SpreadLove In Organizations - Healthcare Leadership

We hear a lot about transferable managerial skills from sports to corporate and entrepreneurial world, Ben Shields summarized those to two key components: common goal for teams and measurable performance. Along those comes a crucial leadership skill of creating and maintaining a winning culture, which is a collective set of actions and behaviors that defines it, and best teams are obsessive about ensuring the culture is sustainable daily. This starts by building a learning culture based on mutual understanding. On a more individual level, success for Ben is driven by passion, hard work and luck. What about data and decision making? "Data can help you be less wrong in your decisions." "Great leaders make those around them better." MEET OUR GUEST Ben Shields Senior Lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management. Ben Shields is a Senior Lecturer in Managerial Communication at the MIT. He studies the multibillion-dollar sports industry to identify broadly transferable management lessons in areas such as leadership communication, data-driven decision making, and innovation.  Ben authored three books, Social Media Management: Persuasion in Networked Culture (Oxford University Press, 2016), The Sports Strategist: Developing Leaders for a High Performance Industry (Oxford University Press, 2015), and The Elusive Fan: Reinventing Sports in a Crowded Marketplace (McGraw-Hill, 2006), teaches and directs a number of courses and programs.   Prior to MIT, Ben served as the Director of Social Media and Marketing at ESPN. He oversaw social media strategy for the ESPN brand and collaborated across the enterprise to develop and implement company-wide social strategy. He also worked on marketing strategy for several ESPN brands and sub-brands, including the SportsCenter “DaDaDa” campaign and the Emmy Award-winning “It’s Not Crazy, It’s Sports” brand campaign.  Ben holds a BS and MA in communication studies and a PhD in media, technology, and society, all from Northwestern University. 

What if we start as leaders by sharing our own challenges, our vulnerabilities, our stories with our people? This might be the first step to bringing back humanity into leadership and building empathy with our teams. From engineering and technical expertise to leadership, executive coaching and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion role model, Angelique Adams shared her story, experiences, and learning with us. Focus on people, on their entire well-being and results at the same time, and most importantly care for the whole person they are. Finally, don't forget to celebrate more your team, even the small wins! "Help people have a seat at the table." MEET OUR GUEST Dr Angelique Adams, Author, speaker, and executive coach. Angelique Adams is an author, speaker, and executive coach focusing on leadership development for scientists and engineers. Angelique is an engineer with 25 years of experience in operations, strategy, and innovation. She was Director of R&D at aluminum giant Alcoa, and Chief Innovation Officer at multibillion dollar steelmaker, Aperam. After leading hundreds of scientists and engineers around the world, she discovered her true passion is developing people, not products.  Following the successful publication of her first book for women in STEM in 2021, she launched Angelique Adams Media Solutions, a distribution platform for her books, online courses, and coaching programs. Her second book, for women executives in college athletics will be out this summer. Angelique lives in Knoxville with her husband and 2 children. She serves on the board of several local nonprofits and volunteers her time to mentor entrepreneurs. She has a Ph.D. from Penn State and an MBA from MIT.

Sustainability is all about: how are we on this planet and how are we with each other? We can't continue living on this planet looking at the world as a "pyramid", a lens of supremacy and extraction of natural resources and labor. Every year of delay means losses and communities we can not recover... Thinking of the world as an interconnected web is the most important action we can take as leaders in each of the decisions we make. Think of it in a staff meeting ensuring all voices are being heard, while building your next manufacturing site ensuring it includes all lives and flows, think of circular economies.... The most impactful projects are the small ones who started to fix a problem that resolved another and entered in a positive loop of change improving the broader environment and community. The key for leaders is to keep a role of learners as we tackle these issues and make disruption of inequities part of our priorities. "Lead by thinking of the world as an interconnected web." MEET OUR GUEST Elizabeth Sawin Founder and Director of the Multisolving Institute. Elizabeth Sawin is the Founder and Director of the Multisolving Institute. Beth is an expert on solutions that address climate change while also improving health, well-being, equity, and economic vitality. She developed the idea of ‘multisolving’ to help people see and create the conditions for such win-win-win solutions.  Beth writes and speaks about multisolving, climate change, and leadership in complex systems for both national and international audiences. Her work has been published widely, including in Non-Profit Quarterly, The Stanford Social Innovation Review, U. S. News, The Daily Climate, and System Dynamics Review. She has trained and mentored global sustainability leaders in the Donella Meadows Fellows Program and provided systems thinking training to both Ashoka and Dalai Lama Fellows. Since 2014, Beth has participated in the Council on the Uncertain Human Future, a continuing dialogue on issues of climate change and sustainability among a select group of humanities scholars, writers, artists, and climate scientists.  Beth is also a member of the advisory board to the Kresge Foundation’s Climate Change Health and Equity Program. A biologist with a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Beth co-founded Climate Interactive in 2010 and served as Climate Interactive’s Co-Director from 2010 until 2021. While at Climate Interactive, she led the scientific team that offered the first assessment of the sufficiency of country pledges to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2008. Beth also led Climate Interactive’s efforts to integrate measures of equity, health and well-being into decision support tools and computer simulations.  Beth trained in system dynamics and sustainability with Donella Meadows and worked at Sustainability Institute, the research institute founded by Meadows, for 13 years. She has two adult daughters and lives in rural Vermont where she and her husband grow as much of their own food as they can manage.

