Recommended Reading.

For long-term care providers, crafting business strategy in the current economic environment can be a daunting task. This column has, in recent months, focused on using strategy development as a tool to reinvent your organizations. (We plan to do more of the same--hence, the name change for this column, from "Post-Acute Consult" to "Business Strategies.") Some readers have asked where they might find resources to assist them in this endeavor. The following are two books reviewed by a colleague and myself that I believe will provide an excellent starting point.

Shaping the Adaptive Organization: Landscapes, Learning, and Leadership in Volatile Times

by William E. Fulmer

[C]2000, AMACOM 

Reviewed by Debbie Hedderly, strategic planner with D2B Group, Las Vegas, Nevada

William E. Fulmer, a Harvard Business School fellow, has written an insightful book discussing adaptability as a core characteristic of a successful strategy for any corporation. Using biology as a metaphor, he offers an encompassing overview of today's business environment, which he describes as characterized by volatility and continuous uncertainty. Strategic planning has therefore changed and, according to Fulmer, requires: (1) an understanding of the business landscape, (2) the concept of a "learning organization" and (3) a new style of leadership.

To understand the business landscape, people must recognize what is happening both within and outside of their industry. This means understanding the environment, which includes political, social and economic factors, as well as innovations, diversity, potential entrants and current competitors in the field.

What about the "learning organization"? According to Fulmer, organizations can become complacent, and therefore resistant, to change. Fulmer asserts that organizations that occupy changing environments should both decentralize and, at the same time, increase their span of control by:

* facilitating faster and more effective decision making

* developing teams

* outsourcing noncore elements of the business

* forming strategic alliances

* developing powerful information systems, along with flexible organizational structures

Then we come to leadership. It is leadership's responsibility to identify a niche for the organization, and then secure the key resources and hire the right people to occupy that niche. More generally, leadership should: (1) create an environment of success, (2) continuously study the landscape, (3) set high expectations, (4) delegate and (5) have a clear vision that is communicated throughout the organization.

Fulmer also believes that leadership should make itself available to help others, including customers and employees. Leadership that maintains high energy and a sense of urgency creates an "edge" within the organization, one that stimulates it to be receptive to change.

Fulmer suggests that continuous change will be the norm for this century. The healthcare company that can become an adaptive organization and can manage rapid change effectively will not only participate in the future, but help shape it for the industry.

Fulmer's new book is chock-full of good examples showing how companies are coping in today's erratic business environment. He also relates compelling stories of how successful businesses have sometimes found themselves in serious trouble. Through it all, the message comes through: Strategic management for a healthcare organization should be a learning process.

More and more, strategy will mean using whatever tools and frameworks we can get our hands on to help us determine the future of our organizations in an increasingly rugged landscape, and then to take action accordingly.

Debbie Hedderly can be contacted at [e-mail].

Leading the Revolution

by Gary Hamel 

[C]2000, Harvard Business School Press

Reviewed by Laura Hyatt, MBA 

Gary Hamel, coauthor of the best-seller Competing for the Future, has written his second book, Leading the Revolution. While Competing for the Future helped set the strategic management agenda for the 1990s, this new work suggests that we still have "miles to go before we sleep."

Hamel gives a passionate call to arms for those who are intent on being triumphant. His treatise centers on innovation and imagination as the cornerstones of an organization's success. Further, he argues that the best ideas don't come from "on high," but rather from an organizational culture that fosters openness. He suggests that a nonlinear world calls for nonlinear ideas in order to create wealth. His tone is one of a revolutionary with some radical strategies for doing business at the beginning of a new millennium.

Leading the Revolution discusses the evolution of new business opportunities, explores the key components of making innovation a core competency of your firm and explains why a company that does not focus on creating an open and democratic culture will most likely end up in the pile of other "one-note wonders." If you think this book is aimed at the dot.coms, think again. Some of the firms named include General Electric, Enron, Charles Schwab, Virgin, Guidant and Merck Pharmaceuticals.

Healthcare companies are not orphaned in this book, as they are in so many other books on strategic thinking. Hamel notes, for instance:

Today it is the employers who decide how much is too much when it comes to health care. It is employers--who are purchasing agents, not consumers--that contract with health care providers and insurance companies. Imagine if we let purchasing agents choose our toilet paper, or our cars, or the kind of food we eat. We'd all be using single-ply toilet tissue, driving puke-green Chevy Luminas, and eating the kind of food you buy at warehouse clubs. We wouldn't put up with that. Why do we put up with employers telling us how much health care we can have? Managed care, which is more accurately described as managed reimbursement, isn't a revolution--it's just the health care version of vigorous cost-cutting. There is nothing nonlinear about it. Whether we ever get a real revolution in health care will depend on whether anyone ever succeeds in taking a wrecking ball to the edifice of industry orthodoxy.

Hamel wants readers to break the shackles of tradition and become heretics creating new solutions. He wants persons in organizations to see novel ways to leverage opportunities for change. He espouses not long-term thinking, but unconventional thinking.

Hamel's new work is a rulebook for the revolutionaries of the new business climate. But for all of its new and original thought, it also promotes an age-old American concept: Work should be meaningful. He calls upon all of us to engage passionately in changing our organizations to create value for ourselves, our customers and our communities.

I want to thank those readers who write in support of this column and those participants who so generously offer their time and expertise. Ideas that you feel would be helpful to readers should be addressed to Laura Hyatt at: [e-mail]. Be sure to include your name, the name of your organization, address and phone number with area code.

Laura Hyatt, MBA, is president of Hyatt Associates and a member of the business faculty at Mount St. Mary's College.