Ron Williams Discusses the Health-Care Business

This was about a year ago, a few years after he left h He has a really interesting new book out and he is quite the expert on leadership and the proper ways to to run a company and to really get buy ins from all the constituencies that a big entity like healthcare giant like ETNA has. So I think you'll find this to be a fascinating conversation with no further ado. Here's my interview with Ron Williams. This is Masters in Business with Barry Ridholts on Bloomberg Radio.

My special guest today is Ron Williams. He is the former chairman and chief executive officer of Etna Healthcare, the giant company purchase last year by CVS. He is on the board of directors for such August companies as American Express, Boeing, and Johnson and Johnson. UH. He received his NBA from the M I. T. Sloan School of Management, and he is a newly published author. His book Learning to Lead By Leading Yourself, Others and an Organization UH is just

out recently. Ron Williams, Welcome to Bloomberg. Well, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. So let's start with your background. You have kind of an interesting background. You grow up the son of a bus drive ever and a manicurist on the South side of Chicago. That's not the typical background for a thirty billion dollar company CEO, is it. No, it's not. I was very fortunate in

my life. UM. I went to public schools and UH went to a community college for two years, then went on to Roosevelt and started working and ultimately found my way to M I. T. So in the book, you tell this really interesting story in the beginning about working in the winters in a car wash in Chicago, and

you found that to be quite an constructive experience. Tell us about that, Well, it was highly instructive in the sense that in Chicago there's snow and slush, and when there's a sunny, clear day in the day of winter and it is colder than you can imagine, everyone decides it's a great day to wash your car. Sure, I gotta get the salt and the mud off the car. And and when you wash cars and so end up soaking wet, you end up soaking wet. And my job was to uh wash the cars as they pulled up.

I would um climb inside the car, clean the inside windows, wash the outside, then go down as the car moved to the line and dry the car off. On a very busy day, I would do that times. And the one thing I learned from that experience was I did not want to do that for the rest of my life. That that was the clear takeaway. Hey, there's got to be a better way to earn a living than than this.

So so you go to eventually end up an m I T. Where you graduate with an m b A. How did you find your way into the healthcare sector? You know? I uh. At m I T. There was a huge focus on entrepreneurial activity, and one of the areas I focused on was the um operational management of cervices businesses, which was a completely new area because everything that had been done in marketing up to that point

was all about products as opposed to services. And in one of my entrepreneurial classes, we had a gentleman come in named Mitch Kapoor. Mitch was the founder and creator of Lotus one two three, which was the original eventually bought by IBM, eventually bought by BM, and he built Lotus one to three after he worked on the original

spreadsheet called VisiCalc. And it was interesting to hear his story about how he created a company, and ultimately I was highly successful in selling the company, and so I became interested in entrepreneurial activity. So when I left m I T, I ended up joining some partners I met who were starting a healthcare company in California. I knew nothing about healthcare, but I knew a lot about the

operational management services businesses. And this was a services business that was bringing the treatment for chemical dependency and substance abuse out of the hospital into an amiliatory center where people who had good family support and we're beginning to have problems could come in after work and get the care that they needed. It was a huge cost savings to the companies and for the families. It made care

and treatment much more accessible. So that started me down the road of healthcare, and ultimately we sold the company and I looked around and I joined Blue Cross of California. So from entrepreneurship, you now join a fairly large company. What was that transition like, because it's obviously very different when it's just you and a handful of people running a startup, where there's no intrense way of doing things and a lot of freedom to experiment. Suddenly you're in

a giant entity. Well, I think, Um, the experience that that I had actually before I went to graduate school was at a company called Control Data. Now Control Data had seventy thousand employees, so I had been in a company with seventy thousand. Then I started a company with three and I went to Blue Cross that had about five thousand employees. So um, I have to say the

size didn't worry me as much as the culture. I jokingly and it was half humorous and a half not that the places I was interested in working at the bottom of the list was the federal government, state government, and then Blue Cross. Because I actually had had some experience in state government as well, and but I met

