TMRW/TDY
Read time: 3 minutes
Hey Reader,
⏀ Get Smaller as You Scale Bigger – Founder of Starbucks Howard Schulz talks about the challenges of how to grow smaller as you get bigger. He was referring to Starbucks record expansion in the late 1990’s to mid 2000’s. More scale meant more revenue but more customers who soon felt the Italian coffee culture was becoming diluted. They were no longer coffee clientele but sheep being herded. Healthcare is facing the same challenge – how do you maintain individual attention while also dealing with a higher volume of people to treat? Listen to Starbucks efforts on this problem on the Acquired podcast, which the WSJ called the one podcast every smart and rich person in the world is listening to.
💡As your business grows, don’t forget the high quality individual experience that allowed your business to succeed in the first place.
⏀ Idea I’m mulling – How do we optimize decision making? In healthcare, there is the trend of allowing providers to operate at the “top of their license” – the idea that nurses to mid levels to doctors all should handle the highest complexity of care they can. This allows appropriate triaging of complex patients to the right level provider and increase efficiency of care delivery.
However, we should have every provider operate at the “top of their thinking” instead. To do that, we need an organizational culture and business model in healthcare that prioritizes high quality thinking as opposed to pure efficiency, volume of care and increasing margins.
Sadly this does not exist in our managed care, hyper-bureaucratic healthcare in which doctors are factory workers with rushed visits limit the ability to formulate intelligent care plans.
💡Operating at the “top of your license” means nothing if providers can’t operate at the top of their thinking. Decision making is the most powerful, if underutilized, intervention in all of medicine.
⏀ Quote I’m pondering – “The biggest economic misunderstanding of my childhood was that people got rich from high salaries. Though there are some exceptions.. Almost no one in the history of the Forbes list has gotten there with a salary. “But somehow or other, you need to own equity in something, instead of just selling your time. Time only scales linearly.” – Sam Altman, founder of OpenAI
💡No matter how educated you are, if you don’t a business you’re just a worker bee and therefore commoditized and replaceable and highly taxed.
⏀ We all fall – Jordan Syatt, well known fitness coach and social media presence, recently profiled US Olympic Gymnast Suni Lee who had a terrible fall during a warmup for her uneven bar event. See what lessons her response has for all of us for our fitness, our diets and lives.
💡Doesn’t matter if you fall down. Just don’t stay down. GET UP! For the committed person, there is no failure even if you fall 1000 times.
Keep creating,
