All Entries Tagged With: "Leadership"
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]
President Obama: Forget About The First 100 Days
My mother in Atlanta had a tea party on inauguration day Jan. 20, 1977 in celebration of our former Gov. Jimmy Carter being sworn in as President of these Yoonited States. Knowing what we did about Jimmy, we tuned in mostly just to make sure the country would actually go ahead with it or call if off at the last minute when we all came to our senses.
I doubt anyone outside Georgia bothered to celebrate Carter’s inauguration as a historic one, but the earth shifts tomorrow as Barack Obama becomes the 44th President.
The pundits will react for about a day to what will be one of the most anticipated presidential addresses ever. But that will last only a day or so before the focus will shift the what Obama can do in his first 100 days. Ever since FDR announced the New Deal in his first inaugural address, and then went out to pass its legislation in his first 100 days, Presidents have been held to this standard of almost immediate success whether it has any historic value or not. In Beltway psychology, the thought is that the first 100 days are the time when a new President can swim on the momentum of the election, setting forth an agenda that has been tacitly authorized by the majority of voters who put him in office. It’s just a shame it doesn’t actually work that way.
Carter got mired in too much legislation, and the first 100 days only became a preview of his naivete of Capitol Hill mechanics that would later be his undoing. Ronald Reagan did manage to push an across-the-board tax cut in 1981 despite a democratic Congress, mostly by using his persona as the Great Communicator to lobby public support to apply legislative pressure. [more]