the team. They were a really dynamic group of people who had a vision to transform the company, and I joined and that's really where I kind of did the apprenticeship of running all aspects of that company and ultimately really uh to develop a complete knowledge of the health care system. So did you aspire to the C suite or were you more interested in looking at companies that were um either in need of some assistance or in

edness case a giant turnaround. What what was the motivation when you left Blue Cross and joined that now, Well, I think when I was at M I t one of the unique things I think they did was they brought in alumni who were CEOs, and we would have dinners maybe once a month, to be fourteen of us at a time who would sit down with the CEO and hear their story and hear their journey. And as I heard those stories and heard those journeys, somewhere in there the light went on and said, you know, I

think I could do that. I could learn to do that. I couldn't do it today, but I could see a path where with the right experience and the right opportunities I could learn to be a CEO. So for me, that was kind of the beginning of a distant light on the horizon that said, you know, I think maybe I could learn to do that. Let's talk a little bit about the health care system in America. On the one hand, we have absolutely a fabulous level of medical care,

just incredible innovations, incredible life saving techniques. On the other hands, the business side of healthcare you mentioned earlier, it's opaque. We have no idea about pricing, there's no transparency. Americans seem to pay the most amount for procedures, for for prescriptions for drugs. Is the system broken and how can it be fixed? If it is well, I would say that the system is not broken. The system is not optimized that if you need healthcare in America, if you

have insurance, you get fabulous healthcare. But we do have a segment of the population that even today does not have insurance and where they're not getting access to the services that those of us who are insured would be. Now, when you think about the cost of the US healthcare system, it is more expensive and we spend more than other countries. But our system is uniquely American and by that I mean one of the ways that other countries control the rate of increase is they set a budget. We don't

set a chit. They actually are have many, many instances a culture that accepts waiting. So if you need a hip replacement, and you may be uh needed, but you believe today in other countries, you might not get it for months or in some places years. Canada is probably the poster child has you have to wait for many, many services. You know, if someone were to be told to wait in the US, their answer would be, you're gonna hear from me, You're gonna hear from my congressmen,

you're gonna hear from my attorney. I want what I want. The other issue is that other countries really do ration care in the sense that's saying you may be eighty years old, you may be extremely fit, you may be in great shape, but we think you're too old for a hip replacement, and so that's not something that we

uh endorse and encourage. I think there is an opportunity to create much more value in healthcare and make healthcare more affordable, and I think one of the secrets of that is to restore the primacy of the primary care physician as the person who really is the guide and coach to the patient to try to make certain that health care is looked at from end to end and also that patient preferences are taken into account so a patient can make an informed decision of is surgery better

or should I try medication? What is the best course of action? And those are judgments the patients really need to make in consultation with their position. Can we make the personal physician the quarterback of somebody's health care? It seems like the way the cost structure has changed, they've become under pressure to see a lot more patients UM in a shorter period of time. I happen to be lucky.

My personal physician UM coincidentally is a cardiac expert, and every time I have a physical with him, we sit down in the office and he spends twenty minutes UM going over everything. I think that sort of relationship is not the rule. That seems to be the exception. Most people aren't fortunate enough to have that sort of primary care physician. It's a much more assembly line type of situation.

How can we create the financial incentives for those doctors to be focused on not just the billable procedure, but the overall um health of the patient, well, I think one of the answers that we're beginning to see is

the use of what's called integrated care systems. And in those systems, one of the things that many health plans are doing is to take the premium dollar that's paid for insurance and instead of paying the physician on a piecework or activity basis, to pay the the the system on a percentage of the premium, and say eight of the premium is going to go to health care services.

