Recently in Leadership Strategy 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...

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...

There's a lot of gnashing of teeth out there about the erosion of 401k nest eggs into more modest "201k" sized savings. On this backdrop, in a piece published in the online edition on June 8, Business Week's Stacy Perman provides some provocative data and vignettes on the rise of entrepreneurship in the "over 50's and 60's." Seniors as Entrepreneurs: Their Time Has Come makes me wonder about how this benefit health care leadership picture...

The source for When Leaders "Waffle," Confidence Plummets is a little off the beaten path for this space, but Dr. Joseph Simone, one of my fellow Health Care Leadership Blog core contributors identified it and it's a great pick. Joe didn't have time to write - but had an itch about this piece and sent it along to me. So without having discussed it with him, I will take a stab at scratching for him...

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...

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...

Retaining patients, physicians, vendors, and partners is a the best and cheapest way to build a medical practice, hospital market, or health related service customer base. Bedrock principle, right? Not so fast say Timothy Keiningham (global chief strategy officer at Ipsos Loyalty) and Lerzan Aksoy (professor of marketing at Fordham University) in the Harvard Business Online Conversation Starters column - When Customer Loyalty Is a Bad Thing - which appeared on May 7, 2009. This short piece examines some aspects of customer loyalty that can suboptimize or sink business to customer or business to business enterprises. It struck me that some of these red flags could be useful to health care leaders as well...

Bill Taylor's Practically Radical online column in Harvard Business Online on May 4 poses the provocative question: MBAs vs. Entrepreneurs: Who Has the Right Stuff for Tough Times? It made me wonder whether it matters for health care leaders. The answer, as I learned early in my own MBA classes is "it depends"...

On April 27, The Economist (web version) published a brief piece titled Entrepreneurship in its regular "Idea" column in which it briefly defines and characterizes entrepreneurship - well done, but no biggie. More interesting was a reminder that one aspect of entrepreneurship is "intrapraneurship" - defined as "the introduction and implementation of a significant innovation for the firm by one or more employees working within an established organisation". I thought it was timely for health care and physician leaders to examine this a bit further so I surfed around, connected a few dots from my own consulting experience, and learned a few things worth sharing here...

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...