Got Content? An Innovative Forum Provides Food For Thought

Editor’s note: This post is part of a series of several posts related to the Center for Healthcare Management’s 5th Forum: Learning from each other – Scaling ideas up to the next level, to be held in Berlin, Germany on June 9 and 10, 2016. Please contact the center for more information or to request your personal invitation. Form follows function. Structure follows strategy. These long-used management mantras imply that content, such as strategy, function, and vision come first, and the medium that conveys the message—the “packaging”—comes second. They should be chosen carefully, so as to serve the purpose of communicating content as effectively as possible. At the majority of today’s conferences, however, the form of information dominates its function. Driven by convenience, this approach can even prevent new knowledge and content from being generated, evaluated, and further developed. A New Approach “We are all conferenced out — we need something new,” Larry Brown told me more than five years ago. Brown is a professor at Columbia University and a board member of the Center for Healthcare Management, which I direct. Tom Rundall, a professor emeritus at UC Berkeley, added to Brown’s plea, specifying the issue-at-hand: Nearly all the conferences I have attended over the past 35 years used the traditional approach where the enlightened “few” teach the “many” who are less enlightened. The Care-Tank [the Center’s ...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - Category: Health Management Authors: Tags: Global Health Health Professionals Center for Healthcare Management 5th Forum conferences Source Type: blogs