The best business strategy, plans, tactics and goals don’t matter if your people aren’t allowed to create or feel something beautiful or purposeful at work, to have a mission, and maybe make a little art that gives meaning to their job. 

Here is the automaker Henry Ford on the subject: “Business must be run at a profit, else it will die. But when anyone tries to run a business solely for profit, then also the business must die, for it no longer has a reason for existence.”

Hippocrates, often called the father of medicine brought high ethical and clinical standards to medicine in the years he practiced around 400 B.C, but  even Hippocrates, had to have business meetings with his partners, deal with human resources issues, figure out what his competitor practices and other schools of thought were doing at the time to stay current, hire new people and staff, and have enough money left over after a day’s work to buy food and clothes for himself. Sure Hippocrates had a higher calling, but I would have loved to have a video recording of his practice’s annual strategic planning meetings. 

Governance, commerce, and mission. Politics, business, and art. Those are the three pillars on which our independent medical practices are built.

We have to get our politics right and govern ourselves well, then we have to get our business right but we can’t forget that we have a purpose, a higher mission that gives meaning to our life, our work lives, and to society as whole. We have to remember to put art back into medicine, even if we can’t define it we will know it when we feel it.