Kevin Tracey, on Putting It Together (After Taking It Apart)

The following quotes are from an interview with Dr. Kevin J. Tracey, president and CEO of the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research of the North Shore-LIJ Health System and was conducted by Adam Bryant.

Get the entire interview at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/06/business/corner-office-kevin-tracey-on-putting-it-together-after-taking-it-apart.html?_r=0

But I do think that kids today are growing up with computers and technology that don’t need to be fixed or can’t be fixed, and they’re missing out on something.  I think you have to take apart something.

I also think you want to figure out how things work, because that gives you the power to innovate. Innovation has to start with creativity, and creativity means making something. The best way to make something, if you don’t know how to do it, is to take something else apart.

…

But I think that when your mother dies when you’re young, you approach life differently. You realize nothing’s guaranteed to last forever. So you make decisions about what you want to do each day, and what you want to accomplish, and what you hope to accomplish long term. That opened my mind to try to understand: “Well, how can I be more organized? How can I plan?”

You spent a lot of time in operating rooms. Any leadership lessons from that?

I’ve seen the best of management and the absolute worst of management.

The worst is when the team fears the leader, so when someone sees something going wrong, they’re afraid to point it out. I’ve also seen the best. It’s about clearly stating the purpose and asking people how they’re doing and really listening if someone needs something different that day. If the operating team can accommodate the needs of that person without deviating from the plan, that person will be a better member of the team.

How do you hire?

My favorite question is, “What do you want to do?” If you don’t know what you want to do, you’re letting chance dictate your future. Then I look for patterns in their life that show they’ve conceived of a plan in the past and accomplished it.

At least three things are required to come up with a plan and accomplish it. There has to be some element of creativity and self-analysis, which is really important. There has to be some element of operational capacity. And there has to be persistence, because anything worth doing in life requires persistence. You can weed out a lot of people by listening carefully to the stories they tell around this theme, and then looking at the résumé.

The other theme I ask about is, “What did you do on your previous jobs?” If they say, “I did research,” I’ll ask: “Where? What time did you get to the lab? What did you do at the lab bench?” If there’s a red flag, it will almost always come when someone can’t explain what they did.

That happens?

Absolutely. I think some people can actually go through a lot of jobs, doing a lot of tasks, without thinking about them and really not having any insight into what they’re doing. But creative people and innovative people will tell you every detail about what they did, because they found a way to do them better.

If you can’t glean the sense of accomplishment, pride and operational excellence from them describing previous jobs, it’s not going to start when they show up at a new place.