Rants and Opinions
Opinions expressed here are my own and do not represent
the official positions of the GSM Institute. —Clay Sherman
Contrarian Edge
My column, Contrarian Edge, runs periodically in Inside Healthcare, a great mag reporting on what real leaders are doing to run better hospitals. I hope you will enjoy my efforts to be outside the proverbial box.
Idea: Use these one pagers as a monthly Leadership Letter with a cover from your CEO.
- Confessions of a Consultant.
- The Idiocy of Layoffs.
- Management Malpractice.
- Six Sigma Stop Sign
- Whose Standards? Mom's or the Joint Commission's?
- Sludge Removal
- Problem Employee or Problem Manager?
- Management Flight Check.
- Where’s the Urgency for the Emergency?
- Management Credo.
- Confidently Incompetent.
- Think Global, Act Local.
- Ditch the System.
- Notes to the New Leader.
- Acres of Diamonds
- Keys to the Kingdom
- Moving to McDonaldland
- Are You a Hospital Knight?
- Why Leaders Fail
- Why Staff People Fail
Other Opinions in Modern Healthcare
Two issues are central to understanding American hospitals often mediocre performance: inadequate leadership and a lack of meaningful standards.
Where are the leaders? A core theme surrounding the question of healthcare poor organization performance has consistently revealed that there is an anemic management approach that consistently undermines the good performance of other health professions. Wrong People For the Job.
Where are workable standards? In times past under different leadership I was disappointed with the Joint Commission's (then the JCAHO) standards process for 3 major reasons:
- They basically didn't get management—instead of setting objectives and deadlines, they turned to micromanaging what hospitals did.
- They wasted millions of dollars by mandating programs that resulted in failure after failure. From ORYX to TQM they lurched from one half-baked approach to another.
- Even worse in that era, JCAHO was the prime enunciator of minimalist standards—philosophically they couldn't be further from what excellence is all about.
Here are some Modern Healthcare editorials that ran during that earlier period:
- Sentinel Event at the JCAHO
- JCAHO—A Fallacy of Best Efforts
- JCAHO No Longer Relevant
- JCAHO in Denial About Medical Errors
We remain optimistic that the Joint Commission will add management standards to their clinical focus since that is the driving force for hospital performance.