BusinessMirror
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Monday, May 13, 2019 E1
BOARDS ARE OVERLOOKING QUALIFIED WOMEN. HERE’S HOW TO FIX THAT.
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By Ram Charan & Dennis Carey
ing and development, but it also helps identify HR leaders who have the potential and/or capacity to serve on boards. Along with that, we recommend companies do the following:
ODAY’S gap between the demand and supply of female directors exists for two basic reasons: Boards are overlooking a pool of female talent that is in plain sight, and chief executives are missing the single best way to prepare women to serve on boards. Consider the reality that most women executives have spent their careers moving up in a single functional silo: human resources. But things have changed, and perceptions should, too. Chief human resources officers of big companies are now deeply involved in planning the company’s future. They understand the high-level business issues, and because they attend some if not all board meetings, they know how to work with a board. At the same time, their expertise in
compensation, culture, recruiting and other high-level people issues is itself increasingly valuable as boards and managements prioritize talent. Boards should mine HR for this new breed of leader, many of whom are female. And while there are fewer female chief financial officers, this too is a source to explore. But that still won’t meet the growing need. To address the gap, CEOs can help develop this key talent pool
Search deeper and wider
THE pool of women who have relevant business experience, including profit and loss responsibility, is surprisingly large once you go three or four levels below the CEO. The names are hidden, and the résumés may be relatively short, but some of these people will have the maturity to be a director.
Take risks
while improving the quality and speed of strategic decisions. One of the best practices we’ve seen is the creation of what we call a group of three: a tight-knit three-way partnership with the CEO, CHRO and
CFO. Importantly, a G3 also gives the CHRO a deeper understanding of the company’s financial issues and expands the CHRO’s (and CFO’s) view of the enterprise. The same idea applies to lower
organizational levels. HR leaders can cultivate broader skills by working closely with business leaders. Structuring their work that way has benefits, such as improving placement, recruiting and learn-
BOARDS often back away from a first-time director. But to get the right talent, they should overcome that hesitation and take a chance on a younger and/or less experienced person who meets their criteria. We know there are qualified women out there. Let’s go find them. Ram Charan has been an adviser to the CEOs of some of the world’s biggest corporations and their boards. Dennis Carey is the vice chairman of Korn Ferry.
Can AI nudge us to make better choices? The future of drug trials is better data and continuous monitoring
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By Bob Suh
N the online world, once expected to be a place of ready information and easy collaboration, lies and hate can spread faster than truth and kindness. Artificial intelligence sits at the crossroads of this behavioral issue, with the potential to make matters worse or to elicit better outcomes from us. The key to better outcomes is to boost AI’s emotional quotient—its EQ—by training algorithms to mimic the way people behave in constructive relationships. When people with high EQ interact with us, they learn our patterns, empathize with our motivations and carefully weigh their responses. They decide to ignore, challenge or encourage us depending on how they anticipate we will react. AI can be trained to do the same thing. While it’s still quite early, the fields of behavioral science and machine learning already provide some promising techniques, including:
Noting pattern breaks and nudging
PEOPLE who know you can easily tell when you are breaking a pattern, and react accordingly.
Encouraging self-awareness with benchmarks
BLUNTLY telling individuals they are performing poorly often backfires, provoking defensiveness rather than greater effort. A more diplomatic method simply allows people to see how they compare with others.
Using game theory to accept or challenge conclusions
IN most massive screening systems, the rate of false positives is often extremely high. Artificial intelligence, playing the role of a chess opponent, can decide to counter by accepting the analyst’s decision or challenging it.
Choosing the right time for insight and action
DECISIONS that need more thought could be presented at a time when the decision-maker has more time. An algorithm based on the distinction between what one feels and what one is expected to say might conceivably be developed to address the tendency of people to say and do things under the influence of crowds that they would otherwise hesitate to do. Bob Suh is the founder and CEO of OnCorps.
