There is broad agreement that the U.S. healthcare market has structural challenges that need correcting: Cost of healthcare is the highest in the world and has been growing faster than GDP for decades. So, what should a healthcare provider, payer, or services and technology company do to win in this evolving landscape? How should a healthcare player develop its call-to-action?

Too often when companies embark on a strategic plan, the results are disappointing. A common error involves assembling a long-term business plan, calling it a strategic plan, and complaining about how the exercise is mostly ‘financial,’ with limited use beyond the one-time rollup.  So, what’s causing these frequent unsatisfactory results?

Strategy is all about choice. At its foundation, business strategy comes down to decisive prioritization of what your organization will and won’t do in order to achieve its desired goals and outcomes. Landing on the choices and priorities that underpin any strategy requires insights inherently formed by a number of factors including the integration of competitive intelligence, which in our experience is often neglected or even discredited.

Beyond upgrading and reducing redundancies of an IT Infrastructure that is outdated, incorporating any (or all, if appropriate) of our recommended foundational areas into your IT infrastructure-layer strategy promises greater agility, scalability, cost-effectiveness, and security, while also helping your business deliver on its down-selected imperatives.

Let’s assume you’ve worked through your strategic imperatives with decisive prioritization, calling out what you clearly will and will not invest in for the next 12-18 months, as part of your 3-year (+) aspirations. From those few decisive strategic imperatives, you have an execution mandate for both in-year initiatives and multi-year executions. Typically, at least a portion of those imperatives requires significant changes or new processes within your operations.

Newly merged cultures have the very real potential to negatively impact employee morale, stymie collaboration, and far worse, diminish the quality of employee interactions with customers, vendors, and others outside the organization, impacting business results. So why is merging corporate cultures more challenging today than it’s ever been?

HPA Senior Advisor Alex Nesbitt’s valuable insight on extension mergers continues. Read Part 2 here.

Many of you know of my deep admiration for all things Berkshire Hathaway, including for Chairman and CEO, Warren Buffett and Vice Chairman, Charlie Munger. Over the past several years, I’ve spent a likely unreasonable amount of time thinking about BRK and I’m profoundly committed to understanding how it makes so (so so) much money, and what might be next for them.

Extension mergers, often referred to as roll-ups, have historically been one of the most successful business growth models. Whether pursued to extend geography, markets, products, or some combination of these, such mergers focus primarily on revenue synergies. They have fueled impressive growth for companies like Cisco and IBM, who have used their extensive sales and distribution networks to, in turn, drive sales of products from hundreds of small acquisitions.

Simplifying and thereby becoming more strategic with your IT is a multi-year, enterprise-wide effort that incorporates standardization, optimization, automation, and, as appropriate, virtualization and cloud migration of an organization’s infrastructure, application, and business process layers. The goal is to boost performance efficiently while mitigating compliance and security risks, facilitating new strategic capabilities, and freeing up budget for more strategic spending.