Are you applying fear as a tactic in connection with your relationship with hospitals and other entities with which you have a Relationship Contract™ in place?

As you’ll recall if you're a regular reader, a Relationship Contract is an agreement that, as of the closing, creates an ongoing relationship between the parties. Its opposite is a Transactional Contract™, a deal that once it "closes," the parties go their separate ways – think of the purchase of a home.

Note that when I talk of “fear,” I’m not addressing the use of threats.  Instead, I’m speaking of fear of loss as an underlying current to a broader publicity push in favor of your group – a part of laying the groundwork for contract renewal.

In the context of your group's relationship with, for example, a hospital pursuant to an exclusive contract, the fear that can be harnessed includes the fear that your group will no longer desire to provide services at that facility, and the fear that you will pull back the added value services which you delivered over and above any contractual obligation in the course of your creation of an Experience Monopoly™.

When deploying fear based tactics, it’s important that you focus on an already existing fear, one that hospital administration is empowered to act upon, and one that is relatively soon to occur or to be avoided. But on the other hand, the fear can’t be one that causes the hospital administrator to freeze like a deer in headlights – he or she will be too paralyzed to take constructive action.

Last, fear alone isn't enough to spur positive action in your group’s favor:  You also have to drive home, hard, the fact that your group offers the complete solution to allaying those fears.

I remember, as a kid, walking around Disneyland, noticing yellow "no parking" size signs labeled Kodak Moment. They indicated a great vantage point for taking a photo.

When Kodak was challenged by Fuji for dominance in the sale of photographic film, Kodak succeeded by changing the value proposition. They were no longer in the photo business, they were in the memory business. And who better to protect your memories, the cheaper alternative, Fuji, or the company synonymous with photography, Kodak? The answer was obvious.

But by 2012, Kodak was in bankruptcy, its core film business gutted by the digital camera.

What's darkly funny about this is that Kodak invented digital photography, yet chose largely to ignore it. Perhaps Kodak was too large to truly innovate. Perhaps it was too focused on film to make the switch to digital. Perhaps its employees, from executives to those working in its manufacturing plants, were economically handcuffed to film photography.

The same phenomenon is common in healthcare.

Many medical groups, especially hospital-based medical groups, choose, sometimes intentionally and sometimes simply by default, to ignore the fact that unless they establish an identity separate and apart from hospitals, their businesses will soon be obsolete.

Of course, their medical specialty will likely continue – but it will be controlled by someone else, whether by hospitals or by other groups which disrupt their business relationships.

Start taking action now to avoid having your own Kodak Moment.