All Entries Tagged With: "CEO"
Do Healthcare CEOs Matter?
The June issue of The Atlantic asks the question that is natural for the times: Do CEOs Matter? It’s part of the iterative set of questions that start whenever a set of leaders create enough missteps that their very existence comes into question. The author Harris Collingwood shares some new theories that CEOs in general have a negligible effect on company performance, are overrated in terms of their ability to motivate and in many cases the upside of a good CEO pales next to the downside of a bad one.
One example discussed has been the tie between the health of Apple CEO Steve Jobs and his company’s stock outlook. And even acclaimed CEOs may find that revisionist history is less kind to them, as GE’s success under Jack Welch may have had more to do with the 1990s economy than with a top-down corporate revolution revolution.
While the article was clearly aimed at multinationals and does not mention healthcare, I do wonder of we can paint hospital or health plan CEOs with the same existential doubt that their corporate counterparts now find themselves under. Healthcare leadership has all of the challenges facing any industry plus a few more, not the least of which is that people’s lives are part of the definition of organizational success.
There are numerous justifications for “why healthcare is different” other than the usual answer, “it just is.” Here are three: [more]
If President Can Fire GM CEO, He Can Fire Any CEO
President Obama’s apparent move to remove embattled General Motors Chairman Rick Wagoner may prove to be a necessary step to save what is left of the American auto industry, but in a historical context, having a President for all intents and purposes fire an American corporate CEO is new territory for free capitalism.
Grady’s Fight: You With Us or Agin’ Us?
New Grady Health System CEO Mike Young may not be a Southerner, but he is learning a thing or two about how to pick a fight in Atlanta. The first step in any scuffle is to knock the bystanders off the fence and see which side they fall on.
How else to explain a very public set of exposed loyalties in recent weeks. In December, after less than five months on the job, Young sent out a request to the Atlanta’s other non-profit hospitals to pony up $50 million as their share of the uncompensated care burden shouldered by Grady, which could face a 2008 deficit of more than $40 million. Two reasons that he already knew the answer before he asked: 1) Hospitals never share money and 2) The new Grady board led by former Georgia-Pacific CEO Pete Correll is full of Atlanta business and fundraising heavyweights who have been campaigning relentlessly for months, so I’m pretty sure they had asked before. [more]
Four CEO-Types Outside Healthcare Worth Following
First the disclaimer: There are many good CEOs in healthcare that have provided me with direction, advice and insight on healthcare. I’ll tell you about them later. It’s only important to know that my council of thought leaders is firmly grounded in healthcare.
Actually it is many of those same leaders in healthcare who have told me that they are most interested in hearing from other industries on solutions to the big thorny stuff–flipping the healthcare enterprise to being more customer-centric, standardizing quality as a culture, marketing like you care about results, etc. The healthcare bag of tricks that has worked so well for decades has a hole in it, so now they are looking to cut-and-paste from some proven moves that have grabbed customers and motivated companies in retail, manufacturing, design or anyplace else where dollars follow success.
None of these folks listed are exactly traditional CEO “gurus,” which is just as well since we have seen the last of big company CEOs selling leadership books. If the recent past was about Jack Welch and his process, the future may be about these guys and their ideas.
Tim Cook — COO, Apple
This is not the first time that Apple COO Tim Cook has taken the reigns from ailing CEO Steve Jobs. As a great profile in Fortune points out, Cook is more than just the next guy wearing a mock turtleneck to take over. Jobs may be the visionary and the sizzle, but Cook is largely credited with making the products appear magically in stores when they are supposed to.
Courtesy of Apple
Hospitals, if they are big enough to have a COO, often may view the position as the CEO’s right hand, or merely as part of succession planning. What Apple has found is the right blend as CEO vision with the operations leader to perfect the chain.