You don't have to try to figure out what's the code to put this patient in an uber or a lift bring them in for a visit, because if they can't get to your office for care, then it's going to be a lot more expensive. And so getting away from the piecemeal a lot of the kind of activity based care will pass those resources to the integrated delivery system and they can use those resources in ways that really manage the patient outside of the office and outside

of the hospital. If you think about healthcare, most of the things that impact healthcare actually happen in the home, in the community, at work, and so we have to think about getting the healthcare system much more involved in those spaces by working with the patient. What about costs

of various drugs? You know, when we pass them, what does it Medicare Section D for prescription drug costs, There was a lot of lobbying from the pharmaceutical industry and there is not only is there no cap on costs, but there is a prohibition on the government negotiating prices on on behalf of Medicaid Medicare, which is just outrageous. It makes Medicaid costs more. That has to trickle down to what private insurers are paying for drugs. Well, I

think it does. I think we have to take a look at Uh, negotiating with the government is really not negotiating, right, government is not a negotiator, they are a price setter. Well, certain countries are more aggressive price setters than US, and their drugs costs much less than ours. Well, I think we have to look at the whole drug system on

the global basis. And the one thing I believe is that the US is in fact doing an enormous amount of research for all countries in the US, and and it's fair to say I believe that the US patient population is in fact paying for the research, which is benefiting many countries who don't make the investment in pharmaceutical research. That makes no sense to it may not, but but

but that's what we're doing now. The other thing I would say is that the innovations that pharmaceutical companies create are really spectacular, and it is an extremely expensive undertaking. I've seen companies spend two three billion dollars on a drug which cures a problem but creates a bigger problem, in which case that money has just gone down into flames. And so I think one of the things that we can do is to continue to emphasize generics, which is

really a much lower cost way. Is the patent system kind of making that more difficult. They make a slight change that's irrelevant to a molecule and suddenly they had a few more years to a patent. How how can we work around that? Yeah? I think that um the the the whole question of making certain that drugs move through the proprietary patent UH process for a reasonable period of time for companies to recrup their costs, and then

generics should be available. We also have situations where bugs that have been in use for quite some time have been purchased, and we've seen the prices go up dramatically three three, and I think that that's an example of something personally, I think that's inappropriate. We were talking earlier about um your transition from an entrepreneurial background to a larger corporate entity in your book Learning to Lead. How did you come about the idea of leading yourself and

then others and then the organization. I'm kind of fascinated by the way you structured this well. I think it starts with the recognition that leadership is a journey, and that that journey has different phases. And given my unique background as an individual who started out very meager uh circumstances, one of the first things I had to figure out how to do was to lead myself into a place where I could have a profession career and have aspirations

for greater opportunity. And then and then ultimately I had the opportunity to lead people. I needed to learn how to do that and then ultimately lead organizations. What I found was that after I ceased to be CEO, I got an enormous number of phone calls from other CEOs who were confronting issues of transformational change, issues of team building, human capital, all of the issues I confronted as a CEO.

I also had a lot of phone calls from aspiring leaders who really were at that stage where they had been a very strong individual contributor but were now asked to lead a team. And then I also found lots of inquiries from my peers and colleagues whose children were

at that very early stage. So it really was born out of both my own experience and I decided that I would write the book and I would also interview are executives who had taken journeys similar to me, and so I was able to interview kenchin Alt who ran American Express, Pat Russo who she ran CEO of Lucon and then CEO of Lucon, alcoateel Ursla Burns who ran Xerox, and Ian Davis, who was the person who ran mckenzy

for quite some time mckensey. Consulting their stories, my stories, their insight, and the insights many people I work with are all in the book. So I was kind of fascinated by your discussion um failure early in the book about your background in psychology and how you came to recognize attribution theory as being very helpful in a leadership role in helping to figure out why people seem to blame others when it goes wrong, but they want to take credit for themselves, not when it goes right. Not

the best attributes for a leader. Tell us a little bit about attribution theory, well, I would would say that when my initial undergraduate was psychology, I then decided to study clinical psychology at at Roosevelt University and I found it very interesting, and I got UM and completed all my coursework, and then I had to do the internship UM and I discovered that you had to work for a year for free, and I joked that that was

the day I realized I was a capitalist. But the benefit of that experience was exposure to social psychology and attribution theory, and it helped me begin to observe how people made decisions, how people made judgments about themselves and others. And I think the simplest way to think about it is that if people like you and things go wrong, they will very well blame the failure on external events. If they don't like you and things go wrong, they

blame the all are on you. Now that's gross over simplification, but that's the essence of it. And what caused me to ask myself was what would people have to believe in order to make those judgments. So it always caused me not to look for motivation, which a lot of people do, but to look for logic and thinking that makes that decision makes sense to the individual doing it.

