Management Lessons From Mayo Clinic - Book Review

Many services, including practice management, share common dynamics with healthcare services in general:

• Intangible core benefit; it comes from a performance, and customers incur an expense rather than acquire tangible assets (except for outsourced billing),


• High risk service. Under-performance carries severe consequential damages,


• Labor- and skill-intensive performance, contributing to considerable variability between service providers,


• Physical presence of the customer receiving the service, requiring time and place synchronization with service provider,


• Perishable service. When the resources available to deliver the service are unused, the value that they might have created, perishes,


• Customer demand for the service is unevenly distributed and sometimes urgent,


• Diverse customer needs and preferences, requiring the service provider to maintain a portfolio of skills and resources,


• Multiple resources contribute to the customer experience, necessitating coordination of their performances,


• Complex service chain with numerous interdependent components,


• Service reliability – accuracy and dependability – are essential for success.

The key question for any manager is: “if our organization were to disappear overnight, would customers really miss us?” For Mayo Clinic, the answer is yes, and that’s why it attracts and retains talented people and inspires their efforts. Mayo offers the court of last resort for many patients. A career at Mayo clinic provides a daily opportunity to apply their core values.

The Mayo Clinic model is built on three core values: place the interests of the patient above all other interests, pool talent to create teams of specialists working together, and deliver clinical care with time-condensed efficiency. At Mayo Clinic, the core strategies and core values converge – the strategies are so embedded that they become core values. Its most impressive accomplishment is how well they execute these strategies for more than a century.

In organizations that deliver consequential, complex, variable, and personal service, the performance is critically important. The brand comes as the by-product of consistent focus on the service experience of patients. Customers become marketers and the conveyors of information that can help those they know. A labor-intensive service brand can be only as good as the people creating the experience that forms brand meaning. The Mayo Clinic has created its brand through emphasis on operations. They created a world-class service organization we performing well for one customer at a time and relying EXCLUSIVELY on the word of mouth – for nearly a century, they had no marketing department. An astonishing 91 percent of patients praise the clinic to an average of 40 other patients and generates on average five new patients.

Mayo Clinic brand heroes are the industrial engineers who design the service processes and the line employees who perform their services one patient at a time. They design their processes by paying a special attention to customer perception, by orchestrating the clues for quality. They understand that customers act as detectives continuously looking for clues in order to form an opinion about their experiences. For example, does a service experience make customer feel safe, confident, efficient, smart, respected. or worthy, or does it have the opposite effects?

This book is required reading for anybody who wants to create and manage a service organization with a Mayo Clinic reputation.

Management Lessons From Mayo Clinic - Book Review