Recently in Leadership Skills Category

For the first time in a while I spent fully half the weekend NOT working at anything but my embarrassing golf game and some online sleuthing into what I am convinced is a foolish "can't lose" medical device investment that a friend is trying to get me to participate in (before the greedy people grab the opportunity). So when I finally picked up Friday's (August 14) Wall Street Journal print edition on Saturday night and was immediately drawn to the front page feature: Flying Low Is Flying High As Demand for Crop-Dusters Soars, I wasn't sure what instinct was drawing me to relate it to the experience of health care leaders. Well the 24 online comments as of this writing, all by and about the "ag pilots" celebrated in this article, revealed no health care gadflies leaping to make the connection. So here goes...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Here's a read that's worth a few minutes in your busy day. Decoding Resistance to Change, by Jeffrey D. Ford and Laurie W. Ford ( April 2009 issue of Harvard Business Review) takes a quick look at strategies for defeating resistance to change. Resistance being something health care leaders who operate at the cutting edge of science and technology never see, right? Not...

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 April 7 Wall Street Journal contained several useful articles on investing and managing in the current bear market. Perhaps I was jaded because I was on a plane all day, but I found the whole edition to be interesting. I picked Avoiding Bear Traps by Suzanne McGee to comment on. This feature piece was ostensibly about pitfalls to be avoided when investing after having sustained great losses. And it's worth a read for that reason alone - unless you managed to avoid the 30-40% losses the rest of us suffered in the late 08-early 09 market. But the same framework of pitfalls can be in considering a variety of risk-return scenarios related to decisions made regularly by clinical and executive health care leaders. So read the article and consider this examination of Ms. McGee's six traps in our context...