Book Description

Enterprise Agility in Healthcare explains why agility is vital to organizational survival. It details the critical variables that only executive leaders can address in a way that ensures success. It uses the experiences of two major healthcare organizations in order to frame the situational context surrounding the variables and then explains why and how the leaders in those organizations made choices that proved to be extraordinarily successful ... in the real world! The common challenge shared by healthcare, aerospace, and information-centric industries of every type is the extraordinary complexity and uncertainty driven by the enormous number of individual, yet codependent factors, whether in humans and their cellular functioning, or vehicles and the interaction of materials and environment, requiring leaders and decision-makers at every level to connect, interact, and synthesize vital, fluctuating data, typically via technology-intermediated network structures with varying content and scale. The networks may be obvious, like the organizational structure, while others are more abstract or virtual, like social networks and ecosystems Despite healthcare’s amazing success in improving the quality and average lifespan of human beings, the maximum lifespan remains unchanged at no more than 125 years. Very few healthcare organizations live for much longer, with most disappearing before reaching one-third of that lifespan. How systems, people, and culture respond as organizational size changes is a challenge and also an opportunity in scaling for any information-centric industry. This book will use the actual, real-world experiences of two, very successful healthcare organizations to provide specific, actionable insights into the principles and practices that provoke success. Because scaling plays a determinative role in the successful design of everything from airplanes to skyscrapers, its impact on how effective and efficient an organization is remains a continuous challenge. Perhaps understanding scaling is of greater urgency due to the increasingly large and complex structures required for companies, institutions and governments to continuously evolve the complex adaptive systems they have become. This book focuses on organizational expansion in healthcare. By examining two organizations with similar, yet very different growth experiences, this book demonstrates very successful, very real outcomes while offering key insights into the principles and practices that drove them.