Driven by curiosity, trying, failing, trying again while exploring the world, is what shaped Yacine Hadjiat's incredible leadership journey. This curiosity led him to reinvent himself constantly, putting himself in vulnerable positions that taught him lessons we all should learn from: listen, ask, observe, understand, be open, stay humble and most importantly be benevolent as a leader. Start with the "who", the people, the team to deliver exceptional innovations. Hear Yacine's thoughts on digital health and innovation crystallized beautifully with his words "what excites me is what I don't know yet, new vectors, new possibilities... digital will bring to health what internet brought to tech". "Define your why, bring the who, and work on the what." MEET OUR GUEST Dr Yacine Hadjiat Global Head of Biogen Digital Health Solutions Dr Yacine Hadjiat holds medical degree with a specialization in Pain Management and supportive care (from both Paris Medical University and McGill University), as well as a MBA in Health Management. He has also completed several training courses and specializations in addiction, pediatric pain management, clinical research, health economics and Artificial Intelligence for Healthcare. Throughout his career, he has covered several senior leadership positions in the pharmaceutical industry as well as clinical practice and academic medical research in Europe, US and Asia. He started his journey in the pharmaceutical industry in France with Sanofi-Aventis in the Strategy and Public Affairs department before joining Grünenthal in Medical Affairs. He joined Mundipharma in 2011 in Paris where he served as Head of Medical Affairs for France, and then as Head of Medical Affairs for Europe based in Cambridge, UK, before moving to Singapore as Chief Medical Officer for Asia Pacific, Middle East and Latin America and Global Head of Medical for Consumer Healthcare. Currently, Yacine is the Global Head of Biogen Digital Health Solutions & Chief medical Officer. Based in paris, France. Along with his career in the industry, Yacine had several years of clinical practice in pain and cancer care management including NGO work with Pain Without Borders especially in Africa and Asia and also fundamental and clinical research experience in the US at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Washington DC. He is also currently part of the French Health Institute (INSERM) in Public health research program. Yacine also holds non-executive positions as advisor for governmental agencies in Singapore like the National Health Innovation Center (NHIC) and Entreprise Singapore, as well as MedTEch/healthTech incubators. He’s an author of several scientific publications from fundamental research science to clinical research projects, digital heath and health economics. Yacine was recognised in 2018 as Top 50 Healthcare leaders at the SmartHealth conference in Dubai as a recognition for his work on equity in health and education. In 2019, he has also been awarded by the Association of Pharmaceutical Medicine Singapore (APMS) with the “Excellence in Medical Affairs Award” APMS is a chapter the International Federation of Associations of Pharmaceutical Physicians and Pharmaceutical Medicine (IFAPP).

We don’t get to sit every day with someone like Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi. His journey was inspired by incredible leaders he was fortunate to meet along the way. Noble prize laureates, or powerful figures in their community, who triggered questions around how to live a meaningful life. For Venerable Tenzin, in the history of humanity, the challenge of leadership is today more crucial than ever. Despite so many leadership programs thought in the best schools around the world, we suffer from a lack of ethical leadership... When we look around us, we are living in a society increasingly marked by a sense of polarization. More fear and hate than love and compassion. The world has quite often chosen to operate from a place of despair rather than from a place of hopefulness. “Hope is a game-changer”.  No matter how small we think we are, individuals must recognize that they do have a voice, and need to exercise it; quoting Dalai Lama “if you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito.” In a world where nothing is constant, maintain a healthy sense of curiosity and hopefulness, talk more with people who don't believe in what you do …This is a powerful tool to value perspective in the complex society we live in. This episode couldn’t have been timelier and resonate with the tense environment we are living in today. "Aspiration + Reality = Hope." MEET OUR GUEST Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi president and CEO of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Venerable Tenzin is an innovative thinker, a philosopher, an educator, and a polymath monk. He is Founding Director of The Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a center dedicated to inquiry, dialogue, and education on the ethical and human dimensions of life. The Center at MIT has 6 Nobel Peace Laureates as its founding members and its programs run in 8 countries and expanding. Venerable Tenzin’s unusual background encompasses entering a Buddhist monastery at the age of 10 to receiving graduate education at Harvard with degrees ranging from Philosophy to Physics to International Relations. Venerable Tenzin serves on the Board of several academic, humanitarian, and religious organizations.  He is a recipient of several recognitions and awards, including a 2013 Distinguished Alumni Award from Harvard for his visionary contributions to humanity. 