A little cognitive dissonance goes a long way. You also reference in the book um the role of just chance and luck and how people so significantly under estimate how important just getting a little lucky every now and then is. Well, there's an expression which I learned early on with which is you can't win if you're not in the game. And what that means is when you're in the game, you expose yourself to more probability of luck. So if you want to be in business, you've got to get

in business. Doesn't mean you'll be successful, but if you're in business and you're constantly working and broadening your contacts, you'll make connections. Things will happen. So luck luck favors are prepared. Lux favors those who are actually actively trying to accomplish their goals. Right, what's the old joke the harder I work, the luckier I get exactly absolutely uh interesting. So so let's talk a little bit about ETNA before

we talk about UM. The rest of of the Fortune one thousand, your CEO from two thousand and six to two thousand and eleven. You come in a few years before that, ETNA was really in a mess. It was potentially looking down the road and insolvency. It had not been well managed or well run for a long time, and you had to turn the company around. What was that experience like, Well, it was UM Really one of the most remarkable experiences that I've had. Was was really

helping that company regain its stature in the industry. And I contributed really to the employees, the staff, their commitment, their engagement, and their desire to win. The company had been dramatically underlaid for some time under lad That's an interesting and when I joined that and I expected that I would meet a lot of incompetent people, and I was shocked and surprised and pleased at the level of

competence that the organization had. But the company wasn't well organized, The company's strategy was unclear, the culture had lost its way, and so the company had to be disassembled and reassembled in order to be effective and contemporary. So so you're coming into a situation that's a little dysfunctional. How do you get buy in from the employees and the key management members when you're basically saying, Hey, everything you've been

doing is wrong, let's let's start over. You know, I am remind did of very early in my tenure there. I did a lot of town hall meetings to go out on a listening tour, and I remember explaining what I hope to do and what I accomplish. And one woman stood up. She happened to be a physician who worked there, and she said, you seem like a very nice man. I'm sure you hope you can do all this. You're the fifth person we've seen in you know, five years, So why should we listen and engage and do what

you're asking? And I paused for a minute, and I looked around the room and I said, I want everyone in his room to stand up and give that woman a round of applause for asking the question that was on everyone's mind. But only she had the courage to actually say. And we did that, and I think that was a beginning turning point and people understanding that I wanted a different kind of culture and environment. And I then went on to stress that we have to have

authentic conversations with each other. There's no question you shouldn't be able to ask me. I'm going to give you a direct answer. You may like the answer, you may not like the answer, but I'm going to give you an honest answer. So changing the culture and changing the dynamic really started with that one conversation which kind of spread across the organization that said, this is really different.

I can I can imagine. And the turnaround was so successful that ETNA during your tenure gets named Fortune magazines most admired healthcare company in insurance for what three consecutive years, So that is quite the turnaround, both in how the company has perceived as well as the profitability. The company went from losing lots of money to being a billion

plus profit maker. Um. How much of this was changing the culture and how much of this was just the blocking and tackling nuts and bolts of reorganizing a company and focusing it on its core competencies. Well, I would say, Um, I have an expression that great CEOs have their head in the clouds and feet on the ground and hid in the clouds means that you have a well tuned

sense of the external reality. Spent a lot of time with customers, built a new strategy for the company, and it was the leadership team that that really helped build that strategy. Then we looked very deeply at the culture of the company and the values of the company, and we created something called the ETNA Way, And at the ETNA Way, we put the customer at the center of everything we do. Now we did a slight twist on what people think of as customer. Customer was not simply

the person who paid the bills. The customer was whoever you serviced, and so if it was a planned sponsor who was buying, that was a customer. When a when a patient called, or a member call customer service, that was the customer. If you were in human resources, the employees were the customer. If you were in proposal preparation,

