Results

I’m about 50 pages into Redefining Health Care by Michael Porter and Elizabeth Olmstead Teisberg, and while I’m a long way off from a review, it’s already providing lots of food for thought about leadership generally.

The most significant thing that’s struck me so far is the strong, almost relentless, focus on results in the book, and it’s gotten me thinking about the role of results in corporate decision-making and execution

Review of Getting Health Reform Right

I was excited to read Getting Health Reform Right because it approached the problem of health care reform from an international, public policy perspective. The authors all have deep experience working internationally to address health care, and that shows throughout their analysis in the many real world examples of reforms gone right and wrong drawn from across the globe.

Make sure you tie your carrot to a stick

I’m still finishing up Getting Health Reform Right, so a review is a week or so off. But in the meantime, I came across this passage on the plane last night and thought it held wonderful insight into leadership generally.

“Changes in external incentives and in internal management are powerfully complementary. Giving managers incentives without also giving them the skills, authority, and resources they need to respond to those incentives is likely to be quite ineffectual. The same is true in reverse. Increased managerial authority is not likely to lead to improved care if managers have no incentive to do so. This is why various writers on organizational reform in health care have seen a need for “consistent” change (Harding and Preker 2002). It is not aesthetics that lies behind their observations, but rather the need to combine reasons to do better with this capacity to do better–in the same reform package.” (Getting Health Reform Right, p. 215)

It’s not enough to lead

I was sitting in a doctor’s office over the weekend and picked up the latest copy of Rolling Stone to page through the interview with President Obama. And leaving aside my opinion on the president and his tenure to date, I found the article fascinating on a number of levels, the most important of which for this blog is the implications it had for leadership.

Review of Health Care Will Not Reform Itself, by George Halvorson

George Halvorson is the CEO of Kaiser Permanente, the largest not-for-profit health plan and care system in the U.S., and has been a leader in the industry for over 30 years. Health Care Will Not Reform Itself is his attempt to spell out what he thinks are the key problems and most promising solutions to the health care problems we face.

Review of The Innovator’s Prescription, by Clayton M. Christensen

So, at long last, I’ve finished The Innovator’s Prescription by Clayton Christensen. This was a bit of a slog, but worth it. In every section, Christensen delivers solid ideas and compelling frameworks to understand and address some of the main problems facing health care in the U.S. I definitely recommend it to anyone looking to dig in more deeply to this issue.

The banality of health care reform

I’m almost finished with Christensen’s The Innovator’s Prescription, and I still can’t shake the feeling I had 75 pages into the book: although I agree with his assessment of health care in the technical sense, I feel that there’s a moral/ethical dimension to the health care problem that he ignores that simply can’t be ignored.

Be careful what you wish for

I’m hitting the real meat of The Innovator’s Prescription by Clayton Christensen, and came across an example of disruption that I think poses an interesting challenge for leaders in general. It occurs in his larger consideration of the future of the pharmaceutical industry on pages 261 – 309, and concerns supply chain disruption.

Christensen believes that the trend among big pharmas to outsource R&D, clinical trials, manufacturing, and marketing is a mistake–it essentially amounts to emptying an organization of its value-adding activities and handing them over to smaller firms who will emerge as market leaders.

As usual, I’ll leave weighing in on this kind of stuff to the experts. But what I do want to discuss is Christensen’s story of the relationship between Dell and ASUSTeK, because I think it’s emblematic of challenges many leaders across a rage of markets face.

Leadership, focus, and the confusion of business models

As I continue to make my way through Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Prescription and deepen my understanding of his take on U.S. health care, I keep stumbling across concepts and analysis that have applicability outside of health care to leadership more generally.

In this post, I want to look at the concept of mixed business models, i.e., “doing everything for everybody”, which Christensen sees as central to how hospitals and doctors can improve the delivery of their services. Here, however, I want to move the discussion beyond health care to consider how mixed business models present a challenge for leaders in any industry.

Review of The Healing of America by T.R. Reid

The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care by T. R. Reid chronicles his encounter with a range of health care systems across the globe in order to gain perspective on the health care challenges the U.S. faces. As he says in the introduction:

“Contrary to conventional American wisdom, most developed countries manage health care without resorting to “socialized medicine.” How do they do it? That’s what this book is about. I set out on a global tour of doctor’s offices and hospitals and health ministries to see how the other industrialized democracies organize health care systems that are universal, affordable, and effective.” (p. 3)

His journey takes him through major chapters on France, Germany, Japan, the U.K., Canada, Taiwan, India, and Switzerland, with discussions of lots of other systems sprinkled in and around these main players.