12/22/2022
In our latest newsletter I encouraged everyone to have the guts to follow the example of the leadership dancing guy. If you missed out on this newsletter you can read it here.
Taking the stage, being out front, dancing and looking ridiculous is not easy and takes great courage. One could even say this desire for being so bold can only come from within. The fact is that most successful entrepreneurs love to dance and are driven to dare to think differently. Entrepreneurs look for opportunity and at times seem to dance to a different drummer.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
– George Bernard Shaw
Entrepreneurs are unreasonable. However, I am a believer that the best entrepreneurs not only unreasonable but approach their endeavors with deep insight. The best innovators connect being completely unreasonable with their soul and the soul of your business.
“The Dance, of all the arts, is the one that most influences the soul.”
– Pluto
Why you start your business and your willingness to “dance” are important first steps in the road to being an entrepreneur. However, in my perception the dance which is choreagraphed by the inner soul of the entrepreneur that truly influences how you define and achieve success that matters most. A soul with a desire for success measured by more than financial gain or wealth to me is critical for success healthcare innovation. Are you driven by a desire to have a deeper impact? Can or could you contemplate whether your measure of success will be more than margin? What is at the core of the “why” you are innovating?
We need more entrepreneurs and investors to focus on their soul and the soul of their businesses. I can’t guarantee your success as entrepreneur through any of this advice or my perceptions. However, I personally never see long term success of any business, practice or physician who has lost their soul. Of course, my definition of success is based on long term impact of margin and mission so you may think differently and that’s ok. Either way, I would encourage you to spend much more time and energy examining the impact of your mission, vision and the culture of your business. Healthcare needs us as physicians to find our soul.
This is why I believe we need more physician entrepreneurs in our healthcare system. I believe a “soul” based approach to inequity, disparity and impact would dramatically change how and why we innovate. A call for greater care for all patients in all ways doesn’t seem unreasonable to me but I am an unreasonable innovator. For the reasonable folks it seems that further fragmenting care is more the norm. Margin over mission seems to continue to rule the day. The “disrupters” continue to drive our fixation on healthcare consumers, workarounds and fragmented care. Wouldn’t it be great if we could shift dollars more toward the foundation of better care and better outcomes.
To this end, I will again encourage you to believe like I do that physician entrepreneurism can help our increasing burnout and dissatisfaction with healthcare. Its time for we physicians to stop pointing fingers or hoping others will fix healthcare and lean in to driving the future we want to see. Healthcare disruption without a soul will never fix our problems. Those only looking at quick revenue will continue to try to tell us and our patients that another “workaround” is all we need. Sadly, they fail to point out or consider that most of this discussion of convenience, dial a prescription or drive thru medicine is breaking more than it fixing and their profit is coming at a price to others.
The pandemic has highlighted the failures of our healthcare system. We have stopped dancing and our patients are suffering. Our colleagues are suffering. The cracks in these quick fixes are exposing increasing burnout, poor outcomes, inequity and disparity.
It’s time for physicians to become increasingly unreasonable and bring our hearts and our soul back to healthcare. We can and should begin to seek solutions not workarounds. We should demand better care for all patients. We should seek to bring back relationships, continuity, prevention and driving better outcomes.
Physician entrepreneurs can lead with a soul and build a culture of collaboration, commitment and a conscience. Our patients need us to be unreasonable, look ridiculous dancing, and are asking us to repairthe soul of our broken systems. Shall we dance?
Note: As a reminder this newsletter is written from my experience and perspective. The newsletter does not imply or relay the opinions of others. The intent is to offer an avenue for dialogue and discussion around important topics in healthcare and healthcare innovation from one doctor’s perspective. I am a physician and so can only write from my perspective. If you are clinician, provider, nurse or whatever my goal is to enable you to agree or disagree and have not intention to suggest or imply that only the physician perspectives matter. They do matter but as part of a larger dialogue that can foster better health outcomes.