the sales team was your customer. And so it created a dynamic in which we were externally focused on meeting customer expectations, and the strategy really was linked to the culture, and we spent an enormous amount of time talking about the culture. One year, I gave over two hundred talks and presentations inside the company. I started each and every time with the values of the company, making sure that

people understood. And my experience is that when the CEO has said it so much they could scream, they probably have reached about a third of the people. Amazing you. You mentioned the customers you describe in the book early in your tenure as CEO, taking the corporate jet and really flying around to visit the two hundred top customers of ETNA. What was that experience like, especially coming off

a bad couple of years. How do you convince everybody, no, no, the turnaround is real and you're gonna really like what you see. Well, it was a very revealing experience. Prior to my joining, ETNA had spent twelve billion dollars on acquiring a large number of other health health plans, but it failed to effectively integrate those plans, either operationally from an I T perspective and from a employee culture perspective,

customers were suffering as a result. Customer service was bad, claim payments were bad, information provided to patients to customers were bad. To people calling customer service So when I visited those accounts who were Fortune one hundred companies, Fortune to fifty companies, Fortune five companies, I got a air full on what they expected and what they were getting. The one thing that I was able to do was to ask for time, and I asked them also about

their most important pain points. What did they want to see in new innovations, new products, and new capabilities. And what made the difference really was a theme in the company of back to basics and defining very explicitly what we needed to do, and getting the organization engaged so that the commitments I had made for improved service, improved responsiveness, we're being met. And then the fact that we then simultaneously developed a strategy that represented a whole new generation

of products and services. So you get all this feedback from these big customers and you promise, hey, give us six months to a year. I promise you'll be on people. But you see, how do you communicate the changes that are needed to accompany the size of that Now you have thousands and thousands of employees, How do you make sure everybody is on the same page, and that not just culturally, but those specific pain points you mentioned, How

does that reach the rank and file employees? Well, I think what you have to do is you really have to be extremely visible. So I made it a goal to go to the customer service centers, to meet with the teams, to lay out the strategy, and to build a graphic model that define explicitly what back to basics meant. So if you were in claims, it said you're gonna

pay claims accurately and timely. We're going to measure you on that, we're going to reward you on that, but we're going to make certain you have the resources to be able to do it, and we're gonna listen to you in terms of what are the things the organization has to do to enable you to accomplish that. And we did that area by area by area, And so while we were under enormous financial strain, we did not under invest in making certain that we got back to

delivering the basic commitment for service. You mentioned the twelve billion dollars and acquisitions that proceeded your um period of time as CEO. What were the I T challenges like too, Because it sounds like you had a lot of technologies of of all different sorts. They didn't seem to communicate. You describe in here in the book and elsewhere that it's a bit of a challenge making all these disparate systems work together. How did you finally wrestle that into submission?

How did you get again a giant company like ETNA with a modern, cutting edge UM technology infrastructure. Well, I think, uh, it was a really critical component of our success. And as you mentioned, when I joined the company, I joined as UH shortly after that became president and the CEO was Jack Row, who was a great colleague and friend. And one of the things that we identified was we needed a new head of i T. And there's a

story in the book where I had that epiphany. Uh. After our planning process, what we did was we actually went out and we retained a company, retained IBM to completely update and retool the human capital. So we asked them, on our behalf, evaluate all of the i T staff, help us determine which ones are people who really are contributing and can help us get to where we need to, and then help us replace the others with the highest caliber, greatest expertise we can find. That process took a while.

