Aventine Partners

Revisiting Scenarios and Tracking Tools

As the first year of the current administration is unfolding, and especially as we embark upon the second Christmas shopping season after last year's economic meltdown, it is interesting to reconsider the four scenarios we constructed in the spring to describe possible future worlds.  After the distractions of a raging stock market this summer, our future path now seems just as unclear as six months ago.

We proposed two dimensions to describe out country's future.  The first was the degree of government involvement, the second the degree of consumerism.  The four scenarios that result -- Lever Lever Land, Euro-America, Do-Over, and Back to Basics -- describe very different futures that can help shape strategy and risk management.

Tipping Point for Online Banks?

Wingspan Bank.  Remember the short-lived online-only bank launched by BankOne in the late 1990s? 

A recent post at Bankwatch called attention to an American Bankers Association survey showing that online had become the most-favored channel for bank customers for the first time. Memories of Wingspan, Telebank, Jupiter Bank, and others that made a go at the online-only business model came flooding back along with the unanswered questions.  Was online-only banking the wrong idea, or was it just the wrong time?  With changing consumer preferences, might we expect a new breed of online-only banks to emerge soon?

Are you a Pragmatist? Traditionalist? Curious?

As part of our continuing Culture Graphics project we've released a public version of our Culture Graphics survey.  One of the insights developed in this effort is the ability to categorize individuals' worldviews into five basic groups:

• Traditionalists
• Modernists 
• Progressives 
• Communitarians 
• Pragmatists   

While we continue to collect data, the academic work in this field and our initial results support the validity of this approach.  We invite you to take the survey yourself (click on the image below) to learn more and share your reactions.

 

Sharing

We ran across this presentation by David Gillespie featured on the Slides that Stick blog (an excellent resource for good PowerPoint presentation tips and ideas) and wanted to share this well-done vision of where the internet is and where it is going.  

Digital Strangelove (or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Internet)

View more documents from David Gillespie.

This supports much of what we are experiencing day to day, give us some new things to think about, and impressively packs lots of ideas into an easy-to-absorb presentation.

Stronger Patient Relationships

This summer, as most of America became embroiled in the debate over health care reform, we had the privilege of working with a client looking to reform how health care is delivered at an innovative chain of dental clinic.

A health care outsider had been brought in to run and grow this business.  He began to ask questions about patient relationships, but couldn't easily find the answers.  Questions like:

• What is our patient retention rate?
• Which of our offices, dentists, or hygienists do the best job of generating loyal patients?
• What is the value of a patient? 
• Why do patients defect?    

We worked with his team to develop a set of metrics and analyses that began to shine a spotlight on some surprising patient retention statistics and the potential value to be created by managing both patient retention and acquisition differently.