Where Do You Want to Go?

Our hospital’s a lot like Alice in Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland? You may remember that Alice comes to a crossroads with two paths before her, each stretching onward but in opposite directions. She is confronted by the Cheshire cat, of whom Alice asks, “Which path shall I follow?”

The cat answers: “That depends where you want to go. If you do not know where you want to go, it doesn’t matter which path you take.

I’m afraid that many hospital IT organizations are very much like Alice. They’re so distracted by the operational challenges they face that they don’t really have a good understanding of where they’re going. This is a tremendous problem because it starts to compound itself.

An organization without a steep sense of direction will waffle and go any direction. This will lead to your best employees leaving for greener pastures. No direction and loss of your best people is a recipe for disaster for any organization.

I recently heard that Marc Andreessen’s (created first widely used web browser) personal mantra is “Often wrong but never in doubt.” I’m still chewing on whether I agree with this approach to leadership, but at least there’s no doubt about where a leader like Marc wants to go. There’s power in all team members rowing in the same direction. Even if you have to change course along the way, you’re still getting somewhere. Everyone rowing in different directions just makes you go in circles.

Does your hospital IT organization have a good vision of where they want to go?

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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