Paul O'Neill, former Secretary of State and CEO of Alcoa recently gave a talk about The Irreducible Components of Leadership to a health care audience.
His ideas include what it means to be an good manager and how to create a right environments for companies to improve. When being CEO of Alcoa, he instituted a concept called "theoretical goals", like for example having zero accidents in all plant locations worldwide, which were more than 150 at the time. Even this goal seemed impossible to achieve, he suggests that with a right leadership and corporate culture in place, significant improvement can happen:
"There are several pushbacks to the idea of habitual excellence. One is to say ‘ well, we can never be perfect and we don’t want to set goals we can’t achieve.' I found in my own early days at Alcoa when people told me that about workplace safety, then I said to them, ‘OK, if you don’t want to have a goal of zero, then let’s go around and find out who wants to volunteer to be hurt to make sure we reach our goal of somebody being hurt'..."
O'Neill jokingly says that nobody ever volunteered to get hurt to reach a non zero goal.
His ideas are valuable for organization leaders, be it business or healthcare. In health care, were around 100,000 patients die per year in the US because of medical mistakes, his ideas could give some valuable insights. If interested on his views on healthcare, you can listen to a recent podcast with Mark Graban, were they discuss general problems in the health care system in the US.
Are you setting a right environment and giving people the tools to achieve ambitious goals? Are you walking the walk?
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