Can These Three Anticipatory Leaders Disrupt Healthcare?

What will it take to change healthcare? For years, serving leaders have wondered what would it take to transform healthcare. There are many great healthcare organizations here in the United States. The challenge of healthcare is built into the very foundations.  The values, the innovation, the work ethic all focus on providing the patient with the best care possible.  However, it focuses on symptoms and causes, not prevention.  We are entering the age of anticipatory healthcare. What happens when three anticipatory leaders decide to get more involved in healthcare?

Three anticipatory leaders go into the healthcare market, sounds like the beginning of an interesting joke. But it’s no longer a joke. The good news for you is two of the three have been clients for over 25 years. And one of which I’m a raving customer!

Let’s see if I can share with you why these anticipatory leaders are taking on such an incredible challenge. Today, we talk about the why. Tomorrow, we talk more about what it means to you, your family, and community.

A disclosure is necessary here, anything I share with you is not be based on any direct conversations I’ve had with any of the three anticipatory leaders. But, in two of the three cases, I’ve worked with over 40 senior executives for many, many years. I started my first executive search business for Bank One and then continued working with JPMorgan Chase in many different roles. One of my roles was being director at a management consulting firm who placed well over 130 executives across the organization.

If you know me at all, or you read my online journals, you also might remember I started my relationship with Berkshire Hathaway in 1986 when they bought my mentor’s business for over $330 million dollars. This purchase helped lift Warren over the billion-dollar mark in personal net worth for the first time in his career.

Out of the three, only Amazon has cost me lots of money. I’m a huge fan and many of my better clients are always asking me to share what a recent Amazon move might mean to their businesses. I have several friends who work with Amazon in executive roles.

What hard trends are driving this decision from these anticipatory leaders? They may seem to be obvious, but I had several partners talking about it yesterday, almost all day. The first hard trend I see is the aging workforce. With impending retirements, experienced talent shortages, and a more mobile work force, these organizations need to compete and win the talent wars.

These three anticipatory leaders understand what this means to their organizations. All have their unique way of solving the impending challenge. From developing a workforce of veterans, to creating accelerated success pools, to automating many of their organizations’ critical capabilities. Theses anticipatory leaders proactively disrupt traditional human capital practices.

How do you attract and retain great workers? Can healthcare provide these organizations an edge? Here’s a question to consider; When do you need healthcare the most? When you have a family! So many millennials and GenXers share how important it is to get great healthcare for their children. This is not going to change. Kids are always doing different things that they get hurt doing. It’s a hard trend! The numbers can go up or down, but a single accident can be catastrophic to the family budget.

When else do you need healthcare? I’m a late baby boomer. Last year, I had surgery for a kidney stone. It wasn’t very big. Smaller than the tip of your pinky finger.  The bill exceeded $30,000 dollars when you include the time off from work. The doctor even remarked how great of shape I was in. Recovery was almost instantaneous. Could your yearly budget handle a $30,000 dollar hit? Thank goodness, my wife’s company provides great healthcare!

Anticipatory leaders understand this hard trend.  They understand as Dan Burrus, author of the Anticipatory Organization says, “If it can be done, it will be done. If you don’t do it, someone else will.” None of these anticipatory leaders are going to wait and see what happens. It’s not their style or where their entrepreneurial strengths lie. You can find out more about this hard trend at Entrepreneurs, Are You Leveraging 10,000 Strong? 

Now the second hard trend of why these anticipatory leaders are getting more involved in healthcare. It’s the hard trend of government regulation. The healthcare and insurance industries are under tremendous pressure from government regulation. It’s only going to increase as more people get involved with them. We are charting new territory for regulators and elected officials.

With over 1/6^th of the United States economy impacted by healthcare, no successful CEO can stand by as she sees the landscape changing. I attended the InterConnect conference last year when I wrote Can Ginni Rometty Lead IBM Watson to Healthcare Moonshot? It was amazing!

Many of the CEOs I talk with cannot understand what to do about healthcare, but they do want a seat at the table during the discussions. Many midmarket CEOs feel out of control when it comes to managing healthcare costs. These three anticipatory leaders have just got a seat at the table. Now how they impact the direction of the future of healthcare is still to be determined.

The final hard trend is the increasing speed of new technologies to change how healthcare is being done. The cost of technologies continues to decrease while impact continues to increase exponentially. This is a trend that I have been involved in and will share my ideas on this trend more tomorrow. When you look at it from where I’m working, you can see why we may be entering an age where anticipatory leaders have both influence and impact on future generations.

How can you get more involved in this hard-regulatory trend? Its critical that you do, and I have several ideas to jumpstart your thinking.

See you at Developing High Performing Teams on Friday. You will want to see how these three anticipatory leaders could positively change everything about your life and career for you, and future generations.

See you here next week when I’ll share a new project that you can help me with. See you next week.