HOT READS FOR THE PRACTITIONER
Title: UCLA Gets It Right
Competency: leadership, customer service
Who benefits: anyone in a leadership position or is preparing for one
Consultant Usage: organizational development consultants, trainers of leadership or customer service
What’s it about? You would have to be pretty sick not to know what difficulties the medical profession has been going through over the past few years. Political decisions have forced change. Advocacy groups continue to force change. New medical revelations force change. The economy has forced change. In my New Meaning Dictionary, “hospital†is now spelled C-H-A-N-G-E.
No industry is changing faster and no industry needs leadership more.
I am pleased to report that a leadership evolution is commencing big time in the medical field. Just published is Prescription for Excellence: Leadership Lessons for Creating a World Class Customer Experience from UCLA Health System.
What I like most about this book is how Leadership and Customer Service (patient care) are almost synonymous.  The lessons, shortcomings, and benchmarking are similar to any organization who has customers (and who doesn’t?). There is learning here awaiting anyone in a leadership position.
I wouldn’t be doing my job if I did not admit I didn’t care too much for the first few chapters. They seemed too pedestrian and self-serving. But the bulk of the book has great value as you read how they implement their five core principles:
Commit to Care
Leave No Room for Error
Make the Best Better
Create the Future
Service Serves Us
If leadership combined with customer service is of interested, I refer you also to another medical based tome, the 2008 book: Management Lessons from Mayo Clinic: Inside One of the World’s Most Admired Service Organizations.
And I will also remind you of a book I reviewed recently, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, which was written by a medical doctor and as I wrote previously, probably one of the two or three most important books written this century.
Three cheers for the medical profession. When it comes to leadership and customer service, they are moving from laggards to leaders and now can serve as great role models for other industries.Â
Catch you later.
[tags]leadership, customer service, medical profession, change, ucla medical center, mayo clinic, envisia, envisia learning, bill bradley, william bradley, bradley[/tags]
Bill Bradley
Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.
