No Apology, The Case For American Greatness by Mitt Romney

Author:Mitt Romney [Romney, Mitt]
Format: epub
Published: 2010-10-21T23:22:54.187000+00:00

No Apology: The Case For American Greatness

7

Healing Health Care

So there I was at Morristown Memorial Hospital in New Jersey. It was 1983. My job was to find millions of dollars in hospital savings, identify ways to improve patient care, convince doctors, nurses, and administrators to take the steps we suggested, and share what we learned with other hospitals around the country. But there was one small problem: I didn’t know anything about health care—and that fact was more than a little unnerving for me and for the hospital’s CEO.

This wasn’t the first time I’d been hired as a consultant to do a job in a business I didn’t know much about. One of my first senior assignments had been at the Morgan Knitting Mills in Tamaqua, Pennsylvania. Soon after our arrival, the junior consultant and I were ushered into the CEO’s office, where John Morgan was behind his desk, catching up with The Wall Street Journal. As he put the paper down on his desk, he looked at us, let out a sigh, then stood and raised both hands above his head. He was about six feet, four inches tall—sufficiently imposing to attract my full attention. Boys! Boys! he bellowed. They sent me boys when I needed men!

Fortunately, we boys were able to understand and accurately present his business to potential acquirers. But John Morgan always had a way of putting people on their heels. One CEO asked him why he was selling his company. His answer: That’s a stupid question. I’m old, I have no kids, and they don’t dig graves big enough to put it in with me! I knew just how that CEO felt.

So Morristown, New Jersey, wasn’t the first time I had felt a little apprehensive about an assignment. But over the years, I’d gained a measure of confidence about jumping into unfamiliar businesses and helping them find ways to improve. I’d performed well enough at companies that made farm tractors, glass bottles, pharmaceuticals, fiber optics, chlorine, and process-control values. The analytical concepts and approach that I’d learned from my employers at Bain & Company, combined with hard work, help from smart people, and a little luck, got me up to speed and able to contribute in a variety of settings. We’d start by forming a team with the client’s own people, who brought to the table the comprehensive industry expertise we sometimes lacked. We would add data—a lot of data, so much, in fact, that I wasn’t comfortable until I had been fully immersed in it. We applied the proven concepts that Bill Bain liked to call compressed experience. And then we would condense what we learned from the data, from the industry experts, and from our conceptual framework into the two or three issues we believed would make the biggest difference in helping an enterprise become more successful.

Morristown Memorial Hospital, however, was a different kind of challenge, and I wondered whether health care would be too dissimilar from the business world we knew for us to be successful.

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