McKinsey on Healthcare
They will know a culture—you can't fake it”: An interview with Texas Medical Center’s president and CEO Bill McKeon
22 Jun 2021
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to the McKinsey on Healthcare podcast. My name is Philippe Barboza, and I'm a senior partner at the McKinsey & Company offices in Houston. And I'm enormously privileged today to speak with Bill McKeon, the president and CEO of the Texas Medical Center.
Good morning, Philippe.
I would love to start the conversation with you letting our audience know a little bit about the Texas Medical Center and how you are transforming healthcare.
Sure.
Chapter 2: What makes the Texas Medical Center unique?
Thank you, Philippe. So what's unique about the Texas Medical Center is the name itself is actually quite misleading. When we all think of medical centers, almost every city around the world has a medical center. This is actually a medical city. It's comprised of over 60 institutions, 120,000 employees, and as you mentioned before,
We provide care to over 10 million patients each year on this main campus. The GDP for the Texas Medical Center is over $22 billion, which would make us the eighth largest business district in the United States.
So it's unlike anything I've ever seen in my world travels, and certainly in the United States, this constellation of the largest collection of minds and resources anywhere in the world dedicated to advancing human care. It is much more of a medical city than it is a medical center.
And Texas Medical Center is the largest medical city in the world. How would you say it is helping to transform healthcare in the US?
I think it has a long history of doing that through clinical. I remember when I used to run the program at Stanford University and I looked at some of the volumes of the time of how many heart procedures were being done. And we were one of the largest heart programs in the country on the West Coast.
And they were doing more heart procedures at the Texas Medical Center in a day than we were doing in several weeks. And so it really became a calling card for if you wanted to do some of the greatest, most innovative clinical work, you came to the Texas Medical Center because it had the volume.
And a lot of times when you're looking at unique cases, you have to have a large volume to be proficient at it. The medical center has drawn people here from all around the world for hearts, procedures in brains, cancer, number one cancer center in the world at MD Anderson. It's the largest children's hospital in the world with Texas Children's.
Second part was, and what many people didn't realize is the research capabilities. More research is done on this campus than anywhere in the world. So people don't come here just to be clinicians. They come here to do some breakthrough research. And so many of the research of many of the drugs that are discovered happen on this campus.
Many of the surgical procedures that we've learned have been developed on this campus. So that's been really exciting for us.
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Chapter 3: How is the Texas Medical Center transforming healthcare in the US?
So what I've learned is not to assume anything that if you don't really cut to the real hopes and desires and dreams of the people, that you really can't lead them because those things are so important on how they resonate and how they're motivated. So That's been one of the things that I've really kind of looked back on on that journey. You always want to hire incredibly talented people.
And that's something that I've invested heavily in. When I arrived here, it was largely male-dominated, older people in leadership positions. And now I'd say it's almost been a complete swing opposite of that, that 80% of the leaders on my team are women. Ages are much younger. And it wasn't designed that way. You hire the best people for the role.
But what I find is I try to hire people that actually like agility. We don't use the word department in this company. It's really functions. And that slight change is moving people out of this kind of, I own this part, or I do this thing to be much more agile in their thinking of the roles they have.
So you'll see most people in our organization cross over onto many projects so they don't get stuck in something. The dust factor, as I refer to it, doesn't build. So that's what I think I'm most proud of is hiring a real great group of people that are leaders in themselves. and they're growing and many times don't know even how smart and creative they are.
And that's kind of one of the, I think the greatest pleasures of leading is really hiring people and curating our future leaders here at the Medical Center.
When you reflect back on your career, what is the one piece of advice that you would give to some of the global leaders that are listening here?
It probably is, Not what you'd expect in my answer, because what I've learned is leaders get caught up with the fact of thinking about themselves as executives. And the more that you can take yourself down into the bowels of each organization and really walk it and see it, to see how people deliver a service, to see how they answer phones.
The most important people in the organization are the ones that have the most touch points with customers. And you've probably heard this many times before, but if those people aren't extremely valued as they should be in an organization and the culture doesn't reinforce that, then you're missing the very greatest opportunity in a company.
