Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Ultimately, at the end of the day, everything comes back to the people.
What most people who try to disrupt healthcare from a technology perspective underestimate is the importance of the people and the culture. And it's really the only industry in which the greatest predictor of success is directly tied to how well you see the human being as first. But that relationship is one built on trust.
And so if you can't orient yourself around that model of trust, it's going to be very hard to be successful.
Welcome to Digital Voices, where healthcare and life science leaders explore the real work behind transformation. This podcast is about people, leadership, and the conversations that move healthcare forward. Now your host, Ed Marks. Hey everyone, welcome to another edition of Digital Voices. So excited as I am every week because we have the greatest guests.
And today, and this episode, we have Phoebe Yang. Phoebe, welcome to Digital Voices.
Thank you so much, Ed. I love listening to your podcast. And so it's exciting to be here. Thanks for having me.
And you're like this icon in the industry. I know everyone knows you and we'll dig a little bit deeper, maybe some areas that people don't know as much about you, but you're just a fabulous person. And we just really sort of met, I think just digitally, if you will. I followed all your stuff and you've been, like I mentioned, an icon in the industry.
So I've really listened and learned a lot from your experiences that you share so well. But the most important question, Phoebe, that we have in the entire program is what songs are on your playlist? What kind of music do you like to listen to?
You know what? The songs on my playlist, they vary from Rise Up to Gregorian Chants. I love jazz. I love classical. And I love the really ancient music, too, that you don't hear so much anymore.
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Chapter 2: What pivotal moment changed Phoebe Yang's career path?
Oh, you'll have to send them to me because I know I would enjoy them. Ancient music is very both meditative, but inspiring. There's something just qualitatively different.
What about life message or mantra? Are there words that kind of guide you to how you live?
Yes, there are quite a few, but I would say the way that I orient my life or try to, and I fail every day, but I work at it every day, is there was a great commencement, it's my favorite commencement speech. Barbara Bush gave it in 1990 at Wellesley College. And she was not, the student body there did not want to receive her as their commencement speaker.
They wanted Alice Walker from The Color Purple. And but she it was an 11 minute speech. You can still hear it. And I sometimes go back and listen to it. It was just brilliant. And one of the things she said in that speech was, you know, at the end of your life, you are not going to care about whether you, you know, pass that test or not.
or closed that deal or won that case, what you're going to care about is did you spend time with the important people in your life and how did you invest your life in that way? And so I try each day to make sure that, you know, even if I'm on the road a lot that I have
made a point to make sure that the people in my life and those in my life most important to me know that they are most important to me. Because sometimes what's on our calendar doesn't really reflect the priorities of our hearts.
No, that's a great reminder. I'm going to look that speech up, especially since it's only 11 minutes. What's your story? Tell us about your time growing up.
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Chapter 3: How did Phoebe Yang's upbringing influence her career choices?
Yeah, so my origin story is I'm the daughter of a single-parent immigrant who was a father, not a mother. A lot of times it's a single mother, but it was a single father who had three daughters, and I'm the oldest of the three daughters. He came to the United States in the 60s to get his master's.
The first place he stopped was in Harlem and then ended up at Atlanta University, which is at HBCU, now called Clark University. met my mother and ended up staying in the United States after his father, who had been a single parent also, who fled communism in China and went to Taiwan. Why am I Father was a teenager. He ended up being my mother.
And so when his father passed away, he decided to stay. And he got a job in Arkansas teaching at another HBCU.
Wow.
And so I was born in a small town called Pine Bluff in Arkansas, which is in the Mississippi Delta. Grew up there with the exception of three very influential years when I lived in Nebraska, where my dad did his Ph.D., And then during that time, my parents split up and my father ended up becoming a single parent.
We moved back to Arkansas and people, you know, my hometown, the same year that it was ranked by Rand McNally as the worst city to live in the United States, it was also ranked the top volunteer community in America. And it was a wonderful place to grow up. The whole town becomes your family. But needless to say, in a predominantly African-American community, I looked I looked a little different.
And then I looked even more different because I had a single parent father and then he was an immigrant. And so, you know, it was an interesting upbringing, but I wouldn't trade it for anything. Yeah. Defined who I was.
I love that. That's a pretty cool story. Was there a pivotal moment in your life could have been when you were younger, as you were describing or older in life that fundamentally changed the direction of your life?
Yes. There was one probably most pivotal moment. So I went to law school thinking that I was going to do a traditional career of being a law professor and maybe a judge or something like that, because I had a long history, ancestral history of Supreme Court justices and attorney generals and
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Chapter 4: What lessons did Phoebe learn from her experiences in healthcare?
in a graduate program and the other who was still an undergraduate. And so I decided I was going to go work and earn a living. So I went to a big law firm. The reality is my sisters are very accomplished in their own right and they didn't need me, but I didn't know what would happen and I was pretty dutiful at that point. And at the same time, I did a lot of soul searching.
And I knew fundamentally, I don't actually enjoy fighting. And lawyers, you kind of have to like the fight. I like to compete, but I don't like to fight sort of adversarially. I really like to build. And so I did a lot of soul searching around that. And I decided, you know what? I'm not going to be a litigator, which means I'm not going to end up being a judge.
I'm going to go the business route because I want to build things and I want to bring people together and I want to align interests and then see output that isn't a zero sum game. And so that really, if my father had continued to live, I'm not sure I would have come to that point. But it really kind of changed the trajectory and how I thought about the rest of my life
That's an amazing story. Yeah, the power of words, right, especially from a loved one. And yeah, walk us through a little bit of your career from that point, because you went from sort of this public service, which was historically in your family, into C-suite roles in major tech and healthcare companies. So let's talk about that pivot a little bit.
