JULY / AUGUST 2007

HARVARD MACY

"A wonderful roller coaster"

The Harvard Macy Institute has completed another year of successful professional development courses, most recently its flagship programs on health care education and leadership.

The June program, the Program for Leading Innovations in Health Care & Education, gathered 59 participants representing 41 institutions in 15 countries. The majority of the 30 faculty were returning Harvard Macy scholars.

The major objective of this annual program is to help its participants—whether they chair departments in schools or hospitals, serve as academic deans, direct training programs, or create curricula—learn how to develop the strategies and skills required to create and sustain organizational change.

Elizabeth Armstrong, PhD, Director of the Harvard Macy Institute, was extremely pleased with this year’s leadership course. “The most important measure of success for these programs is the impact they have not only on the individuals who participate, but on their institutions. The feedback we receive from the Harvard Macy scholars suggests that these courses do result in new behaviors—that the participants are leaders of change,” she said.

Mohamed El Guindi, DPM of Menoufiya University in Egypt called the course a “wonderful roller coaster.” Fred Southwick, MD of the University of Florida said it was “inspiring and enlightening,” adding that the lectures and discussions “taught [him] new ways of looking at the world of academic medicine” and offered “frameworks that . . . will be very helpful in trying to bring about the many needed changes” at his institution.

Armstrong co-directed the course with Clayton Christensen, DBA, MBA, MPhil, the Robert and Jane Cizik professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. Christensen is a globally recognized authority on innovation management and organizational change, widely sought after by leading competitors in a range of industries for his insight and expertise. He led a series of discussions on the innovations that leading medical schools and hospitals are likely to be able to achieve, and which will prove extraordinarily difficult. Christensen also presented a compelling picture of how new technologies, including computer-based learning, are being implemented in medical education.

The Harvard Macy courses are noted for their high degree of interactivity—between faculty and participants, between participants working together on project teams, and perhaps most importantly, between the participants’ goals and their long-held and sometimes difficult-to-shake assumptions. Armstrong emphasized that challenging these assumptions is a core principle of each of the Harvard Macy programs.

Copyright 2007 Harvard Medical International