Have you ever observed the energy that leaders of publicly traded companies exert to announce and then deliver promised quarterly financial results? Surely, like me, you’ve wondered how multi-billion dollar companies composed of multiple divisions, and even more business units, achieve their financial forecasts – exactly. My concern is not just about the non-value added time leaders spend pulling orders forward into the quarter and costs back into the next quarter so that reported results match predictions, lest stock prices plunge. I am far more concerned about the value-destruction set in motion by yet another prevalent dysfunctional behavior – promising unrealistic growth, which appears to also happen a lot. A recent analysis of earnings trends by strategy firm McKinsey & Company shows that earnings growth is much lower than many companies’ publicly announced growth targets. From 1997-2007 (go-go years in the economy), large…
The Broken US Healthcare System Can Heal
What if you found out that your company is spending over twice as much as your competitors on a key element of your business, but the excess spending provides no differentiation, market-share gains or price premiums for your company? You’d likely appoint a team to unearth root causes of this wasteful spending. Welcome to the US Health Care system. We spend 16% of our Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on healthcare – seven percentage points of our GDP more than the average of all OECD nations and 5 percentage points more than the second highest spender in the OECD, France. (The 34 member countries in the OECD span the globe and include many of the world’s most advanced countries.) Yet we have nothing to show for our excess spending in terms of population health, as cited in Forbes. Today’s situation will only worsen absent…