Chris Boue
SoapBlog 3 - Keeping the Faith and Leading Through Tough Times
Negotiating the Terrain and Trusting Your Strength While Running at Top Speed

As a leader, how do you square your personal faith when you make necessary, critical professional decisions? As someone who feels faith is major, I believe we're put into a specific place in time for a reason – stewardship. Stewardship means you are called to be the best you can be. You practice it and call others to it, as well. As a steward making tough choices, you do your best in critical decision-making. You're not responsible for the current economic recession or downturn in the marketplace, but you are responsible for your reactions—reactions based on your mind, heart and soul.

On a daily basis I hold myself to a high standard of creativity, passion and commitment in protecting our business and ensuring the value we give our customers. In other words, we steward our stakeholders, investors' capital, employees' careers and our customer partnerships by executing a strong offense. Speaking of offense, it's especially important to defend your base and position your company to be a thriving operation when the upturn comes.

On a personal note, two of my five children have been cross country runners. I've seen that success demands taking advantage of the terrain. Running down hills creates even more momentum when you lengthen your stride. Likewise, during uphill climbs, runners stay in front by shortening their stride and moving their arms faster to power themselves up the hill.

As business leaders and managers, we can't shy from making critical decisions. In thriving markets with easy-to-please customers, anyone can succeed. In fact, many do. But true tests happen in tough times as leaders re-evaluate, add value and determine the best use of staff and resources.

Here's a question I ask: Are all staff members working to ten times the value of their salaries? By evaluating on that basis, it's easier to filter personnel decisions. In better economies, lackadaisical managers let people slide. Tough times force business managers and leaders to make tough calls and invest in things that make the highest-leverage difference. Today's decisions have immediate consequences and need to be constantly evaluated and re-evaluated.

Who are the best stewards on your staff? Have you challenged them to rise to the occasion? Today's business environment is more about harnessing character and creativity to produce value than about defending and trying to stay afloat. While survival is a must, leaders are paid to lead in uncertain times as well.

During a downturn, all business leaders should absolutely re-assess their strategic and business plans, re-evaluating that the initial strategy projected is not only still valid, but can also be modified to greater advantage. Company assets must be driven to the highest possible returns, ensuring that highest-value resources guarantee overall success.

The effect of these activities may look and feel like Business 101 cost-cutting without reconciling real value, determining strategy, or assessing risks. Conversely, our company is conducting a bottom-up approach to ensure that everything we are doing resonates with long-term market leadership. In this way, the company is not only protected, but positioned to thrive in the future. To do otherwise is a mistake of critical proportion – an example of bad stewardship and the epitome of poor leadership.

Although it may be easier to avoid asking the tough questions and making the difficult calls, doing so positions leaders as business stewards and ensures their companies' successes in the future.

SoapBlog 2 - Providing healthcare in the new millennium

Our country is rapidly becoming the chronic disease capital of the world.

Of the top ten chronic diseases Americans face, diabetes rates are not only a national crisis (23 million), but experts now expect that fully one third of our population has pre-indications of diabetes. Examples include high obesity rates in adults and children.

We have taken our modern-day comforts and turned them into health risks. We drive our cars to work and park in parking garages. As knowledge workers we sit at computers all day, and even those of us with healthy behaviors in the past put our hearts at risk in the present.

At the very time Americans increasingly will be living otherwise healthy lives while having a chronic disease (62 percent of those over 60 ), we are not managing these diseases very well.  Ours is not a health care system as much as it is an urgent  health care system.

To make a significant impact in improving overall health care, we need to manage care rather than just manipulate it.

For example, there is a dearth of health care providers predicted over the next several years. Education and administrative costs for providers are discouraging many doctors from continuing in their fields of expertise. Why would doctors want to stay in a practice when a high percentage of time is spent filling out medical forms and chasing payments instead of spending time caring for patients?

There are, however, some positive signs that we are beginning to change the way health care is managed in the U.S.

Our politicians and news media are recognizing the social and economic realities of our health care system.  Success will come from the cooperation and coordination of providing health care between providers, patients and payers (insurers).

We need to take best practices and individual successful encounters and make certain they become the norm rather than an exceptional experience.

Health care technology, applied correctly, will be one way to help us move the needle toward economical and efficient health care. It will allow medical professionals to increase their scalability and effectiveness, while leveraging a small pool of health care workers.

A case in point: CH Mack is emerging as a leader in providing managed health care software solutions for the changing face of health care. Our new MedCompass™ software allows health care providers to track and treat patients with its patient-centric system.  It utilizes easy-to-use, browser-based media and interactive Web applications.  It employs service-oriented architecture to help users integrate claims, care guidelines, payroll, EMR, lab data and billing, and other health information resources.

Being committed to better health care management is a first step toward a healthier nation. Besides being patients ourselves, we all have grandparents, parents, spouses, and children whose lives will be vastly improved.

Chris Boue
SoapBlog 1

Time Spent with Co-Workers During Outage Was Best Team-Building Exercise
We All Want and Need a Caring Corporate Culture

In September, when the city of Cincinnati lost electrical power after a wide-ranging  storm, we at CH Mack knew it wouldn't be business as usual for a while. About 700,000 people were without power beginning Sunday, Sept.14 for almost a week, and we worried that some employees wouldn't be able to reach us or come into work.

That's why on Monday, Sept. 15, we contacted each of our 45 employees in Cincinnati by cell phone and got an assessment of what their needs were. One question was asked: How could CH Mack help?

A big issue was child care, because many of our employees' children were out of school. Given this, we set up two conference rooms as an employee "daycare" for the week, complete with DVDs, books, games, and a designated sitter.

We also furnished hot lunches at the office, since many employees were without refrigeration and couldn't cook on electric stoves at home. We acquired hotel rooms close to the office for employees with long commutes, some of whom have very small children.

At this point, you may be asking yourself, is CH Mack flush with funds? How could it afford to offer these things to employees?

The answer is quite simple. We could not afford NOT to help.

Practically speaking, we like our employees and want them to report to work and be productive. Ours is a deadline-driven company, and we are aggressive about meeting our goals. People cannot be productive when they are hungry, or worried, or concerned about the safety of their families. Caring for those who work for you helps the company in the long run.

On the human side, caring about others is simply the right thing to do. We care about our employees as individuals. They are talented, good and kind people, with families and concerns just like ours. We were all inconvenienced by the outage, but many people were severely affected. We tried to look at the situation as an opportunity to bond closer with each other.

On the Monday night of that stressful, confusing week, my family invited our employees and their families for dinner at our home. We were blessed to have had our power restored in only six hours, and that night we were able to provide hot showers and Monday Night Football for about 30 associates and their families.

Taking stock, this year we've accomplished some exciting things at CH Mack: a re-branding of our organization; a brand-new Web site; a product release; and a demonstration overview of a new platform.

But if I had to choose my favorite milestone reached in 2008, it would be the camaraderie our company built during the electrical outage. We all know by the numbers what we are supposed to do to succeed in business, but sometimes we're uncertain just how much of our hearts we should reveal to others.

What gets measured is what gets done, and what is celebrated and rewarded also gets done. We learn, and continue to learn daily, what to measure and what to celebrate.