At the end of it, information technology digitalization, big data analytics became a huge part of the competitive strategy that helped the company win. We have been speaking to Ron Williams. He is the former CEO of ETNA and the author of Learning to Read. If you enjoy this conversation, we'll be sure and stick around for the podcast extras. Will we keep the tape rolling and continue discussing all things healthcare related. You can find that at iTunes, Overcast, SoundCloud, Stitcher,

wherever your final podcasts are found. We love your comments, feedback and suggestions right to us at m I be podcast at Bloomberg dot net. You can check out my daily column at Bloomberg dot com slash Opinion. Follow me on Twitter at rid Holts. I'm Barry Riholts. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. Welcome to the podcast, Ron, Thank you so much for doing this. I think you are the first Fortune one hundred uh company CEO I've

had on and UM. Not only is at in the healthcare provider for my firm, UM, but I was intrigued by your book and found it quite fascinating, and I have to ask you, how did you come up with the idea of putting very succinct takeaways of each chapter. It really when I went back and because I first went through the book on PDF, when I got the physical copy, I started going through it and I found it tremendously helpful to when I'm looking for something to say, Oh,

here are the chapter three takeaways. What what was the thinking process behind behind building the book that way? Well, it it goes back to one of the principles that I've always believed is that when you're communicating, you have an obligation to make what you know accessible to others in a way that is easy for them to absorb. And I think that's whether you're in a business meeting or whether you're writing or you're doing a report, that it's not enough to just put it in there from

your point of view. You want to make certain that you've done the absolute best to make it accessible. And for many people, the way the book is structured seems it to be linear. First you lead yourself, then you

lead others, and you lead organizations. The one thing I've learned in really talking about the book is that when you are leading an organization, the single most important thing turns out to be leading yourself and So these types of summaries at the end let anyone at whatever level real quickly revisit some of the key lessons that can help them be successful. And this is your first book, how did you find the uh, the writing process? Well,

I think um, I found it challenging. I found it, um trying to write a book in which you are pleased with everything you say is a huge challenge, particularly if you are a bit of a perfectionist in what you do. I would say I am pleased with the experience. Right, So we're gonna see another book from you anyway, so that I'll have to consider you have to talk to

the life and see absolutely absolutely, let's do that. So there were a couple of questions we didn't get to that I wanted to ask about, um well, and they're both sort of political, so I'll ask it in a a delicate way. So first, there's actually a few questions we skipped. First, we were talking about Obamacare, UM, which ended up providing healthcare for thirty five million low income people. How did that impact your business and out? And then

was this a positive for the insurance business? Was a negative? Wasn't mixed? What what was the impact when you're running a giant healthcare company. Well, I would say that UM. As the legislation was being prepared, and there was, I was very actively involved in it, and actually the President was kind enough to send me a personally signed copy of the bills. We still have ABIT on my wall as And like all legislation, it's imperfect. I think in

terms of the industry, Uh, it's a mixed record. UM. The many parts of the of the legislation, I'd say UM create financial challenges for companies. But I think in terms of the overall good for society, I think it's a real plus. And it was supposed to be a work in progress, but once UM President Obama left office, works seem to have stopped on. It is a bipartisan healthcare bill even possible, despite how important it is, you know.

I one of my regrets is that we couldn't get the initial legislation to be bipartisan because having it passed by one party made it a bit of a grudge match from each side of the perspective. And I think it does make it hard. And I think if we could get the kind of leadership I would like to see, we would come up with bipartisan fixes, no one side would win everything they wanted. But I just think as a country three we are better off with bipartisan solutions

than we are with single party solutions. And then the other question I didn't get to um, but I think it's important to to discuss. When you were running at now you were one of the few African American CEOs in the SMP five hundred. Are we doing enough to improve diversity at the c suite? And are we doing enough to make sure the pool of all all employees are are given a fair shake, regardless of their background, whatever it might be. Well, I think there is uh

a lot of work to be done. I think we're doing better in terms of advancing women and making certain that we're equalizing on a gender basis, and I think that is a real plus. Now we're nowhere near where we need to be, but given where we were, we've made a lot of progress. I think in terms of other minorities, whether it's Hispanics, African Americans, Asians, whatever, I think we still have a lot of work to do.

Most companies have one or two in the executive suite, and if you look at the next levels in the organization. Often it's pretty thin, and I believe that in order to win a you have to be reflective of your customer base because you'll make better decisions to serve that customer base. And two, there's an enormous amount of talent that we aren't tapping if we're not doing a better job.

