Persenmi, you are severely misinterpreting what you see, to your own detriment. The middle has indeed gone out of the Bell Curve and you are looking only at the end where lowest cost wins. There is good news to go with the bad, though- there's another end of the curve based on Connection and Certainty.
Yes, there is a "race to the bottom" on cost and corporations win there. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_competition
The problem with racing to the bottom on cost is that someone else can always beat you. It's a race that you will lose, period. So-
Don't enter it!
The fact is there is no better time to be a dentist. We have great tech and more than that, people have been beaten down by corporate treatment to the point where they (I should say "we") don't want to take it anymore. We've been treated, in our roles as consumer
and as employee, as interchangeable, temporary and disposable on such a massive scale that we are rebelling.
Rebelling not with pitchforks and torches but with our precious Attention.
Because along came the Internet and allowed us to connect, to organize, to share information. And to find out almost anything about anything. The online review is one of the most significant changes in human history; we don't see it as such too easily because we're living through the change. But it gives us awesome power, as do many other aspects of what the Internet has built. As Seth Godin recently said when I saw him in Tribeca, "The Internet is the first medium in history where everyone who has a receiver has a transmitter."
I know there are practical limits. But do a
gedankenexperiment and imagine that we collectively withdraw our Attention completely from any entity. WalMart, 60 Minutes, you name it. If enough of us ignore it, it dies. The people who run these things are in a state of fear. You want a great example, look at the music industry. Until very recently they had all the power. Then along came the well-armed consumer and we destroyed them. Every label is a shadow of its former self, and the artists themselves don't really need them at all anymore.
Well, many patients are going to ignore corporate dentistry. Because it
only satisfies the one criterium- cost. It does not,
cannot provide true human Connection, the Certainty and trust that a superb dental practice builds over time, or things like patiently executed treatment plans for hard-pressed families and detailed discussions of preventive strategies. They cannot make time or space for these things. That's the definition of a race to the bottom.
Seth said something awhile back that's so powerful it has become my main guidance in practice. After detailing how sick and tired people are of being treated as interchangeable, temporary and disposable, he asserts that our best strategy is:
(1) Delight people.
(By providing remarkable experiences, far beyond what they expect.)
(2) Solve their (interesting) problems.
I put (interesting) in parentheses to emphasize that the more interesting their problem is to them, the easier it is to sell them a solution. For instance, picture two patients, both with large radiolucent lesions at the apices of #30, and you diagnose them both as endodontic lesions. One patient is in severe pain. The other has no symptoms. Same diagnosis, but one person is
very interested in their problem, the other will need some convincing.
This is where your communication skills come in. You
are going to develop your communication skills, right? (I mean all of you here.) Because that's something else that a corporation that has raced to the bottom cannot afford to do.
Advice: Read Seth Godin's book
Linchpin. Read it yesterday. And if I may be allowed to reference myself, have a look at the blog that I started to let my own book live online a little as I write it. It deals with these isues in fictional form. Learning through a story, the best way. Feel free to nose around a bit, but these posts are most relevant:
http://rickwilsondmd.typepad.com/th...dont-ever-give-in-and-race-to-the-bottom.html
http://rickwilsondmd.typepad.com/th...-company-views-its-products-and-services.html
Thank you for listening.