In healthcare, as the storm clouds of change build ominously on the horizon, the marketing gurus of various healthcare suppliers and consultancies are busy as bees fashioning their marketing messages to reflect the new economic realities.
Partnering, value added, keen insights into the future, innovative solutions to navigate healthcare reform… Great phrases, all.
The good news is that most vendors and consultants are thinking about your future. The bad news is that most are approaching this period of change with a transactional business mindset. Why? Because the vast majority of the very successful firms would just as soon keep things the way they are. That is, after all, what transactional management means – transactional leaders and organizations are not looking to change for the future. They want to keep things the same – the same business model, and more importantly, the same level of responsibility and accountability. It is sort of a perverse if ain’t broke don’t fix it mentality.
Transformational leadership requires a vision to guide the change through inspiration – where leaders and companies work together to advance to the next level of performance in a challenging changing environment.
As I thought about those frequently used marketing phrases, I remembered another popular phrase: Our employees are our most important asset. Most of the time, that is more of a written sentiment than an operational reality. And the same can be said for the words partnering and value added. They sound good but more often than not are just marketing schmooze, not a representation of a transformational way of doing business.
To be a real partnership the vendor and the customer must have shared financial risk. In most consulting engagements that is simply not the case. That is especially true in the world of executive and management recruiting where the business model has remained essentially unchanged for more than 50 years. Most recruiting firms would just as soon keep the outdated transactional business mindset in place despite tectonic shifts in the marketplace. Why change, they are doing very well, financially speaking, under the old rules.
Why change if the customers are not asking for a new deal?
Because they deserve more, that’s why.
Wednesday: Our Clients Deserve More