How the Mayo Clinic got to now.
Chances are, you think your brand is about marketing, not strategy. If you worry about the future and how to get there, one of the most powerful management tools at your disposal is understanding your past: it explains identity, demythologizes nostalgia, and reveals unifying themes that heal rifts, unite employees, and pass on values. How you tell the lessons of your unfolding leadership story profoundly impacts whether your identity, culture, and expertise is successfully understood and appreciated…and how successfully you reach the future.
Organizations perceive themselves to be in a constant race for attention, which means they are always reexamining their brand’s positioning and messaging. They know they have to be well-differentiated and authentic. They worry about building for the future and how to get there. Very few of them will turn to the past to find answers.
“You’ve got to know where you came from to know what to do next.”
Abraham Lincoln, attributed by Doris Kearns Goodwin
“Who are we?” is a surprisingly vexing question. In a crisis, leaders will ask “how we got to now” but few investigate how the organization evolved and adapted in the past. Instead of divining the essential truths of the organization that have become an indelible part of its DNA and leveraging those insights, most managers are oriented to looking ahead. They are dismissive of history, seeing it only as something quaint and charming, an amusing collection of memories without any compelling strategic use. For a leader planning to take an organization into the future, one of the most powerful management tools available may be a sophisticated understanding of its past. It is, quite simply, crucial to branding and strategic thinking.
“Where we’ve been. Where we are. Where we’re going.”
American Experience (PBS) tagline
The past reveals the roots of identity and demythologizes nostalgia so people can more clearly understand why decisions were made at the time they were, and why. It reveals unifying themes and helps pass on the values of founders so the torch can be passed to the next generation of leaders.
“We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.”
Marshall McLuhan
Organizations using the lens of history to examine their culture find that leveraging what they discover has a profound impact on how successfully their work is understood and appreciated. McKinsey & Company, for example, learned as it evolved from being a small and informal partnership to a global consulting network, that it needed to pay attention to the values that had shaped the Firm over time for a new generation of consultants. These insights aren’t luxuries for marketing, they help leaders with two vital jobs: revealing the direction of future strategy, and uniting employees with a common, inspiring and authentic identity story.
Once we get beyond asking “What is our story?” we also have to know how to tell it. How do you convey culture when books and magazines seem as useful and convenient as a rotary-dial phone, and people get lost in the Internet’s wilderness of voices?
That brings me back to the historian whose role is not to live in the past but, rather, to understand, contextualize, and leverage experience so organizations see the future. That backward glance letting people see their unfolding story as a process is not just how to cope with change, but also how to reach the future.
The Mayo Clinic
In the 1970s, Avis proudly told the world it was the number-two car rental agency, and promised to try harder for customers. The assumption was that Hertz, in first place, didn’t (or wouldn’t) work quite so hard to make their clients happy. It was a brilliant marketing slogan: being number one lulls some organizations to sleep; they take their status for granted and don’t try harder.
If there’s truth behind Avis’ logic, why would Mayo Clinic, what some call “The Greatest Medical Centre in the World” – an organization of 64,000 employees whose almost-mythical reputation attracts patients come from all over the world – feel it necessary to have Ken Burns tell its story in a documentary film?
A documentary is a strategic exercise in understanding and communicating the values of an organization, and Burns, by identifying the seeds of the Mayo Clinic’s culture, provides essential knowledge for directing its future. In telling this story, Mayo Clinic is applying a fundamental principle of leadership branding: capturing the unique knowledge that makes it a leader and using this particularly powerful medium to convey its messages.
How the Clinic appears today – its website uses bold, declarative statements to position its attributes: “More experience,” “The right answers,” “Seamless care,” and “Unparalleled expertise” – isn’t the way things started. The Mayo Clinic began humbly, as an agreement between Mother Alfred, a nun with the Sisters of
St Francis in Rochester, Minnesota, and Dr. William Worrell Mayo, a local physician. After a tornado devastated Rochester in 1883, both were convinced better health care was necessary for their community, and Dr. Mayo agreed to serve as director of a hospital to be built by the Sisters.
By the time their new hospital was built, Mayo’s two boys, Will and Charlie, were themselves physicians. He had raised his sons in medicine – “like farm boys on a farm” – and taught them to believe that if you have certain skills, abilities, resources, you hold them in trust to give back to other people. The boys grew up seeing their father reduce his fees for those who couldn’t afford treatment and were equally inspired by the devotion the Franciscan sisters had for the people of Rochester.
