MHA's Executive Briefing

Health Care Innovator Offers New Book On ACOs

Dr. Marc A. Bard is the Needham-based managing director for Navigant Consulting and chief innovation officer for its national health care practice. A physician who practiced internal medicine for 18 years at Harvard Community Health Plan, one of the early health maintenance organizations, Bard, 65, is author, with Navigant colleague Michael Nugent, of the new book, Accountable Care Organizations: Your Guide to Strategy, Design, and Implementation.

Read more about the author and his new book here.

Author’s Choice: Getting Back on Track

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com and author of Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose, introduces a lesson on how to rally employees around a unified plan from Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.

Read more from strategy + business here.

Required Reading for Health Care Leaders

A new book reveals how former Cleveland Clinic CEO Floyd Loop, M.D., led a turnaround at the renowned but struggling organization. Read more here.

Tools for Talking When the Stakes are High

The void created by the failure to communicate is soon filled with poison, drivel, and misrepresentation.
~ C. NORTHCOTE PARKINSON

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When the Stakes Are High shows readers how to navigate communications when your ability to be heard, get your point across and truly communicate can change your life. Written by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan and Al Switzler, the authors propose that preparation is the key, and they give readers a list of tools that can be used in planning and executing crucial conversations. (Defined as a discussion between two or more people where the stakes are high, opinions vary and emotions run strong.)

After more than 25 years of research in two dozen industries involving over 25,000 individuals, the authors found that:

• All relationships, families, teams and organizations have problems.
• The difference between good organizations and the best is not how many problems they have. The difference is how respectfully and rapidly they get problems solved.
• People's ability to confront emotionally and politically risky topics (crucial conversations) with each other is the #1 predictor of rapid problem-solving.
• If you want to become unstuck and improve your results and relationships, you need to improve your ability to deal with crucial conversations.
• When faced with crucial conversations, you have only three options – avoid them, deal with them badly, or deal with them well.

Read an excerpt here.

Top 25: What corporate America is reading

800-CEO-READ, a leading direct supplier of book-based resources, compiles a monthly list of bestselling business books based on purchases by its corporate customers nationwide. This is what corporate America is reading:

1. Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim, Renee Mauborgne 2. Twilight in the Desert by Matthew R. Simmons 3. The Millionaire Real Estate Investor by Gary Keller, Dave Jenks, Jay Papasan 4. The 7 Irrefutable Rules of Small Business Growth by Steven S. Little 5. Hardball George Stalk, Robert Lachenauer, John Butman 6. It's Your Ship by D Michael Abrashoff 7. Art of Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander, Benjamin Zander 8. Breaking the Bamboo Ceiling by Jane Hyun 9. Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz 10. Making Rain by Andrew Sobel 11. Ten Minute Marketer's Secret Formula by Tom Feltenstein 12. Overpromise and Overdeliver by Rick Barerra 13. What the CEO Wants You to Know by Ram Charan 14. Likeability Factor by Tim Sanders 15. The Radical Leap by Steve Farber 16. What is Lean Six Sigma? by Michael L. George, David T. Rowlands, Bill Kastle 17. Survival of the Savvy by Rick Brandon, Marty Seldman 18. Nobodies to Somebodies by Peter Han 19. IT Governance by Peter Weil, Jeanne Ross 20. Customer Centered Selling by Robert L. Jolles 21. Being the Shopper by Phil Lempert 22. Winning by Jack Welch, Suzy Welch 23. Food for Thought by Phil Romano 24. Profitable Growth is Everyone's Business by Ram Charan 25. Leadership Moment by Michael Useem

What Bill Gates Says CEOs Should Be Reading

Bill Gates held his annual CEO Summit last month. And 1-800-CEO-READ has a little inside scoop for you. There were five books recommended to the attendees:

• The Trendmaster's Guide: Get A Jump on What Your Customer Wants Next by Robyn Waters
• Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne
• The Only Sustainable Edge: Why Business Strategy Depends on Productive Friction and Dynamic Specialization by John Hagel III and John Seely Brown
• FAB: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop--From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication by Neil Gershenfeld
• MarketBusters: 40 Strategic Moves That Drive Exceptional Business Growth by Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian C. Macmillan

Book Report: Managing a Company in an Activist World: The Leadership Challenge of Corporate Citizenship

Corporate giving to worthy causes has never been higher—but hostility toward companies has also never been higher. A company’s first loyalty may be to its shareholders, but woe to the executive who neglects his or her role as corporate citizen. (A review of Managing A Company In an Activist World)

Top 25: What corporate America is reading

800-CEO-READ, a leading direct supplier of book-based resources, compiles a monthly list of bestselling business books based on purchases by its corporate customers nationwide. Here's the top 25 books corporate America is reading now:

1. Call to Action by by Bryan Eisenberg, Jeffery Eisenberg
2. Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim, Renée Mauborgne
3. The One Thing You Need to Know by Marcus Buckingham
4. What the CEO Wants You to Know by Ram Charan
5. Food for Thought Phil Romano
6. Breaking the Bamboo Ceiling by Jane Hyun
7. The 7 Irrefutable Rules of Small Business Growth by Steven S. Little
8. Radical Change, Radical Results by Kate Ludeman, Eddie Erlandson
9. All Marketers Are Liars by Seth Godin
10. Instant Persuasion by Laurie Puhn
11. Make Your Own Luck by Eileen Shapiro
12. Radical Leap by Steve Farber
13. It's Your Ship by D. Michael Abrashoff
14. Indispensable by Joe Calloway
15. Many Unhappy Returns by Charles O. Rossotti
16. Thing Big, Act Small by Jason Jennings
17. Time Off for Good Behavior by Mary Lou Quinlan
18. Get Them On Your Side by Samuel B. Bacharach
19. How Full Is Your Bucket by Tom Rath
20. Profitable Growth Is Everyone's Business by Ram Charan
21. Purple Cow by Seth Godin
22. The Likeability Factor Tim Sanders
23. The Power of We by Jonathan Tisch
24. Leadership Presence by Belle Linda Halpern, Kathy Lubar
25. Profiting from Uncertainty by Paul J. H. Schoemaker

Strategy Bites Back: It Is Far More, and Less, than You Ever Imagined

With its cover graced by the image of a presumably hungry shark, Strategy Bites Back is actually a friendly collection of essays and observations on some of the elements of strategy that intimidate people the most. 

Marketbusters: A call to arms for upper-level managers

Coinstar, the Bellevue, Wash.-based company that puts change-counting machines in groceries and discount stores, figured out a "marketbusting" move, according to Ian MacMillan and Rita Gunther McGrath. The company took something that had been an annoyance for both banks and consumers -- counting and handling spare change -- and turned it into a profitable business. "Coinstar has all the earmarks of a classic strategic move," McGrath says. "It identified an unmet need that was pervasive. And it created a focused solution. It does one thing and does it well."

MacMillan and McGrath's new book, Marketbusters: 40 Strategic Moves that Drive Exceptional Business Growth, is intended to help managers identify similar high-impact opportunities within their own companies and industries. Each company doesn't need 40 marketbusters, the authors add. Just one could be enough.

To read the full story from Wharton, click here.