The May 2013 Harvard Business Review contains an interesting and highly relevant article titled “Figure It Out.” The article was written by Beth Comstock, Chief Marketing Officer at GE.
Comstock discusses organizations that face new problems for which road maps to a solution don’t yet exist and resources are never ample. Does that sound like healthcare leadership today? Here are some excerpts from the article:
“We’ve also been inspired by an ethos we’ve seen in the world of social enterprise: the belief that if you hire smart people, they should be able to ‘figure it out.’”
“[One CEOs] standard reply is tough but empowering: No one has the training. Figure it out.”
“We help our employees there abandon their assumptions about what customers need. Instead, they observe how people actually live and work. They create relevant offerings and improve on them iteratively, in real time. They figure it out.”
“Figure-it-out-jobs are the building blocks for what will have to be figure-it-out careers.”
This article is absolutely relevant to the dramatic change that is taking place in healthcare today. Because of GE’s huge investments and successful presence in the healthcare industry, many healthcare leaders are perfectly positioned to learn from GE. Information regarding how GE is addressing issues and solving problems is probably no more than a phone call away for most healthcare CEOs and senior leaders.
Click here to read the full article from Harvard Business Review. Make the call for more information. What do you have to lose? Far more important – what do you have to gain?
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