Yeah, well, you know, first I went to a law firm, and then I went, and while I was at the law firm, which was a great firm, I really actually enjoyed practicing law, but I really detested billing hours, which is the way the legal profession is built. That's going to change, by the way. AI is going to change the economics of law firms, and it's sooner than people realize.
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Chapter 5: How does Phoebe Yang define 'curious humility' in leadership?
I had worked for a law firm in Asia once, and during the summer of one of my law school years and very exciting things were happening in China where I had spent a little bit of time. China was looking to accede to the WTO and I was asked to go into the government to work on a presidential initiative to help bring China into what we would consider global standards around rule of law.
to prepare them for WTO accession. That initiative was really successful on a number of fronts, but most importantly, beyond the initiative, China was successful in acceding to the WTO and a lot of multinationals were looking to go to China at the time to start, you know, to launch businesses there.
But notably they were not interested in hiring local Chinese because they were nervous about acquiring talent that may or may not have the cultural alignment or the practices and the disciplines of Western business. And so even though I came from Arkansas, I was being very heavily recruited to go to China because I spoke some Chinese and I have a face that looks Chinese.
Anyway, I end up going and with the blessing of my law firm intending to go back to my law firm, my law firm said, this is an incredible opportunity. You know, coming out of government, you should go take this. So I ended up going and helping AOL Time Warner to start a China office.
At the time, they had a lot of divisional representatives representing, you know, Turner Broadcasting, Warner Music, a number of businesses, AOL, after the merger of AOL Time Warner. but they didn't have any corporate presence and they were running up against each other and contradicting each other in front of the Chinese government.
So I ended up being the person who was trying to bring some of those issues and perspectives and viewpoints and positions together. It was a policy role, but it was a business and strategy. You had to have a business and strategy perspective to do that role effectively.
But I really wanted, and my deal was I would come back to the United States and go into one of the business units because I really wanted to understand how businesses operated.
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Chapter 6: What impact does AI have on the healthcare industry?
Well, some very well-publicized things happened at AOL, which was the business unit I had intended to go into. It was, you know, the advent of the Internet. We're probably of the same vintage, right, Ed? So it was the advent of the internet and I was so interested in what was happening. But some very well publicized things, including an SEC investigation was happening in that business unit.
And I just decided at that point, I never wanted to be at a company and not see that coming. But in order to see that coming, I had to understand finance and operations better than I did.
And so ultimately I left, took a pause, decided that, did a little research on my family history on the side, and then decided I was going to join Discovery, which owned the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet, all the real world television networks. This was the heyday of the 300 channel universe of television. And I joined the corporate development team.
And I was the only member of the corporate development team who had not gone to Wharton, worked at McKinsey, and been sort of a certain track. They were all men. They were all lovely men, but I looked and seemed quite different. But I had this international experience, and I was willing to roll up my sleeves.
And I still have, just as a memento, I still have my Excel for Dummies book on my bookshelf. To remind me that I learned how to run, you know, discounted cash flow analyses. I'm looking right now at my McKinsey valuation book. I learned how to value companies. And I remember my boss one day coming by my office and it was late. He left every day at 5. It was 7 and I would stay till 11.
He said, why are you still here? And I said, because I'm learning this stuff.
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Chapter 7: How can technology disrupt traditional healthcare practices?
And he said, you don't have to do this. I said, yeah, but that's why I took this job is to learn it. But in that process, I really learned at least the financial labors of successful and unsuccessful businesses. But I wanted to operate too. And so while I was there, I ended up being asked to help turn around a business before we became public. It was Discovery Health, which is at the time Dr. Oz.
At the same time, things were starting to disrupt the media industry. The media industry was the first to really be disrupted and impacted by digital forces.
Chapter 8: What strategies does Phoebe suggest for fostering trust in healthcare?
And we had a fledgling business unit called the New Media Business Unit. And I raised my hand and I went to go be the operator in that business unit. And I was a VP so I could sign for the company. But I wasn't senior enough to win in any internal jockeying that was happening around which deals you got to do. And so everybody was jockeying for the big deals with Comcast and DirecTV.
And I got stuck, in air quotes, doing the little deals that nobody else wanted to do that would never make any money, like with Amazon. and with Microsoft and with Nokia and Google. And it was an interesting time to be there because you had this sort of emerging new industry that was forming.
And the technology players didn't understand our business and our business didn't understand what they had to do to be successful in the technology space. But I rolled up my sleeves and, you know, got my hands dirty in the space and it really kind of changed my trajectory.
Yeah, that's super interesting. And then ultimately you made it to the best industry there is into health care. So tell us about like that transition and some of the things that you've done in health care.
Well, you know, it's interesting. Sometimes you don't realize what's happening in your life until you have the benefit of hindsight, right? And so my first foray into health was really at Discovery when I helped turn around that health business. Then I went into the Obama administration where the Affordable Care Act was the big initiative happening.
And I was at the FCC working on a national broadband plan to make broadband the next big infrastructure, transformative infrastructure like highways and electricity and railroads and telephony in prior generations. And we were... putting together a national plan to make broadband that.
But what was justifying the investment in this plan was really what we called national purposes, healthcare, education, energy, and how those industries really needed and could benefit from the acceleration of broadband technologies. And so I ended up taking a particular interest in healthcare.
And so when I was asked to stay after the broadband plan was complete to be the chairman's senior advisor on broadband, I said, I really want to focus on healthcare. And the reason for that was probably multifold, but I didn't realize it until after I really entered the healthcare industry full force when I went to work for the advisory board company. You remember the advisory board company?
I followed you.
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