Have you heard the latest word defining great Leadership? Humbitous. For Amer Kaissi, award winning Professor, exceptional leadership is all about humility and ambition combined. While ambition might sound familiar, humility comes in 3 layers. First, relationship with ourselves: it’s about self-awareness, being aware of our strengths and areas of improvements, and looking at our capabilities as accurately as can. Second, relationship with others: it’s about generosity and giving time and effort to grow others. Finding appreciation to the intelligence of the group and having a growth mindset to go into every conversation with curiosity and assumption to learn something new. Lastly, relationship with the world: Taking the time to ponder in the grand scheme of things and acknowledge how small and insignificant we are. This layer comes as an "ego dissolver". When thinking of ambition in leadership, it is not narcissism. Unfortunately, narcissists tend to be chosen more for leadership position, however in the long run, they are ineffective leaders because they are self-centered, and not good team players: short term turn around but no long-lasting impact. I will leave us as healthcare leaders with this last statement from Amer ”In Healthcare, humility is amplified by 100 because we are in the business of compassion and empathy.” "Humility is looking at your capabilities as accurately as can." MEET OUR GUEST Amer Kaissi an award-winning professor of health-care administration at Trinity University, a Top-15 program. Dr. Amer Kaissi is a professional speaker and a certified executive coach. His most recent book is “Humbitious: the power of low-ego, high-drive leadership.” He is an award-winning professor of health-care administration at Trinity University, a Top-15 program. His previous book, Intangibles: The Unexpected Traits of High-Performing Healthcare Leaders, won the 2019 ACHE Book of the Year Award. He is a national speaker and a faculty member with ACHE, the University of Colorado Denver, and Boston College. Amer is the director of the Executive Program at Trinity University, where he teaches courses in leadership, professional development, and public speaking. Amer works with MEDI — a division of Navvis — and with the Leadership Development Group as an executive coach, and consults with hospitals and other organizations in their strategic planning efforts. Amer is also a certified executive and physician coach. He lives in San Antonio, Texas, with his wife and their two teenagers.

Looking back into your past, do you regret not taking the time to pause and cherish precious moments with your loved ones? Or not being there when they needed you the most? It is unlikely to listen to Christi Shaw and not pause and reflect on your personal story. What strikes us is the strong sense of care, love, family and the desire to make an impact she conveys when sharing genuinely her story with us with all its highs and lows. Christi shares her lifelong learning and leadership philosophy “Never let success go to your head; never let failure go to your heart”. Because when you are at your best, you help people be at their best. For her, leadership is all about enabling others to move forward by leveraging what everybody brings to the table. It is about leading without labels, without hierarchy, and barriers to collaboration. Listening to Christi, beyond respect, you can't but admire her strength from miles away and the genuine soul behind the incredible leader she is… As she says, life is too short, and "we spend too many hours at work just to be respected and not loved”. "My biggest learning:  being compassionate and spreading love and caring at work is a good thing." MEET OUR GUEST Christi Shaw Chief Executive Officer of Kite. Christi Shaw serves as Chief Executive Officer of Kite, a Gilead Company. Kite is the only company with global scale dedicated exclusively to the research, commercialization and manufacturing of cell therapy to treat cancer. Christi is driven by values, integrity and a deep connection to people living with cancer and their loved ones after losing both her mother and sister to cancer. Under Christi’s leadership, Kite has received four FDA approvals for its CAR T-cell therapies in just four years for certain types of blood cancer and is working to bring CAR T to more patients. Kite recently released 5-year patient survival data, a significant milestone showing durable long-term survival and suggestive of a potential cure for these patients. Christi currently serves on the board of directors of Avantor and the Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association (HBA) and is on the executive committee and the board of directors of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO). Christi holds a bachelor's degree in business administration from Iowa State University and an MBA from the University of Wisconsin. She resides with her husband and son in Santa Monica, California.