© 2019 Harvard Business School Publishing Corp. (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)
By Antoniu L. Fantana, Gina M. Cella, Charles T. Benson & Joseph C. Kvedar
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EW and proven digital technologies can make drug development smarter, better and faster. Consumers are also turning to these devices to help them lose weight, increase their daily activity and sleep better. It’s time to apply them to drug development in order to more efficiently, frequently and accurately present actionable information to researchers and health-care providers.
What becomes possible
DIGITAL technologies will allow researchers to
measure the health data of clinical trial participants on a regular basis during the normal course of daily living without significantly disrupting them. They will make it possible to more accurately assess an individual’s health, as well as how the study drug is performing. To put it in technical terms, the measurements need to be commensurate with the change in the variable being measured. Known as Nyquist frequency, this identifies how often measurements should be conducted and accounts for the natural variabilities in an individual’s health or their underlying disease, including changes in blood glucose, pain levels, blood pressure or heart rate.
Digital technologies can allow researchers to detect adverse events to a drug therapy earlier. These events include medication errors, drug reactions, allergic reactions and overdoses. The devices also can enable researchers to glean better insights into these events when they do occur.
Where do we go from here?
NEW technologies will make possible radically new designs for clinical trials—with more targeted interventions, shorter duration and fewer participants—thus lowering costs, increasing efficiencies and potentially bringing important new therapies to market faster.
By linking information about an individual’s genotype (genetic information) and phenotype (human traits and behaviors), digital technologies can lead to individualized diagnoses and therapies on a scale previously unimaginable. Antoniu L. Fantana leads global patient safety analytics at Eli Lilly & Co. Gina M. Cella is a principal of Cella Communications. Charles T. Benson is a senior director at Eli Lilly & Co. Joseph C. Kvedar is vice president of Partners HealthCare’s Connected Health unit.
What putting patients first really looks like
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By Ghazala Q. Sharieff
BOUT a decade ago, when I was running the emergency department at Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego, a woman showed up with her seven-year-old grandson, who had been suffering from unexplained fevers and pain that moved from one leg to the other. The staff obtained an x-ray which proved to be normal and the family was advised to follow up with the child’s pediatrician. I almost sent the boy on his way. But then I paused; the family had sought out a different ED four times, uncomfortable with the non-diagnosis each time. They knew something was wrong. I asked the grandmother what her great-
est concern was. She feared her grandson had cancer. Roving leg pain, normal x-rays, unexplained fever—she could be right. I suggested that we obtain a blood test. Sure enough, the boy had leukemia. The success of that training led to a program at Scripps, where I am now the chief experience officer, called One Thing Different. The initiative, now a year old, asks front-line staff to do something different each day in their routines with patients and loved ones. It might be to ask what their patient’s greatest concern is. Or it might be to help a lost visitor find their way. The program is already having impact, as I’ll describe. There are two critical reasons for providers to focus on this. One is that providing
empathetic care to people when they are at their most vulnerable is, simply, the right thing to do. The other, as everyone in health care knows all too well, is that failing to meet patients’ expectations is increasingly costly. Here’s how our program works. Through a web site, videos and patient-experience training sessions we encourage the 15,000 employees, 3,000 physicians and 2,000 volunteers across the system to choose their own “one thing” to help patients and their families, and then share these with the organization on a dedicated web site. The site categorizes staff by roles, so other employees in the same field can get ideas. To date we have more than 4,000 entries, a measure of the enthusiasm with which staff
has embraced the concept. It’s probably impossible to tease out the impact of the one-thing initiative alone on patient experience, as we have multiple patient experience efforts under way. But since the program launched we have seen a six-percentile improvement in patient experience scores systemwide, and in one unit saw a 20-percentile improvement in assessments of clerks’ helpfulness. And it’s well known that the more engaged healthcare employees are, the more satisfied their patients. Ghazala Q. Sharieff is corporate vice president and chief experience officer at Scripps Health in San Diego.