Recently in Getting Results Category

In a July 27 feature, Business Week, published a profile of Honda's new CEO, Takanobu Ito. The spin in Honda's New CEO Is Also Chief Innovator by Reena Jana and Ian Rowley is an examination of the value and wisdom of appointing an "in the trenches" engineer (Ito is also Honda's Director of Research and Development) to the chief executive post, thereby combining the company's leadership accountability for innovation and business success. It struck me that health care organizations face similar questions when considering whether or not to place clinicians in top executive management positions. So read the article and think about the issues it raises...

From Moore's Law to Barrett's Rules, Michael Malone's May 16 op-ed piece on departing Intel CEO Craig Barrett in The Wall Street Journal is another one of those sketches of an iconic business leader that holds more universal messages. About to step down, Barrett led Intel as President (since 1998) and CEO (since 2005) in the years following the legendary founding leaders: Andy Grove (of "Only the Paranoid Survive" fame), Robert Noyce, and Gordon Moore (visionary of "Moore's Rule"). This pithy article describes Barrett's peripatetic style while codifying his managerial wisdom in a way that can be very useful to health care leaders...

When Internal Collaboration Is Bad for Your Company by Morten T. Hansen, appeared in the April 2009 Harvard Business Review and Getting Togetherness was published online on Economist.com on April 7. Both examine collaboration within organizations. The interesting news from Professor Hansen (U.C. Berkeley and Insead) is that despite the charge for internal collaboration across industries, it is not a "no brainer" in terms of benefit. So by extension, it may not be the best tool for health care leaders in all circumstances...

The April 2009 issue of Harvard Business Review arrived this weekend and I devoured it on the plane yesterday. There were so many provocative pieces for health care leaders that I decided to bundle several of the short ones into this commentary. They all happen to take contrarian views to "common management wisdom" - on such "no brainers" as the value of employee satisfaction, the wisdom of following the path set by "best of breed" organizations, and the degree to which organizations gain replicable competency from the alliances they create. If the conventional wisdom found in the management literature is actually wrong, how are we to learn leadership skills and techniques from those who came before us...

While every health care leader should read every article in the January 2009 Harvard Business Review, I can't resist going for To Lead, Create A Shared Vision, contributed by James M. Kouzes (Dean's Executive Professor of Leadership) and Barry Z. Posner (Dean) of the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University. They also happen to be the co-authors of The Leadership Challenge, an easy reading business book of biblical stature among leadership gurus. It would be a mistake to think that yet another spin on vision is bound to be trite...

All the best ideas come from the big centers, right? Not always, if you believe what you read in Innovation Trickles in a New Direction published on Businessweek.com on March 11. In this article, Reena Jana turns conventional thinking about innovation on its head by describing products developed in third world or remote countries by the likes of General Electric, Microsoft, Nokia, Proctor and Gamble, and the like, that have found their way into wide application in the industrialized world. This must mean something about where and how to look for innovation in health care...

McDonalds Seeks Way to Keep Sizzling which appeared in the March 10, 2009 Wall Street Journal is a pretty standard business press article which is nominally about how the "golden arches" has remained profitable during the recession - but it reads like an instructional manual in effective management style for any industry (yes, health care is an industry) in any economy. If Janet Adamy's characterization of McDonald's President and COO Ralph Alvarez is anywhere near on the mark, health care leaders have plenty to emulate in his leadership methods and style. This is another of those often published corporate snapshots that I suspect are not on the daily "must read" list for most busy health care leaders. Hence the mission of this blog - to "push" it out to you. And your reciprocal response - to take a few minutes to read it. Here's why....

The entire January 2009 issue of the Harvard Business Review is devoted to perspectives on leadership, cover to cover. So it's hard to recommend one article over another. That being said, Picking the Right Transition Strategy is particularly relevant to health care leaders. In this article, Michael D. Watkins examines the critical importance of differentiating situations (rather than positions) as a success factor when moving into new job situations. Health care leaders, especially when they have responsibility over clinical areas, do this every day, within the same job...

In his March 2 Business Week article, Pushing the Limits of Crowdsourcing, Damien Joseph recounts several successful design projects resulting in the creation of animated features and video games, that utilized a free global design crew consisting of many thousands of contributors via social networking applications. Does this represent an opportunity that should be harvested by health care leaders in order to innovate operational improvements?

A Scion Drives Toyota Back to Basics, in the Management section of yesterday's Wall Street Journal chronicles the factors that earlier this year led to the appointment of Akio Toyoda, grandson of the company's founder, as Toyota's next President. What's provocative about this, other than the potential intrigue of nepotism which always draws reader interest, is the "back to basics" subtheme which may bear examination for health care leaders as well...