A transformational episode with a social transformer and thinker, Otto Scharmer. Hear in this episode from the creator of Theory U and the Presencing institute. The pandemic was a mirror of what is broken in our society. We all have a responsibility as leaders and change-makers to fix that, to improve the world, the planetary wellbeing. We can achieve that by sensing, feeling the emerging future possibilities, and embodying them now. Learning from the past is not good enough, we should learn from the emerging future... All we need to do is ask ourselves: What is mine to do? Find that one piece we are polishing as a leader and put it into the path of the future. "Lead by activating the intelligence of the heart." MEET OUR GUEST Otto Scharmer, a social transformer, an MIT professor and incredible leader. Otto is a Senior Lecturer at MIT and co-founder of the Presencing Institute. He chairs the MIT IDEAS program for cross-sector innovation and introduced the concept of “presencing”—learning from the emerging future—in his bestselling books Theory U and Presence. He is co-author of Leading from the Emerging Future, which outlines eight acupuncture points for transforming capitalism. His most recent book, The Essentials of Theory U summarizes the core principles and applications of awareness-based systems change. In 2015 Otto co-founded the MITx u.lab and in 2020 the GAIA journey, which have activated a vibrant worldwide ecosystem of transformational change involving more than 200,000 users from 185 countries. Otto is a member of the UN Learning Advisory Council for the 2030 Agenda, the World Future Council, and the Club of Rome’s High-Level 21st Century Transformational Economics Commission. Otto has won several prizes and received in 2021 the Elevating Humanity Award from the Organizational Development Network.

A "global citizen" as he defines himself, a leader and multicultural manager, we had the pleasure to host Theodore Leondaridis in this inspiring episode! He shared about how he built a culture of feedback, a culture of trust, where people feel safe to say what they think and thrive towards the shared purpose of the company. Theodore defines leadership as being useful for people; what a great example of loving leadership! "Get on the boat and change!" MEET OUR GUEST Theodore Leondaridis General Manager at Pierre Fabre Spain. Theodore Leondaridis is General Manager at Pierre Fabre in Spain. He always wanted to be a veterinarian but then decided otherwise! Moving to Basic Science then ESCP business school in 2013, he then joined Pierre Fabre as a trainee in Corporate Business Development. Theodore then had different experiences as Financial Analyst, Global Oncology Launch Manager, Oncology Business Unit Director in Portugal, along with different leadership responsibilities. Theodore is now heading Pierre Fabre Medical Care in Spain as the General Manager where he is leading a team of more than 250 people. Theodore is a global healthcare leader, a husband, and a father of 2 amazing young kids.

From the island of Crete in Greece to the US, Georgia Perakis fulfilled her father's dream. We wouldn't have imagined that analytics could actually change the world and make a real difference. Georgia took it even further and talks about an analogy with data to understand the power of diversity and inclusion. Her pragmatic vision of using data is invaluable and makes us see things through a different lens. Start by filtering out the noise around big data and asking the big question: what is the problem I am trying to solve? Before big data, let's start talking about "little data" and missing data to put things in order and see the big picture. Georgia definitely won her students' hearts but also the analogy of the year by comparing MIT to a great candy store to choose from! Thank you for being who you are and for your exceptional leadership! "The Love Large Numbers: Look at the long term goal, focus on the end outcome rather than looking at the present failure, persist... it will work out eventually." MEET OUR GUEST Georgia Perakis, Professor of Management, Operations Research, Statistics, and Operations Management. Prof Georgia Perakis teaches at MIT Sloan courses and performs research in analytics, optimization, machine learning with applications in pricing, revenue management, supply chains, transportation, energy, and healthcare among others. In her research, Georgia investigates the theory and practice of analytics and its role in operations problems. She has received numerous awards and has several prestigious publications. Currently, Georgia serves as the co-director of the Operations Research Center, on the council for the College of Computing, and faculty director of the Executive MBA (EMBA) program at MIT Sloan. She is also the editor-in-chief of the M&SOM journal. Prior to that role, she had also served as America’s editor in chief of the Journal of Pricing and Revenue Management, as a department editor for the journal Service Science in the area of Analytics and as an associate editor for the flagship journals: Management Science, Operations Research, M&SOM, INFORMS Journal on Optimization, and as a senior editor for POM. She has served as the chair of the RMP Section of INFORMS and as the VP of Meetings of the MSOM Society of INFORMS.   Georgia holds a BS in mathematics from the University of Athens as well as an MS in applied mathematics and a PhD in applied mathematics from Brown University.