Will and Charlie came to see their interest was in the service of humanity, and this film underscores what continues to lie at the heart of the Mayo Clinic’s culture: the urge to continually improve so it can help more people. Just as the Mayo brothers were challenged to improve so they would leave behind something better than what they inherited from their father and Sister Alfred, the Mayo’s current generation of leaders face the same challenge.
Burns reminds the present-day Mayo Clinic that over the span of 130 years it remains focused on its commitment to taking care of each other, the role of money and profit in medicine, and the very nature of healing itself. And helping perpetuate the culture at Mayo Clinic is an air of curiosity and imagination looking for new methods, new science, new technique that extends back all the way to the beginning of its history.
At its heart, however, the Mayo Clinic mission has always been focusing on the patient. The Clinic doesn’t exist to treat illness, they treat patients, and there will never be a decision made about patient care that benefits the physician. And to better treat the patient the Mayo Clinic remains a culture that thrives on collaboration. The hiring of new specialists to help Will and Charlie in the 1890s signaled the start of a collaborative approach to medicine because Will Mayo believed “individualism in medicine can no longer exist.” Believing no one person can know everything they ensured no Mayo doctor would be alone in his or her effort to find an answer to a patient’s problem. What this means in current terms is that behind every physician at Mayo Clinic there are 2,400 other physicians who can help take care of a problem the patient has. Then, as now, physicians were on salary and did not profit from the proceeds of the practice. The concept of establishing this group practice for the good of a single patient may be the biggest contribution of the Mayo brothers to American medicine.
Are you telling your story like the Mayo Clinic?
The Burns documentary ensures insiders and outsiders alike know what makes this place tick – and there are obvious lessons for Canadian institutions which might be wondering if they tell their own stories effectively. Canada’s version of the Mayo Clinic could be Toronto’s University Health Network which is, at the moment, focused itself on how to convey organizational culture. It is running an internal campaign asking employees “ Do you live UHN’s values?”
Crudely taping a photocopied poster above a garbage can next to the elevator, and directing people to read details buried on the corporate intranet doesn’t seem calculated to be either inspiring nor effective. What it does do, however, is demonstrate little commitment beyond lip service on the part of the institution toward extending awareness about the values and identity of the organization.
Now, according to Newsweek's 2020 list of the World's Best Hospitals, Toronto General Hospital (TGH) is the fourth best in the world. We’ll let you guess who ranked first. https://www.blogto.com/city/2020/03/toronto-hospital-ranked-4th-best-entire-world/
Congratulations all around are in order. We should feel pride in the institution, as should all who work within the organization as well. But if UHN and Toronto General want people to take the exercise seriously so that they actually come to internalize and appreciate the UHN identity the way the rest of the world does, it has to broadcast a compelling and attractive story. It should be explaining its own culture and showing employees (and the rest of us) “how we got to now” by following the Ken Burns and the Mayo Clinic model.
Historical thinking isn’t about living in the past but, rather, about challenging thinking – understanding, contextualizing, and leveraging experience so organizations see the future. People have an appetite for deeper accounts of history, science, and the environment that tell us how things got to be as we see them today, and institutions can harness this by thinking more expansively about their brand story. It’s hard for outsiders or insiders alike to connect with organizations that don’t effectively tell their story. Engaging content should be at the core of outreach but more often than not organizational content isn’t adequately put to use to create a broad mission-supporting brand. No one can hear your story if you don’t tell it; don’t bury it on an Intranet. A backward glance lets people see their unfolding story as a process; it’s not just how to cope with change, but how organizations can reach the future.
The Mayo, through its Marketplace, also offers a wide variety of educational resources in the form of books, videos and newsletters, including hundreds of titles for purchase that help fund medical education and research at the Clinic.
Note: This article initially appeared as part of Argyle Brand Counsel+Design’s Leadership BrandingTM series
Retool Lab is a collaborative focused on helping cultural, entertainment and public institutions regroup, reshape, and retool their strategy to recover from the economic impact of the current crisis, and to use these insights as a springboard to thrive far into the future. You can contact us at info@retoollab.com or at www.retoollab.com