Recently in Leadership Succession 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...

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...

In addition to my day job advising health care leaders, I have a shadow life recruiting senior physician leaders (in addition to blogging here). So you can imagine the delight when my favorite source of blog content (the Harvard Business Review) published The Definitive Guide to Recruiting in Good Times and Bad with tips and principles for filling senior level positions - aimed squarely at the global corporate market. Reading the original will be very useful for you. And by applying standard Health Care Leadership Blog wizardry, this well written piece can be transformed into a sensible set of (albeit scaled down) insights for health care leaders to consider when on the prowl for talent...

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....

Gen X Takes Over, the January 13, 2009 article by Tammy Erikson on BusinessWeek.com (actually a prequel of her longer case study in February's Harvard Business Review) nominally comments on the Gen-X (Obama post Bush and Clinton) takeover. But it's mostly about the emerging generational inversion in the business world - which includes the world of health care leaders...