant thathad more outlets than any other was Howard Johnson's but in that year BurgerKing and McDonalds and Pizza Hut started by taking parts of Hojos menu andopening single product restaurants.  Now McDonald's is facing the fact thatits menu has grown so that it is not in the hamburger business but in theall things to everyone business.  A newer restaurant is taking a greaterpercentage out of its market share and that is Subway and it is linkinghealthier, lower fat sandwiches to a changing consumer preference.  Tastesand values change over time and we have to mindful of what people want andwhat they are willing to invest in for their well being may change and wehave to change with it if we are to survive. Let's work together to make our Center vital and stronger. All the best, David I. Falk PhDPresident, Board of Trustees