Excerpts from Robert Fritz’s Interview that he graciously agreed to do with me.

Deepa: Could you share with the readers the work you have been doing at Blue Shields, where you have enabled a well motivated change and helped change the underlying structures?

Robert Fritz: We?ve been working with Blue Shields for last four years. First of all, Blue Shield has an amazing visionary as CEO in Bruce Bodaken. He is one of the best CEOs I have ever seen. Funnily enough his background is philosophy but he is a very hard nosed business guy too. He has a good combination of really good common sense and philosophical nature. When I first went to work with Blue Shields, Bruce had just become CEO and at that time it was a 3 billion dollar company, still pretty much a legacy company. A bureaucratic company, where people had been there for years and years and were hard to move. Four years later, at 7 billion dollars, it is the fastest growing health care provider in California. It is a model company of the kind of underlying change that we were talking about, it is outcome oriented rather than problem solving oriented. It trains all of its senior managers. In fact, Bruce Bodaken himself attends training as a student and will sometimes co-lead training. HR is very important in that company. They have a very strong HR leader named Marianne Jackson. We have instituted a number of programmes around training and leadership that have completely turned that company from a very bureaucratic, legacy company to a very flexible, professional and accomplished organization.

To read the entire interview, go
here

• Deepa