Residency Select, LLC provides psychometric assessments for matching medical students to residency programs. After a series of successful pilots, founder Alan Friedman is considering whether to continue developing his offerings in this area, or whether to expand into new areas in the healthcare field, including offering assessments for administrative or executive positions. The case provides a walkthrough of the decision-making process of a young firm making a strategic leap, and how Friedman weighs many factors, including his own personal mission and desires. Friedman is also an alumnus of HBS's "Launching New Ventures" Executive Education program, and the case discusses how he makes use of the lessons from that course.
When interpersonal risks loom large in the moment, human beings often fail to act in their own or in their organization's best interest. When uncertainty clouds peoples' tentative thoughts and views - views that may be at odds with those of others' - they often take the path of 'reduced interpersonal resistance' to avoid conflict and confrontation. This can happen when a lot is at stake (a patient's health, an aircraft's safety, a costly takeover) and when not much is at stake (a small improvement idea is not communicated to the individual who could act on it). Either way, the silence, along with the incomplete thoughts that lie behind it, inhibits team learning in organizations that depend upon such learning for their ongoing viability. As a result, in virtually every organization, failed collaboration occurs countless times throughout the day, usually without much conscious attention. Diversity of three particular types exacerbates these tendencies. The authors explain how 'psychological safety' can enable team diversity to be better and leveraged, allowing a team to reap the benefits associated with diverse sets of skills, experience, knowledge and backgrounds in ways that would not be possible if team members were unwilling to take the risks associated with speaking up.
Explores the numerous initiatives Children's Hospital and Clinics has undertaken to improve patient safety since the late 1990s--from the perspective of 2007. The case thus updates the A case by revisiting the hospital to find out what happened as a result of the ambitious change program launched over eight years earlier. It elaborates the ways in which Children's COO Julie Morath seeks to continue to improve hospital operations by involving nurses, physicians and even patients' families in an ongoing organizational learning process. The 2-case series is particularly distinctive in tracking an organizational change initiative for almost a decade and, as such, uncovers and promotes discussion of the important, granular details of change leadership in a messy, knowledge-based organization.