Matter. Julie Williamson
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that are most meaningful to them?
If your customer asked you a question like, “Why is it so hard to . . .” and the honest response is either “I don’t really know much about that” or a more superfluous set of generic ideas and observations that don’t really create progress toward a scalable solution, how likely are they to continue the conversation? Not very. But what if your response is “You know, we’ve been studying that exact question for a while now, and here’s what we think about it,” or “Funny you should ask, we are currently co-creating a solution to that very problem with some of our customers. Would you like us to come and talk to you and your team about what we are discovering?” These answers would very likely lead them to bring you in to talk to their boss. Or even their boss’s boss. You would comfortably move right up the chain to the organization’s decision makers, because you had a definitive point of view, grounded in reality, that you were willing to share.
We believe there are things that matter to buyers, and there are things that matter more. An elevated perspective that comes from the edge of disruption matters more. Your ability to have insight at that edge, and to share it in a compelling and applicable way, will matter in the most influential rooms of your most important clients. Clients can leverage that perspective to help differentiate their organization and solve their most complex problems. This is what is truly meant by the phrase thought leader.
Your ability to offer an elevated perspective from the edge of disruption is critical to gaining access to the right people, and to influencing them in a way that opens an opportunity for you to create more value than your competition does. GHX uses its elevated perspective to persuade partners in the industry to participate in joint problem-solving for challenges that matter most to their investors and customers, and that have the biggest impact on the industry’s Triple Aim goals. Your goal throughout this section should be to define for yourself the right edge of disruption and build an elevated perspective around it. It is a critical first step on your journey to becoming the obvious choice. This is especially true when clients can better identify opportunities for themselves to be a part of something much larger, as is often the case with the work GHX does. We need to work together now to define what it is for you.
An elevated perspective that comes from the edge of disruption matters more. Your ability to have insight at that edge, and to share it in a compelling and applicable way, will matter in the most influential rooms of your most important clients.
After we are done defining your edge of disruption—the place where you can add the most value to solving the most important problems your clients face—we will shift our attention to how you can go about learning as much as you can about it, and then critically sharing the point of view you develop there from a strong platform. By the end of this book, you should have an elevated perspective in an area that matters to your most important clients, and you’ll have the reputation and access you need to develop the next capability, elevated relationships, which in turn will allow you to have an elevated impact. When you have all three, you will consistently matter more than your competitors and will be creating the capability and culture to stay that way. And that is what will result in you being the obvious choice, year after year, for your industry, your employees, and your community. Let’s get started.
DEFINE: Discover Your Edge of Disruption
AS WE DISCUSSED IN THE INTRODUCTION to this section, if the most value is created where complexity reigns, healthcare certainly has a lot of value creation opportunities. We could start with looking at how the insurance industry works (both patient coverage and practitioner malpractice), move over to the ways physicians and nurses are educated, skip along to hospital care and the outcomes hospitals deliver, maybe spend some time in rural community access, tally the overall cost of delivering care (plus there’s the fact that the United States typically spends more on healthcare as a percentage of GDP than almost any other nation), and perhaps throw in changing patient expectations (admit it, you’ve diagnosed yourself via Google search—we all have), and we wouldn’t even scratch the surface of the massive changes that are happening. There are lots of places to go to find interesting and meaningful edges of disruption in healthcare.
No one knows this better than GHX, which you met in the section opener. GHX was founded during the heady days of the internet boom. Healthcare buyers were being bombarded with what Bruce Johnson, current GHX CEO and member of the founding executive team, calls “PowerPoint Promises” that sounded something like this: “Sexy startup from the Silicon Valley promises data nirvana. Every transaction and piece of inventory in your system will be instantly trackable and traceable via electronic data interchange, and there will be no more waste in the system.” Bruce and the founding team at GHX knew better. That vision described in the PowerPoint Promise was beyond the edge of disruption in 2000 and was deep in what we call “unproductive disruption,” the space where the technology, processes, and infrastructure and other environmental factors are not yet in place to make the vision a reality. At the other extreme, more conservative approaches by single manufacturers attempting to use their proprietary websites as a competitive advantage were too close to the status quo, offering no meaningful progress for the industry. Doing nothing risked leaving a market opening for a third party to enter and dictate how the industry would interact with its customers—also not a good option.
That was the edge of disruption upon which GHX was founded—somewhere between the hyperbole of the internet startup mania and the industry status quo. To avoid duplicating e-commerce investments and third-party disintermediation, which would worsen already spiraling healthcare-system costs, five competitive manufacturers created a digital data exchange that would benefit the industry.
GHX has successfully become the obvious choice for much of its industry. It grew from a first-year target of $20 million in transactions annually flowing through its exchange to more than $60 billion annually today, with its systems handling more than 168 million transactions per year. Ironically, some people who in 2000 were, at best, avoiding being involved with GHX now like to fondly remember their early support for it, revising history a bit in the process! As an example of the shift that has occurred since the company’s launch, Bruce noted that one of the early companies on the exchange back in 2001 took the minimum possible steps to be on it, sharing only very hesitantly and incrementally out of a fear of losing control of its data and contracts. Today it is one of the most active and vibrant members of the exchange, using its supply chain offering as a differentiator. It was tough at times, but GHX brought customers along to the edge of disruption with them. In doing so, GHX provided those customers with their own path to becoming the obvious choice for their customers.
With more than 417,000 unique trading partner pairs connected to the exchange, 22,000 healthcare facilities, and 85 percent of medical/surgical products represented by integrated GHX suppliers, the company is thriving. With metrics like that, GHX clearly has a track record in delivering from the healthcare industry’s edge of disruption, providing more value, and as a result becoming the obvious choice for the suppliers and providers they serve. Even more, it delivers to both sides of the market—suppliers and providers. As Bruce Johnson told us in our interview with him, the ability of GHX to provide solutions that work across the supply chain gives the company an elevated perspective about what will advance the industry as a whole, rather than simply helping one side to win over the other.
“Defining your edge of disruption should be driven by the question, What are the problems we are uniquely positioned to solve with a scalable solution?”
As GHX has learned what matters most to its customers and worked to deliver it, its elevated impact has pushed the industry into new potential edges of disruption, in the process opening up new opportunity for GHX to create more value. As we mentioned in the introduction, GHX has now tackled several edges of disruption. As Bruce explained to us, “Defining your edge of disruption should be driven by the question, What are the problems we are uniquely positioned to solve with a scalable solution?”