Recently in Leadership and Ethics Category

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...

If You Think Worst Is Over, Take Benjamin Graham's Advice, the offering in Jason Zweig's Intelligent Investor column in The Wall Street Journal print edition of May 23, provides some thoughtful guidelines to managing an investment portfolio in uncertain times. Interestingly, and perhaps inadvertently, the same guidelines hold for managing a leadership portfolio in all times. And truthfully, what times aren't uncertain? In today's economic upheaval we are simply more aware of the same uncertainty that exists in "good times." So read this with an expansive mind, with an eye to leading health care organizations today....and tomorrow...

I thought I was pretty good at connecting the dots to make relevant connections between seemingly unrelated stories and experiences. That's the thesis of this blog - connecting the general business press to relevant learnings for health care leaders. Well, August Turak has trumped me with his Forbes.com series entitled Business Secrets Of The Trappists - lessons gleaned from his many years of making primarily spiritual visits to Mepkin Abbey, a Trappist monastery in South Carolina. Part 1 and Part 2 (of four) parts were published online on April 14 and the others are forthcoming on a daily basis later this week. Of course, it's only fair that I now use a wild card to one-up him by taking the connections between monks and business and extending them to relevant learnings for health care leaders...

The March 15 issue of The Wall Street Journal carried another one of those "business" articles that health care leaders could easily overlook as too corporate. But Seven Lessons for Leading in Crisis, written by Bill George, former CEO of Medtronic and a member of several mega corporation Boards, is important reading for both physician leaders and executive health care leaders - especially these days which are anything but crisis-free. George dismisses the technical causes of the current economic crisis (poor regulation, bad investment decisions, risky investment vehicles) and lays the blame squarely on people just like us: "The root cause is failed leadership....[It] can only be solved by new leaders with the wisdom and skill to put their organizations on the right long-term course."

In today's Wall Street Journal, Harvey Silvergate takes on the SEC on the thorny issue of privacy regarding the health of Apple Corporation's Steve Jobs. The SEC Should Leave Steve Jobs Alone explores whether the right of investors to know and evaluate "material" information about company management trumps SJ's right to protect and manage his own heath information. Silvergate asks us to ponder whether withholding detailed information about a corporate principal's health constitutes a prosecutable fraud? What about the health of health care leaders?....