Course Preview | Executive Decision Making for Healthcare Leaders from Emory Executive Education

Hello, my name is Steve Walton. I'll be your instructor for this program. In this video, I'll briefly introduce myself and introduce the program that we'll be working on together. My PhD is from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. My undergraduate and master's degrees are from Clemson University in South Carolina. Both of them are in a technical discipline of Operations Management, Process Improvement, Process Analysis. I'm a trained statistician and analyst by training. I've been at Emory since 1996, and in my time at Emory I've been Dean of both our full time MBA program and our Executive MBA program. And the reason why I mentioned this is along this journey from being a statistician, a quantitative decision maker, to being Dean of these programs, I learned the power of combining both quantitative and qualitative analysis. Along the way, I also had the opportunity to design leadership programs. I'm a certified leadership coach and this added another layer to my thinking about executive decision-making. Much of executive decision-making is more about how the executive as leader sets a tone inside their organizations for decisions as it is about that leader having access to technical analytical tools.

This frames what we'll do together in this program. Specifically, we'll look at the portfolio of decisions that health care executives face. It's a complicated portfolio from really quite easy short-term decisions to decisions that may not actually even be made for three to five years. Then an important idea arises that will follow us through much of the program which is when you understand the type of decision that you're going to make, you've really got to be attentive to make sure that you're using the right sets of tools, the right approaches, the right people are involved, and so we'll spend time talking about how to match decision type with decision process. Then we'll start to look at the role of people in these decisions. Specifically, we'll look at the relationship between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind, and how we really make decisions. We will look at analytics, but we'll look at analytics from a slightly different lens, which is in what ways might analytics increase the bias inside the decisions that we're going to make. And all of this then culminates with us spending some time together discussing what exactly is the leader's role in improving both your own individual decision-making, decision-making of your team and then decision-making more broadly inside your organization.