Recently in Managing Teams, Alliances, and Collaborations (Series) Category

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...

One of the opportunities in a down economy - if you are not too down yourself of course - is the potential to pick up some bargains. Which is not without its rewards - and its hazards. The April 3 issue of Business Week features How to Make Acquisitions in a Down Economy as the cover article in the Small Biz section. In this article, Amy S. Choi passes on some wisdom and experience which can be useful to health care leaders as they consider purchases - be they physician practice acquisitions, hospital or clinic takeovers, or purchases of health care related businesses...

When Internal Collaboration Is Bad for Your Company by Morten T. Hansen, appeared in the April 2009 Harvard Business Review and Getting Togetherness was published online on Economist.com on April 7. Both examine collaboration within organizations. The interesting news from Professor Hansen (U.C. Berkeley and Insead) is that despite the charge for internal collaboration across industries, it is not a "no brainer" in terms of benefit. So by extension, it may not be the best tool for health care leaders in all circumstances...

The April 2009 issue of Harvard Business Review arrived this weekend and I devoured it on the plane yesterday. There were so many provocative pieces for health care leaders that I decided to bundle several of the short ones into this commentary. They all happen to take contrarian views to "common management wisdom" - on such "no brainers" as the value of employee satisfaction, the wisdom of following the path set by "best of breed" organizations, and the degree to which organizations gain replicable competency from the alliances they create. If the conventional wisdom found in the management literature is actually wrong, how are we to learn leadership skills and techniques from those who came before us...

Everyone's abuzz about the Tata Nano. The world's cheapest car is taking India, and the world, by storm. Leveraging the wundercar's impending launch, Business Week (on March 18, 2009) asked the critical question in its eponymous article: What Can Tata's Nano Teach Detroit? I immediately tried to leverage their question to your advantage - so I began to wonder about what the Nano can teach health care leaders...

What Kind of Collaboration is Right for You?, which appeared in the December 2008 issue of the Harvard Business Review, explores the use of collaboration networks to achieve innovation. The authors codify models for external collaborations as they have been used to develop products and services in the high tech, pharma, and consumer products industries and propose a framework that can be useful for evaluating and selecting modes of external collaboration based on organizational requirements and market strategy. Their 2x2 matrix for classifying collaborations can be useful for health care and physician leaders....

In his New York Times column of December 7, 2008 (The Brightest Are Not Always the Best), Frank Rich sounded a cautionary note about the incoming Obama administration, especially the economic team. The latter is being filled with an all-star collection of intellectuals from economics, business and political life. He recalled David Halberstam's book, The Best and the Brightest, in which he described another all-star team assembled by President John Kennedy. This team, with McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara, and Walt Rostow had gilt-edged pedigrees from grade school through Ivy League institutions as students and professors, and in the business world. This was the same group that got us mired in Viet Nam: "...these bright and accomplished men repeatedly relied on their own biases to the exclusion of facts to the contrary, even when the whole approach was coming apart..."

The point of the column -- that the brightest are not always the best is what Halberstam says in his book: the title is intentionally ironic and its meaning is closer to Rich's title. Halberstam's classic history of Viet Nam showed how these bright and accomplished men repeatedly relied on their own biases to the exclusion of facts to the contrary, even when the whole approach was coming apart and destroyed the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. Arrogance and hubris rank high among fatal flaws seen in leaders. Humility is a precious attribute in leaders; its absence frequently leads to disaster. In healthcare, we see this when an outstanding scientist is recruited to be chairman of a department and turns out to be a disaster as a leader because he won't listen, won't take advice, or lacks humility and sage judgment.