Saturday, October 30, 2010

Matt Gymer: Innovating the Future of Healthcare

North Carolina’s Novant Health, one of the country’s leading integrated health networks, recently tapped Dr. Matthew Gymer (DM 2007) to be its Corporate Director of Innovation.  In this role, Dr. Gymer is charged with finding new ways to innovate around established medical practices, with the goal of providing “ the most remarkable patient experience, in every dimension, every time.”

To do this, Dr. Gymer is building cross-disciplinary labs where a variety of diverse health care stakeholders can convene and explore patient care and innovation.  Novant Innovation Labs bring together a variety of disciplines in addition to medical experts and patients, including architects, artists, psychologists, marketing specialists, equipment manufacturers, and software developers.  According to Dr. Gymer, “for most healthcare organizations and particularly those associated with the research universities, innovation in healthcare is mostly around the transfer of intellectual property (IP). At Novant, our innovation model extends best practices beyond IP, to include innovation around patient care and business processes that support our clinical work. Coordination of health care and delivery across the patient care continuum is the basis of our innovation model.” By “patient continuum,” Dr. Gymer is referring to the different levels of medical attention people need over the course of their lives, including acute episodic care, regularly planned visits, wellness, preventative medicine, and self directed care. Novant Innovation Labs rely on design methodology to bring many elements of business process change to the coordination of care delivery. The labs are also engaging in organizational development to enable transformation.

Dr. Gymer believes many of the ideas that he was exposed to during the DM program are directly applicable to his work.  In particular, he uses many of the principles of “appreciative inquiry” (developed at Weatherhead) in his organizational development practices.  He is hoping to host an appreciative inquiry summit in the future to innovate around patient care.

In a broader sense, Dr. Gymer indicates that his DM training have enabled him to tackle such a complex endeavor. “It is more than just an educational experience, it changes the way you view the world, and the way you compose your professional and personal life. You learn the value of ‘reframing’ problems... The quantitative and qualitative skills and tools that we learn are invaluable to problem solving in a rapidly changing global economy.”  These skills are particularly important to Dr. Gymer’s work: “It really works. As a practitioner and leader, bringing scholarly rigor to transformation activities is a competitive advantage as we design a sustainable innovation practice.”

Dr. Gymer entered the DM program as a university financial executive, and since graduating the program has worked as an executive for a large bank and as an independent consultant to companies and government agencies. In addition to his DM degree, Dr. Gymer holds a Bachelor of Arts from The College of Wooster, Masters of Arts from Harvard University, and an MBA from the University of Phoenix.

Monday, October 25, 2010

Getting Situated: Thoughts after the 3rd Residency Session

The comedian, Steven Colbert, has a segment on his comedy show called “Word of the Day.” I would like to talk about a few words that came up this session that really had an impact for me.
The Doctor of Management program places an emphasis during the first semester on getting one’s research question in focus. As my topic has moved from very broad and integrative to something narrow and manageable, all of us have been advised that when we tell the story of our research interest we need to “situate the research within the academic literature.”
I know what all the words mean in this phrase except for “situate” within the context of this phrase. Situate has a physical dimensionality to it. “My chair” is situated amongst all the other chairs in the classroom such that it is close to the front of the room. So, how are ideas situated? I recall during the first two sessions of the program of the need to situate our idea within the research literature but until this third session I really had no concrete idea what “situate” meant in the academic sense.
Our research methods professor, Tony Lingham, asked us to describe our research topic in a few sentences. He then replayed our topic back to us but in a way that showed explicitly how the specific topic was embedded within a larger, simpler set of concepts and how, in kind of a story-telling fashion, one moves from framing a broad category and eventually drilling down to the specific issue of one’s interest. This may seem obvious to me now but it was anything but obvious until Tony turned our language into academic language.
Another word or phrase is “tipping point.” In the mainstream literature, we have read Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point. Our theory professor, Richard Boyatzis, uses tipping point as an element within his Intentional Change Theory, a theory about sustaining change at any level of human organization. One of the key issues is how one moves from a negative to a positive emotional orientation. This is where tipping point is situated. I finally understood the mechanics of tipping points in Richard’s context: to move from a highly charged emotional state (or any heavily committed state whether technology or intellectual or emotional) the leverage to make that move has to be something neutral, not highly charged in either direction and something that people can use to swing in the opposite direction.
Lastly, another word is “democracy.” Our culture and world politics professor, Eileen Doherty, asked the class to reflect on the readings for the 3rd session. Our team came up with a very interesting observation: people from different countries have different perspectives of what democracy means. This observation served as an exemplar for other concepts, that everything political or cultural is relative depending on the context of situation, that is, how the issue like democracy is situated within the broader set of complex historical and present conditions.
And like Steven Colbert says, “situated,” and that’s the “word of the day.”
Adrian (Zeke) Wolfberg
DM Class of 2013
23 Oct 2010

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Why do DM Students Pursue a Doctorate? [Part 1 of DM Alumni Study]

People who apply to the DM program are already accomplished individuals. They are typically highly-educated executives who have achieved a great deal in life. The typical DM candidate is already employed, has many career options, and is financially stable. So we asked them – why did you decide to pursue a doctorate at this point in your life?

Responses varied widely.  Some were in it to pursue the credential, others for a challenge. Some pursued a doctorate in order to transition to academia, others to research something that would inform their practice. Alumni typically had many reasons for pursuing the program.

The biggest reason that many DM alumni had for pursuing a doctorate at this stage of their lives involved the “credential” itself. But the credential meant different things for different people.  Of course, some wanted to teach at a university, and for others it was a lifelong dream to get the credential – in some cases because a parent had a doctorate, or they left a PhD program unfinished at some previous point in life. But others dealt with doctors or scientists every day, and these folks felt that a doctorate credential would give them more credibility. Consultants saw the credential as a differentiator. In one noteworthy example, a successful alumni was attempting to encourage young African Americans to pursue continuing education, and realized that he should be a better role model and pursue an advanced degree himself:

“Here I am promoting education for young people and I need to promote my own education myself… as I was giving speeches… I recognized that I want to go beyond the masters… ”(HA)

Although some emphasized the credential, others emphasized the substance of the program in a variety of ways - including using the program as a means for obtaining in-depth knowledge or expertise in a particular topic. A good number of DMers had a very specific thing that they wanted to study and saw the program as a way to properly study or learn about the domain.  To become a “thought leader” (GM) in a particular subject.  In the words of one alumnus:

“I had a question that was making me itch and had to find a way to scratch it. I wanted to give structure and language to the process of generating answers to my questions” (TC)

Not all alumni were so specific in the reasons to pursue a doctorate, but instead as an opportunity for personal enrichment. These alumni saw doctoral studies as an open-ended means of transition or as a way to broaden their intellectual horizons. Some were dissatisfied with the intellectual challenge or heft of previous studies, others saw it as an opportunity to continue studies they found enjoyable; to continue on a course of “lifelong learning.” Perhaps one alum captured this view best when she said

“I wanted to shake up my own marbles.”

Nicholas Berente is a former faculty member of the doctorate of management program (now an Assistant Professor with the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia).  Dr. Berente interviewed alumni from the first decade of the DM program.  This blog is the first of five parts based on those interviews. Subsequent blogs will address: (part 2) why they chose the Weatherhead DM program, (part 3) their reflections about the program, (part 4) the impact of the program on their thinking, and (part 5) the impact of the program on their careers.