Setting a culture really starts at the top and the way in which you treat people, the way in which you're curious and talk to them about their jobs, you can't do that from an executive office. You've got to be able to walk through and touch points of all throughout the organization. And I often think CEOs try to behave like CEOs and think those things are above them and just the opposite.
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Chapter 4: What challenges did the Texas Medical Center face when Bill McKeon joined?
Or I'd be writing a check for several million dollars to purchase more supplies from around the world. And it became... one of our greatest moments, I would say, in our history coming together because none of us could have done this by ourselves. And we needed to pull together as a collective entity to really look at this and make decisions.
And we were looked upon by our community as kind of giving them the real up-to-date daily view on the presence of this virus through the early days, through testing, We looked at the prevalence. We even have wastewater management sites, 39 of them, around the city where we actually test wastewater and we can tell you the presence of the virus or how many now multiple viruses in our community.
So it was a moment in time and now has been a year and a half of time where we've dedicated huge amount of resources and I don't see any end of it for some time, sadly. because of the resistance of many not to get vaccinated. So we still have this presence in our community and will for some time, but the fight goes on. But it's been a very proud moment in history for the Texas Medical Center.
Yes, it was an amazing collaboration between healthcare, local government, academia, the Greater Houston Partnership, and business in one of the most diverse cities in the country, if not the most diverse big city. Social capital is such an important concept in leadership. What would you say is one of the key learnings that you gained from this pandemic about the value of social capital?
Yeah, well, you know, when I think of the heart of social capital are those links and shared values and understanding that enable people to trust one another. And that's the cornerstone in which you do work together. And that really took for us because remember each of these institutions worked independent from one another. They don't share data with one another.
And so that was a real big accomplishment for us to allow them to give the data to the Texas Medical Center at the time. And that trust really opened the door for many other opportunities of understanding. And that really built the trust with each other because
With all of us sharing our data in real time and knowing how things were happening, people really didn't understand the depth of this problem. And so I think what it allowed us to do when each of those institutions trusted themselves enough to give the data to us centrally and to see the benefits of it, that was really set a whole new tone in how we work together.
A lot of people forget during this pandemic that our hospitals are usually at 80, 90% for just the normal challenges disease brings on in our community. And people travel from around the world to come here for that care. And so we had that on top of a pandemic. And so one of the things about social capital is once we establish that trust baseline,
to really work with each other, it was amazing to see how we would set up our testing. We would really talk collectively about how can we set up the testing, because remember, it was first mandated to come in to our hospitals who were already taxed with not only providing care for non-COVID, but now COVID patients. And now we became the cornerstone for testing in the entire country.
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Chapter 5: What achievements has the Texas Medical Center accomplished under Bill McKeon's leadership?
So we don't have to look back in future times and, and look to our reliance on other countries that are obviously taking care of their own. We want to have that capability within the United States, and we want to have it here in mid country, as we call it in Texas. So perfectly located to do supply chain to both East and West coast.
So those are big, audacious Texas goals, but they're ones that were already underway. So we're not waiting. We believe in our ability to execute on these. And we have the entire medical center arm in arm together on this vision. So it's not my vision alone. It's really a shared collective vision across the entire Texas medical center.
Thank you, Bill. And I can't thank you enough for taking the time to have this discussion with us. As always, it's inspiring and informative.
Thank you. It's been a pleasure.
I'd also like to thank our audience for listening to the podcast. I took a few just important takeaways from the conversation. The first one is just the importance of visionary leadership and courage to make a difference. How Texas Medical Center pivoted from
an organization that just provided physical infrastructure, parking, catering to all these world-class medical institutions to becoming a partner that has a vision to help really drive healthcare across this region and nationally and globally. Very exciting vision, one about entrepreneurship and courage. I also took away the importance of social capital and how
When you establish trust amongst people, in this case, COVID helped create, you know, real trust, you're able to achieve miracles and how all these institutions and the city, you know, business, academia, local government came together was really a benchmark, I think, for the USA and globally, as we think about all these important problems and challenges that we are wrestling with as a society.
I'm also very inspired about the future of healthcare, everything from AI to accelerated clinical trials, to driving innovations that exist in someone's mind or lab one day through to, you know, millions and billions of patients a little bit later.
And I really take a lot of hope on how we as society are starting to accelerate our response to so many of these healthcare challenges through innovation.
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