Harvard Business Review webinar: Building Enduring Businesses

Join best-selling author Chris Zook, an expert on profitable growth, to learn how to build simple, repeatable business models

Wednesday, Arpil 11, 2012
12:00 noon – 1:00 PM U.S./Canadian Eastern

About This Free, Interactive Webinar:

All companies want profitable growth. The challenge is how to achieve it, which few do.

Often companies seek to "reinvent" themselves by launching multiple new initiatives and growth strategies. But this usually adds complexity, which hurts growth, kills profits, and weakens the core business.

Research by Bain & Company's Chris Zook—captured in his new book Repeatability: Building Enduring Businesses for a World of Constant Change—concludes that profitable growth comes from simple "great repeatable models" (GRMs). Companies with GRMs have learned to replicate their success and adapt, over and over, often for decades, in difficult industries and tumultuous circumstances.

Six Social Media Trends for 2011

If you're not leveraging social media in 2011, you're missing some significant opportunities to connect with other physicians who can help you in your non-clinical career development. Social media isn't simply about social networking.

Last month, Harvard Business Review had a blog post titled, "Six Social Media Trends for 2011." The author writes about some of the newer social media trends that may permeate the New Year. After all, now that most people are carrying smartphones or slate tablets with built-in GPS location, what's next?

Make sure to read the HBR article and get connected on some social networks. Start with LinkedIn and get involved in some groups so that you can participate in some discussions that are relevant to your areas of experience.

10 Must-Read Articles from HBR

I really enjoy reading Harvard Business Review (HBR). My subscription is about to expire, so I'm planning on renewing it through Amazon.com because I can save over 50%. Make sure you don't miss the "10 Must-Read Articles from HBR." You can also get this as a paperback. This collection includes the following 10 articles from HBR:

1. Meeting the Challenge of Disruptive Change, by Clayton M. Christensen and Michael Overdorf, explains why so few established companies innovate successfully.
2. Competing on Analytics, by Thomas H. Davenport, explains how to use data-collection technology and analysis to discern what your customers want, how much they're willing to pay, and what keeps them loyal.
3. Managing Oneself, by Peter F. Drucker, encourages us to carve our own paths by asking questions such as, "What are my strengths?" and "Where do I belong?"
4. What Makes a Leader? Not IQ or technical skills, says Daniel Goleman, but emotional intelligence.
5. Putting the Balanced Scorecard to Work, by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton, includes practical steps and examples from companies that use the balanced scorecard to set strategy and measure performance.
6. Innovation: The Classic Traps, by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, advocates applying lessons from past failures to your innovation efforts. She explores four innovation problems and offers remedies for each.
7. Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail, by John P. Kotter, argues that transformation is a process, not an event. It takes years, not weeks, and you can't skip any steps.
8. Marketing Myopia, by Theodore Levitt, introduces the quintessential strategy question, "What business are you really in?"
9. What Is Strategy? by Michael E. Porter, argues that rivals can easily copy your operational effectiveness, but they can't copy your strategic positioning — what distinguishes you from all the rest.
10. The Core Competence of the Corporation, by C.K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel, argues that a diversified company is like a tree: the trunk and limbs its core products, the branches its business units, the leaves its end products. Nourishing everything is the root system: its core competencies.

ACPE 2010: Complexity Science with Dave Snowden

I'm in Washington D.C. attending the 2010 ACPE (American College of Physician Executives) Annual CME Conference. This morning, Dave Snowden led an interesting session and a workshop on the topic of "complexity science." This session was a part of the Physician Leadership Summit. What did he talk about?

A leader’s framework for decision-making, complexity is poised to help current and future leaders address the challenges and opportunities they face.

Let's take a look at a snippet from his 2007 HBR (Harvard Business Review) article titled, "A Leader's Framework for Decision Making." You can read this article on HBR.com by clicking here.

