In a blog post on Harvard Business Review a few days ago, Bill Taylor wrote about the transformation of a health care company called DaVita. According to Taylor, the company has grown its market capitalization from $200 million in 1999 to $ 6 billion today.
Taylor reports that CEO Kent Thiry and his team “turned around the company by turning around the culture. One of the first messages [Thiry] sent to worried employees was: ‘We are going to flip the ends and means of this business. We are a community first and a company second.’ Translation: If the people of DaVita could figure out how to treat patients right, and how to treat each other right, then the business would right itself. And that’s precisely what happened.”
“At the DaVita offices in El Segundo, California, there’s a wooden footbridge across which thousands of employees have walked to signify their passage into a new way of working. The wildly spirited Nationwide Meeting, in which thousands of employees celebrate awards, mourn the death of patients, and connect with the emotional side of their work, is truly something to behold.”
In talking about why DaVita has succeeded so well, Taylor quotes a source that surprised me: Vince Lombardi. I’m familiar with many Lombardi quotes that stir us on to greater achievement, but Taylor tells a story I hadn’t heard before. Taylor writes that, in the speeches he used to give to corporate audiences, Lombardi said the most important ingredient of success is love.
Taylor quotes Lombardi: ”The love I’m speaking of is loyalty, which is the greatest of loves,” Lombardi told his audiences. “Teamwork, the love that one man has for another and that he respects the dignity of another…Heart power is the strength of your company. Heart power is the strength of the Green Bay Packers. Heart power is the strength of America and hate power is the weakness of the world.”
Taylor continues: “That spirit of tough love explains why DaVita works the way it does. At this company — as at all companies — the make-or-break issue isn’t just what separates you from the competition in the marketplace. It’s what holds you together in the workplace. Organizations built around unique strategies are at their best when rank-and-file colleagues share and express genuine emotions. That’s the new question facing leaders in all kinds of industries: Even as you provide colleagues with a sound playbook for the business to compete, have you given them strong enough reasons to care — about customers, about colleagues, about doing what’s right in an environment in which so much can go wrong?”
For me, this is a fantastic example of the tangible commercial success that can be achieved in a corporate culture where love – tough love – is at the center: for colleagues, customers, suppliers and the community.
Thanks and congratulations to Kent Thiry and all at DaVita for their work, and to Bill Taylor for putting the spotlight on them.
I for one will keep looking for ways to help more stories like this one come alive.
Bill Taylor’s blog post is at http://blogs.hbr.org/taylor/2010/03/how_one_copmanys_turnaround.html
Scott is @scottdowns3 on Twitter
community · culture · leadership · love · performance · success
Tweets that mention My Kind of Turnaround Artist | Loving Work -- Topsy.com · April 8, 2010 at 2:38 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Scott Downs. Scott Downs said: I loved @practicallyrad's HBR piece on the great culture at DaVita. http://bit.ly/aKfAkT My kind of turnaround! http://bit.ly/99n8py [...]
Truden · April 16, 2010 at 4:59 pm
Interesante, yo cotizaciуn en mi sitio mбs tarde.
Have a nice day
Truden