Latest posts
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Eric Cecava | What It Means to Run Something Well
This is the question Eric Cecava has spent his career trying to answer. He’s still working on it. The Operational Definition Running something well means that the people the organization is supposed to serve are getting what they’re supposed to get, reliably, and that the people doing the work can sustain it. That definition is…
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Eric Cecava | The Gap Between What Physicians Want and What Organizations Need
This tension is structural. Understanding it is the first step to working with it. The Nature of the Gap There is a structural gap in most health systems between what physicians want from the organization and what the organization can provide. The gap isn’t primarily about money, though money is part of it. It’s about…
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Eric Cecava | Why Simple Solutions Are Harder to Build Than Complex Ones
Organizations default to complexity. Simplicity requires more work, not less. The Bias Toward Complexity Adding a step to a process is almost always easier than removing one. Adding a committee is easier than dissolving one. Adding a metric to a dashboard is easier than deciding which existing metric to retire. Organizations accumulate complexity the way…
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Eric Cecava | What I Got Wrong About Accountability Early in My Career
Accountability is one of those concepts that sounds simple until you try to build it into an organization. The Version That Doesn’t Work The version of accountability Eric Cecava started with was simple: set a clear expectation, measure whether it was met, and address the gap if it wasn’t. That sounds right. In practice, it…
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Eric Cecava | The Hardest Conversation in Healthcare Administration
Most of the difficult conversations in healthcare administration aren’t about money. They’re about what the organization is actually for. Why Administrators and Physicians Often Talk Past Each Other The tension between physician expectations and organizational constraints is one of the most consistent features of healthcare administration. It shows up in every health system Eric Cecava…
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Eric Cecava | Why Culture Is an Operational Variable, Not a Soft One
Culture doesn’t live in the values poster. It lives in what happens when things go wrong. What Culture Actually Affects Culture gets assigned to human resources or to leadership communication, which means it gets treated as something separate from operations. That’s a mistake. Culture is one of the most direct determinants of operational performance, and…
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Eric Cecava | The Decision You Can’t Make With Data Alone
Data answers “what happened.” It rarely answers “what should we do about it.” Data Tells You What Happened Healthcare generates more data than most industries. Patient outcomes, operational throughput, financial performance, quality metrics, patient satisfaction scores: all of it gets captured, reported, and reviewed. Most health systems have more data than they have time to…
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Eric Cecava | What I Mean When I Talk About Operating with Purpose
The word gets used so often it stops meaning anything. Here’s what it actually means to Eric Cecava. The Word Gets Misused “Purpose” in leadership contexts usually means one of two things. Either it’s shorthand for a mission statement nobody reads, or it’s a way of saying that work should feel meaningful, which is true…