Doctor CEO Performance & Decision Making

We all like to be top performers. Doctor CEO’s stand out as notorious for wanting to accomplish a lot in a condensed time period. Yet, so often in analyzing a doctor’s performance in our planning sessions one or more areas of the practice just seems bogged down. Why? It is often not for lack of trying! Many doctors plan to death the steps they will take to add an associate, expand the practice, or initiate a marketing effort. But the decision to "go" or the multiple decisions needed to move forward lag or are never made. Increasingly our view is that doctors can be far more effective making decisions and moving on to implementation than over planning. During a wonderful lunch yesterday in Naples with Dr. Richard Weinstein and his wife Audrey and their local friends, we reflected on the decisions he had made in 1996. When he determined to bring on his associate and move forward with a partnership. Health issues several years later upended their longer term plans. But Richard and Audrey both commented on how thankful they were with the early decisions I had helped them to put in place that allowed the practice to transfer easily when his eyesight changed. The lesson here, top performance means making and implementing your decisions. Avoid over planning or endlessly waiting to execute your plans.