Recently in Leadership and Finance 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...

When Economic Incentives Backfire which appeared in the March 2009 issue of Harvard Business Review examines another dimension of the same issue -namely the economic incentives that organizations design to motivate employees to achieve goals and targets. This is more than a hot topic today with the AIG incentive bonus issue in the forefront of news and commentary around the country. The author, Samuel Bowles, is a behavioral scientist at the Santa Fe Institute who reports briefly on evidence about how financial incentives influence moral sensibilities and behaviors. Or, conversely, how human nature influences the behavior of incentive programs. And the picture, similar to that for goals, is not always what you might predict in ways that are particularly relevant to health care leaders...

THIS SPECIAL GUEST POST WAS AUTHORED BY Jeff Levin-Scherz, MD MBA who writes the Managing Health Care Costs blog. A more complete bio can be found at the end of this post. Please click on the link below to read this provocative piece...