June 2009 Archives

A few months ago, this blog commented on a short piece about the use of ethnography as a strategic tool (Try Ethnography for Health Care Strategy). The source article had been a short, theoretical, and perhaps even whimsical exploration of the use of anthropologists in developing business strategy. Well, along comes Business Week on June 24 with "How to Kick off an Innovation Project" by Jessie Scanlon which gets practical really fast in describing how Office Max used ethnography to do an image turnaround - complete with a "how to" guide. It struck me then, and now, that there are valuable pearls for health care leaders here...

I was reading two issues of the Harvard Business Review simultaneously (a hazard of being overly busy), so I rapidly became aware of complementary articles that appeared in successive months addressing the related issues of candor (What's Needed Next: A Culture of Candor by James O'Toole and Warren Bennis a full article in the June HBR) and transparency (Heed the Calls for Transparency by Sam Wilkin in the Forethought section of the July-August issue). The latter was just received by subscribers so the online link is not yet available so if you don't subscribe watch the HBR web site in the coming week for it. Both are essential business reading for health care leaders...

The monthly Harvard Business Review opens with Forethought - a section of short pieces that typically pack a lot of punch in a page or less each. I am always tempted to write about each of them but I'd have to blog daily to hit these in addition to everything else that's potentially relevant to health care leaders from the business press. But if you pick up the HBR, do read the short stuff. The shortest this month, and the most concentrated value per word for health care leaders, is provided in Ten Fatal Flaws That Derail Leaders by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman. It's a great list of "don'ts" that serves up way more impact than the few minutes of your reading time it takes...

There's a lot of gnashing of teeth out there about the erosion of 401k nest eggs into more modest "201k" sized savings. On this backdrop, in a piece published in the online edition on June 8, Business Week's Stacy Perman provides some provocative data and vignettes on the rise of entrepreneurship in the "over 50's and 60's." Seniors as Entrepreneurs: Their Time Has Come makes me wonder about how this benefit health care leadership picture...

Something rather remarkable apparently took place at the Harvard Business School just before graduation last week. According to Forswearing Greed: A Hippocratic Oath for Managers, which appeared in The Economist print edition of June 4, half the graduating class took an oath to advance integrity, moderate personal ambition, and seek to make choices that serve the greater - rather than the individual's - benefit. Having personally graduated from both trainings, I took the bait when The Economist connected the "MBA Oath" to the Hippocratic oath and figured there must be something worth connecting here. And there is. It has something to do with what sometimes happens when physicians become practice or organizational leaders with financial responsibility and accountability...

Alaina Love may be stating obvious in her June 2 Business Week commentary Leading at the Speed of Thought when she says: "Never before have leaders experienced the scale and complexity of change that they face now" but she thankfully gives us something worth pausing over as she considers some of the leadership adjustments that need to be made simply for survival as a result...

The source for When Leaders "Waffle," Confidence Plummets is a little off the beaten path for this space, but Dr. Joseph Simone, one of my fellow Health Care Leadership Blog core contributors identified it and it's a great pick. Joe didn't have time to write - but had an itch about this piece and sent it along to me. So without having discussed it with him, I will take a stab at scratching for him...