It may have started out as a small outpatient facility, but now, a century later, the Mayo Clinic is one of the top-ranked hospitals in the nation, with annual revenues of nearly $7 billion. How does the hospital balance a 100-year history with cutting-edge research and innovation? In this interview, Leonard L. Berry, a marketing professor at Texas A&M, and Kent D. Seltman, the marketing chair at Mayo Clinic — coauthors of Management Lessons from Mayo Clinic discuss the secrets behind the Mayo Clinic brand.
What makes the Mayo Clinic so successful?
Leonard L. Berry: The Mayo Clinic does something really well that any medium size or larger company can do better: the pooling of talent. You find the right kind of people, and then create a culture in which they work harder than most people work. It’s the power of culture, the power of teamwork, the power of a legacy; it makes people proud. If you are really proud of your organization, you work harder for it. In our interviews, so many people who work at Mayo have told us, “I’m a better employee here than I’ve ever been before.” That’s a really powerful statement.
Kent D. Seltman: It’s also the power of a work force all aligned to a single value. At the Mayo Clinic, the needs of the patient come first. Everyone is working together for the same thing. There are 43,000 employees. You could walk up to any one of them and ask: ‘What’s the mission?’ ‘The needs of the patient come first’ is on the lips of virtually every employee. Another area of alignment is the salary policies at Mayo Clinic. No one is given an incentive; no one is measured by productivity–everyone’s on salary. No supervisor is going to take home more money because he or she can get a little bit more work out of these peons. Everyone is using their energy to meet the needs of the patient.
At Mayo Clinic, after five years a doctor’s salary is capped. How would that model translate to other types of companies — like a software company?
KS: I don’t know I have an answer to that because I haven’t studied those companies, but what’s transferable is that the Mayo Clinic employees are working for a goal beyond themselves. My guess is that there are people who write software who are writing for a reason beyond just making some money. Some other thing drives them, which becomes an asset for companies to draw upon.
LB: For people whose main goal in a job is to maximize their money, the Mayo model would not work. Every company needs a reason for being or they’re not going to last very long, and if a company’s reason for being doesn’t galvanize human spirit, it isn’t going to do well with the Mayo salary model.