The companies that I work with are all highly focused on the issue, and what they find is when they broaden the candidates slate to reflect candidates from the full spectrum, and they pick the best person. Often they end up picking a woman, They may pick a person of color, or they may pick someone else. The object isn't to

force a solution. The object is to broaden the field, and companies need to invest much more earlier in the toilet, in the talent pipeline to make certain that people are coming into the company and moving through the assignments and producing great results. You know, I work in finance and it is a notorious um lack of diversity sort of industry. It's gotten much better, but your point about the pipeline

is well taken. You can't hire somebody at a C suite level if there aren't a lot of people working at at different stages below. I think I think Wall Street has improved in many ways, but like the rest of the country, it still has a lot of work to do. So so let's jump to my favorite questions. These are the ones we ask all of our guests and and they're the ones that I think, UM people are are most excited about. Let's uh, let's jump right into it. You mentioned you worked in in the car wash.

What was the first car you ever owned? You're making model. The first car I own was a night teen sixty eight Chevrolet, and um it was. It had no air conditioning, which was not good, and it was a horrible green but it was the cheapest car on the lot, right, well, Chevallet, what what was it? A Nova? And Pala, It was a Nova, okay, which is when you said cheapest on a lot. Now, in later years those Nova's became muscle cars. You could get those with big, fat tires and a

lot of horsepower. No, I think this was the smallest engine they had. Um, So, what's the most important thing we don't know about? Ron Williams? You know, I would say, um? Probably, Well, the most important is um makes it a difficult question? Probably one of the things you probably don't know. Is I'm actually a movie buff. I'm I'm a cinema fan, yes,

and I enjoy actually own movies. And I actually am now building a collection of African American UH movies that were made in the twenties, thirties and forties, which many people don't know about. Really, I'm a film buff. I had no idea, what what are some of the movies we might have heard of from that era? Well, you probably UH wouldn't have heard of many of them. They were a lot of them were Westerns that had all

black cast. Uh, and we're very similar to the westerns that were made in john Ford type of john Ford type, you know, budgets weren't as big, themes were the same. So I would say, uh, cinema is an area of interest. So so out of curiosity, who was funding those Was this through the studios? Was this in the that they were independent films, that that a company carved out the segment and recognized there was a business opportunity and UH put together cast and you see a lot of the

same people participating in in the movies. And UH. One of the UH gifts that I I I got recently was a poster from one of those original movies that hangs in my home. Quite interesting. So who were your early mentors who helped shape your career? You know, I had clearly my parents were were instrumental. I had a lot of professors in school who in Pickleyan College and

in high school it was very challenging. They had just begun to desegregate Chicago, and I went to a school where we were the really really truly minority, and there was no one ever talked to me about going to college. All the college conversations were held with other students. You you mentioned that in the book that was like, yeah, okay, when you're done, back to the car wash? Was you with you? Was the attitude exactly? Exactly and so um.

But in college I met really great fact with that great experience at Roosevelt, great experience at M I T. And then I've worked for some really great executives Lyn Shaffer it Uh, blue Cross I would give high marks too, uh. And then Jack Roll was just a great, great colleague, great partner, and I've the other thing I would stress is I learned a lot from everyone. You know, you don't have to be a professional. You don't have to be a CEO. Every person you meet you can learn

something from you mentioned. So this is everybody's favorite question. What are some of your favorite books? And I have to mention that in the your book you reference you're a sci fi fan. So, so tell us some of your favorite books, be they fiction, non fiction, science fiction, or otherwise. Well, you know, I I read a lot of biographies, you know, Uh, books of the books on Lincoln that uh history which author most recently, Delores Kerwin? I like her books? Um, I it's sci fi. Actually,

