July 2009 Archives

The July-August issue of Harvard Business Review is far from light holiday reading. Through a wide range of lenses, it aims squarely at business strategy and leadership challenges to be faced in the post-2009 recession world. Leadership in a (Permanent) Crisis by Ronald Heifetz and his colleagues at Cambridge Leadership Associates, reflecting the volume as a whole, is all about national and global post recession trends in the broader business environment that will shape industries over the next several years. As physician and health care leaders we owe it to ourselves, our patients, and our organizations to examine how these will impact us...

Bill Buxton, author and Principal Scientist at Microsoft Research, provided us with Innovation Calls For I-Shaped People - the Insight opinion column in BusinessWeek online on July 13, 2009. Taking yet another stab at identifying the elusive idealized leadership or design team member, this concept is a counterpoint to the "T Shaped" collaborator prototype attributed by Buxton to Bill Moggridge of the design consultancy, IDEO. Since health care leaders are in the business of empanelling high functioning teams and hiring talent to work innovatively and collaboratively, we must pause to think about each prototype that comes along - especially when its from such a worthy source...

The July 8, 2009 Wall Street Journal noted the passing of Robert S. McNamara (former Ford CEO, Secretary of Defense, and President of the World Bank) with From McNamara to Obama an opinion piece by Bret Stephens who comments on the dangers of too much rationalism - or more aptly - on the dangers of hubris. Not an insignificant pitfall for health care leaders to consider...

In health care, possibly more than other industries, we consider ourselves so expert that innovation is generally expected to come from within - and deep within at that. Can We Innovate Ourselves Out of Recession published July 1, 2009 in the Knowledge@Wharton column on Forbes. Com examines a different approach taken by industry. It describes the effective use of external innovation networks to generate solutions to technical problems in the non health care world. It occurred to me that health care leaders might want to consider how to harness fresh ideas from smart people outside our somewhat insular industry...