Recently in Managing Performance Category

Nobody likes bad reviews. Especially health care delivery or service organizations. Because bad press means customers (patients, referring physicians, etc.) will think we are unsafe or unfriendly. And it will surely lead to lawsuits, regulatory intervention, loss of competitive positioning, etc. Especially if it's online. Well maybe there's another side to this story - at least if you believe the lessons of The Upside Of Bad Online Customer Reviews which appeared on Forbes.com August 4, 2009. This short piece by Mirela Iverac, a frequent Forbes contributor, is a provocative read for those health care leaders who might be willing to consider the other side of conventional wisdom on this point...

As soon as I saw the title of the May 25 Business Week's cover story (How the Mighty Fall: A Primer on the Warning Signs) I knew I'd found my mark for today's post. I didn't even realize at the time that this was an excerpt from Jim Collins' (Good to Great and Built to Last) new book that turns his prior work literally upside down. As the title implies, it's the quick guide to how high performing companies lose their edge and end up in the toilet. And while it's about companies, it's also implicitly also about leaders. Perhaps even more about the leaders than the companies. And while it's not about health care, it's all about health care. Having worked for at least one of those "great to ashes" leaders myself, I can vouch for the soundness of the analysis and its relevance to health care leaders. Read the excerpt and when it is published, read the book...

I may be slow. It took two hits about Sergio Marchionne before I got him on the blog. The impetus to take the leap came when Business Week published the April 2 article, How Fiat's Marchionne Can Help Chrysler by Carol Matlack. But I do take credit for noticing and not forgetting when I first thought there was something here for health care leaders -after reading the Harvard Business Review's Fiat's Extreme Makeover in December of 2008, which was authored by Mr. Marchionne himself. Read the HBR piece first, for its strong focus on leadership culture, to see why Marchionne may be able to teach Chrysler - and health care leaders - a few things...

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...