Isaac Asimanoff was a great UH love his whole collection. Uh. One of the ones I read very early, which I was fascinated with, was a Foundation trilogy, which is a whole series on both combinations psychology and science fiction. Uh. And then I read, um a lot of Jim Collins in the business Um. Very early. I focused a lot on management book Strucker read everything he ever wrote, UM, and UH a lot on leadership. Quite interesting. Uh. Tell us about a time you failed and what you learned

from the experience. Well, I I my first business failed miserably, UM. And what I learned there is that I was a great salesman, but I knew absolutely nothing about running a business, and that prompted me to go seek what I'll call was a business apprenticeship and where you could learn, And that's when I joined Control Data and that took me from understanding how you sell things to actually learning how you actually run a business and what do you do

outside of the office for fun? You mentioned film? What film? And Um? I of jazz? Uh? I visit New York and in great enjoy all the great jazz clubs here. Really tell us somebody you saw recently who you enjoying? Well, I would say recently I saw Herbie Hancock was just great chick Korea. Um, I'm kind of a sixties, seventies, eighties jazz fan for obvious reasons. Well, fifties and sixties for sure. Um. Have you followed any of the Herbie Hancock albums where he takes like a pop artist and

reworks one of their their albums? He I The last one I think I saw of his was Joni Mitchell. They're really quite actually have not heard that one out. He does some some really interesting, uh really interesting work, very good. Um. Oh, so what are you most excited about within the healthcare industry today? What? What changes are

teat up that you think really are going to be impactful. Well, the changes that I'm most excited about center on a couple of the companies I'm involved with, one called agilean another one called have a Health. Agilan is a company that partners with primary care physicians who are interested in

serving the Medicare advantage population. And what Agilan does is it brings a technical platform to support the physicians in terms of data, analytics, the clinical indicators, and it also then goes out and negotiates with health plans directly to shift those physicians from being paid on activity to receiving a capitated amount to take care of those patients. It's about a billion dollar company. We have about a hundred

thousand Medicare Advantage members and we handle the business. The doctors handled the medicine, and we give them the data, the analytics, the decisions support to really look at their population and figure out how do we make certain every person is coming in and getting assessed and and getting the right preventive care throughout the year. And so it's really been a great partnership and it's growing about thirty a year. We're very excited about it. That's that's quite interesting.

So if a millennial came to you and said they were interested in a career in healthcare, UH, what sort of advice might you give them? You know, I would give them the the ad advice to look at emerging companies, UH, that are finding new solutions. Some are empowering consumers and supporting consumer engagement. Some are shifting care from the hospital setting into the outpatient setting. I would say, look for companies that are inventing the future. There are many of them.

Some are backed by hospital systems, some are private equity, some are venture But I would look into that space. And our final question, what is it that you know about leadership and running a company today that you wish you knew twenty years ago when you were first moving

up the corporate ladder. Listen. That's the answer is when you when you're starting out, the mixture of talking to listening is not quite right for me at least, and I think one of the most important things is really listening to what people are telling you, being in the moment, absorbing it, digesting it, and figuring out how does it impact your customers, how does it impact what what you're doing. I'll give you just a quick example which I learned.

I learned more about what we should be investing in by listening to our front line customer service people than all the strategists in the world. Because when you sit down with someone who's on the phone interacting with the customer, you're telling them to give that customer the best experience they've had in the best service. And yet they don't have the tools, they don't have the capabilities, the systems

get in the way. When you really listen to them, it changes your priorities and you focus on giving them the capability to create a real service experience. And I think what we see great companies are doing that using now data algorithms and analysis quite quite interesting. We have been speaking to Ron Williams. He is the former CEO and chairman of ETNA and author of a new book,

Learning to Lead. If you enjoy this conversation, we'll be sure and look up an Inch for Down an Inch on Apple iTunes or any of the other places where these podcasts are found, and you could see the rest of the two hundred and fifty or so such interviews that we've done over the past five years. We love you comments, feedback, and suggestions. You can write to us at m IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net, go to iTunes and give us a review. Be sure and check

out my daily column at Bloomberg dot com. UM. I would be remiss if I did not thank the crack staff that helps put together this conversation each week. Michael Boyle is our booker Utica val Bron. Michael bat Nick is my head of research arch. I'm Barry Results. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio