Healthcare sector

How physical space can reduce pain, lower costs, and save lives.

An online tool takes objective and subjective factors into account.

Companies say they want breakthrough products, but most are far more adept at making incremental improvements to existing lines. A pioneering division at 3M successfully navigated a process that leads to breakthrough thinking.

Your organization can become more decisive—and can implement strategy more quickly—if you know where the bottlenecks are and who’s empowered to break through them.

Executives routinely dose their organizations with strategic snake oil: discredited nostrums, partial remedies, or untested management miracle cures. In many cases, the facts about what works are out there—so why don’t managers use them?

In most companies, strategic planning isn’t about making decisions. It’s about documenting choices that have already been made, often haphazardly. Leading firms are rethinking their approach to strategy development so they can make more, better, and faster decisions.

Aim for incremental improvements over breakthrough inventions.

New services are using research data and anonymized medical records to identify ways to treat conditions that lack care guidelines.

A framework for balancing stress and rewards.

There's considerable waste in the system.

Just having the conversation isn’t enough.

The “bounded awareness” phenomenon causes people to ignore critical information when making decisions. Learning to expand the limits of your awareness before you make an important choice will save you from asking “How did I miss that?” after the fact.

Research shows they do, but how health care providers should use them isn’t quite so clear.

An “I win, you lose” approach won’t work.

It can help lower costs and reach more people.

Editors’ Note: This post marks the launch of a month-long forum on the huge trends that will shape the need for and delivery of health care throughout the world for decades. In recent weeks, we have talked with a wide variety of people: executives at major pharmaceutical companies and care providers, scientists and inventors, academics […]

But lean management can help.

Sixty percent of maternal deaths in the United States are preventable.

From patient safety to lack of infrastructure.

Expand access to medicine, and the rest will follow.