Complexity is more a way of thinking about the world than a new way of working with mathematical models. Over a century ago, Frederick Winslow Taylor, the father of scientific management, revolutionized leadership. Today, advances in complexity science, combined with knowledge from the cognitive sciences, are transforming the field once again. Complexity is poised to help current and future leaders make sense of advanced technology, globalization, intricate markets, cultural change, and much more. In short, the science of complexity can help all of us address the challenges and opportunities we face in a new epoch of human history.

Gender and salary

In general, men tend to earn more than women. Is that true when we control for job titles? What if they have advanced scientific or business degrees? Researchers have explored this issue of salary differences between men and women and they seem to consistently find that men are earning more and their salaries are rising faster. Women who have MBAs are earning roughly $4,600 less than men who have MBAs. I don't know how this compares when you're looking at MD/MBAs instead of standard MBAs, but I doubt we'll get any data on that anytime soon.

Here are some interesting points from one HBR blog post:

• The most surprising finding was that unequal pay starts with first jobs.
• Women, it turns out, were far more likely than men to leave their first job because of a bad manager. In fact, as many women were leaving because of their manager as were leaving because of other opportunities.

Here's another HRB blog that approaches this issue from another angle:

• Why are we focusing on the negatives associated with the gender-salary gap?
• In 2010, the US labor force was majority female.
• 26% of wives out-earn their husbands
• More women than men are starting American companies
• Women earn 6 in 10 bachelor's and master's degrees

Here's a great resource for women working in the healthcare industry: the Healthcare Businesswomen's Association (HBA)

Harvard Business Review focuses on health care

The April edition of the Harvard Business Review (HBR) has a section titled, "Spotlight on Fixing Health Care." This edition places a heavy focus on health care and starting on page 50, you'll see 5 great articles that evaluate different components of our current health care system. Those article are:

• Turning Doctors Into Leaders
• Medicine Needs a New Kind of Hero
• Fixing Health Care on the Front Lines
• Premium Price, Poor Performance
• Five Reasons Why Costs Are So High and How to Tackle Them

I've really been enjoying my complimentary subscription to HBR (more about that later). It's a great business magazine and it's really motivating me to enroll in business school ASAP. HBR is not an inexpensive magazine, but it's well worth the investment. I also read BusinessWeek and a few others, but HBR is my favorite business magazine. You can get a great deal (save over 50%) by subscribing through Amazon.com below:


Speaking of business school, make sure you don't miss out on some great business podcasts on iTunes and also on iTunes U. My favorite business podcasts have been from Stanford and Wharton so far.

Three Distinct Career Paths for Innovators

I love reading Harvard Business Review. It's probably my favorite business magazine. There's a great article in the December 2009 issue titled, "Create Three Distinct Career Paths for Innovators."

What are those three career paths?

1. Discovery: creating or identifying high-impact market opportunities.
2. Incubation: experimenting with technology and business concepts to design a viable model for a new business.
3. Acceleration: developing a business unit it can stand on its own.

Over the years, I've probably played a big role in discovery and incubation, but I haven't spent a lot of time in acceleration. I love innovating new concepts and exploring new options for myself as well as for various business organizations. 

Are you surrounded by innovative people? Do you have some ideas that you'd like to incubate? Perhaps you consider yourself a medical entrepreneur, but you don't really know how to get started in entrepreneurship.

5 key innovation skills

There's a great article in Harvard Business Review titled, "The Innovator's DNA." How are innovators wired? How do they think? They're constantly asking questions and exploring new options.

The authors of this article highlight 5 key innovation skills that are acquired and honed by innovative entrepreneurs. There's what they are:

1. Associating
2. Questioning
3. Observing
4. Experimenting
5. Networking

The article ends with this challenge: Try spending 15 to 30 minutes each day writing down questions that challenge the status quo in your company.

Perhaps you need to be innovative in your organization. Maybe you need to be innovative to find a new job or to make a career transition. Are you willing to take some risks to make change happen? Have you been asking the right types of questions?