CAD/CAM international magazine of digital dentistry No. 4, 2016

| practice management globalization in dentistry 08 CAD/CAM 4 2016 But it’s different here An international perspective on the business of dentistry Author: Chris Barrow, UK As a business consultant, I have been providing training, coaching and mentoring services to UK and Irish dentists and their teams for the last 23 years. Additionally, I have had the opportunity to work with clients in a number of European and other countries, including Turkey, India, the US, Canada and Australia. I consider myself a bit of a rebel and love to talk about innovation in business andhowitappliesindentistryandthewiderhealth care environment. In this article for DTI I want to take you back to the mid-1990s and my first experience of work- ing with UK dentists, providing team training workshops all across the country. Inevitably, there would come a point in one of those early work- shops at which an attendee would raise his or her hand and, instead of asking a question, make a statement that came down to something like “Chris, this is all very good and exciting, but you needtounderstandthatherein(insertplacename) things are different.” Candidates for “insert place name” ranged from the valleys of southern Wales to the West End of London, from north to south, from crowded to thinly populated areas; references were made to cosmopolitan, suburban and rural communities. The speaker would elaborate and suggest that whatever idea I was proposing would fall on stony ground because of the idiosyncrasies of the local population or macro- and micro-economic circumstances. As a speaker, one learns to deal with such objec- tions and concerns with empathetic listening and © Rawpixel.com/Shutterstock.com 42016

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