Successful Organizational Leadership - It's Child's Play

A core content principle of this Blog is to write about what business can offer to health care leaders - not the lessons we can learn from inside health care itself. But more accurately the Blog is about what the business literature and journalism we often don't read has to teach us. So choosing to comment on David Sutton's Forbes.com interview with David Smith, CEO of the medical supply distributor, PSS World Medical, really isn't breaking the rules. How My Company Beats The Bigger Guys is about how to run any successful business - and the interview covers all the important aspects of leading a successful health care delivery organization. In the equivalent of half a typed page. It's all anyone has to read. So please do so.

David Smith breaks successful business strategy down to the basics using the analogy of a child's teeter-totter. "Picture a triangle and across the triangle is a board. The triangle is the fulcrum and the board is the teeter-totter. In the bottom of the triangle is ethics, at the top of the triangle is growth at two-times market. The kid on the left is customer satisfaction, and the kid on the right is profitability." Simple and elegant. He goes on to briefly discuss the importance of focus (knowing what you are good at and consistently doing it well); leadership style (setting principles for a trusted executive team and not micromanaging); decision making style (using a simple, consistent, and disciplined approach); and human resources (valuing and respecting co-workers and employees). "...having principles, not preferences, and having a simple decision-making matrix that people can really understand are the two things that I think have most helped me be successful." Using this approach, PSS is the largest physician office supply distributor in the US, successfully competing against giants Cardinal and McKesson in this space. It's stock remains up 700% since 2000 (that's right, even now). It's only advertising is word-of-mouth.

So is there anything about Smith's "running a business" principles that doesn't apply to "leading a health care delivery organization?" Or an academic Department? Do we follow them consistently? Are there reasons we can't do them well? Are they complicated? Not really. No more so than riding a see-saw.