By David Jarrard and Ken Graboys
3.5-minute read
Tina Turner, Virgil and George Vaillant walk into a bar.
(Stop us if you’ve heard this one before.)
Turner looks at the poet and psychiatrist and asks, “What’s love got to do with it?”
Virgil and Vaillant look at each other, then turn to her in unison.
“Everything.”
Virgil, the immortal first-century B.C. Roman poet and author of “The Aeneid” and “The Eclogues,” left us with one of history’s most enduring affirmations:
“Omnia vincit amor.”
Love conquers all.
Omnia vincit amor
Against this backdrop, “Love conquers all” was not the language of romance. It was a declaration that political power and physical force, however formidable, cannot by themselves bring about lasting human change; cannot make the world better.
Only love can do that.
Two thousand years later, in 1938, Harvard launched what would become the longest-running study of human development ever conducted. The Harvard Grant Study followed 268 men for decades through surveys, interviews, medical exams and psychological assessments, all in pursuit of a deceptively simple question:
What makes a life happy and fulfilling?
For more than 30 years, the study was led by Harvard psychiatrist George Vaillant, who chronicled its findings in “Triumphs of Experience.” After decades of analysis, Vaillant concluded that the central lesson was deceptively simple:
“Happiness is love. Full stop.”
What’s love got to do with it?
Well, everything.
You know this in your bones. We know this.
And yet…
Pick up a Fortune 500 annual report. Alongside the financials, you’ll find discussions about competitive threats, growth opportunities, geopolitical risk, and, increasingly, artificial intelligence. Roughly half will step into the tepid waters of employee “engagement” or customer “satisfaction.”
Yet among all those pages, charts and carefully crafted narratives, you will struggle to find a company that uses the word love in any meaningful way.
Rooted in love
Which brings us to healthcare.
Few industries are more fundamentally rooted in love than healthcare. We do not mean the soft sentiments of Hallmark cards and warm puppy adoration.
We mean the muscular love that builds hospitals on the frontier; that cares for communities in need; that strives to alleviate suffering. The kind that can conquer despair.
People do not go into healthcare because they are passionate about administrivia, market share or reimbursement policy. They go into healthcare, we all went into healthcare, because of, in one form or another… love.
Love remains in healthcare, of course. But it’s been papered over, weighted down by layers of regulation, finance, operations and complexity. Yet the embers burn there… unharnessed and waiting.
Love is the ultimate source of strength
Why is love such a taboo concept in professional life? How did it come to signal softness or weakness when, in nearly every other realm of human experience, it is recognized as the ultimate source of strength?
Perhaps because love isn’t linear. It cannot be captured in a spreadsheet cell.
Perhaps because love isn’t transactional. Love gives when the calculation says withhold.
Perhaps because love plays the long game. It resists quarterly reporting.
But, boy, it is powerful.
Love: A powerful management principle
Take a beat. Engage in a thought experiment with us. What if love were a core value and management principle of yours? For your strategy? Your operating model? Your organizational constructs? For your why, your what and your how?
How would your enterprise be different? How would your results be different? How would you be different?
Conquering all; requiring all
A strategy where love is the central tenet is one where true value creation, client centrism and caregiver engagement are the price of admission and byproduct. Because – to paraphrase The Beatles – the more love you give, the more you get.
We plan to write more about this topic – to discuss further how leaders may consider channeling love as a management principle that focuses, energizes and powers their work and their organizations.
In the meantime, a final thought: When Virgil wrote of love, he also wrote about the consequences of accumulating power without it. That doing so risks losing the very thing that matters most – the chance to know the experience of love and to ultimately be powered by it.
That to act without love may be the riskiest strategy of all.
We think Virgil, George and Tina are right on that.
Ken Graboys is the co-founder and CEO of Chartis and David Jarrard is chairman of the Jarrard Executive Committee. As colleagues (Jarrard is a business unit of Chartis), they are also healthcare thought leadership partners who connect history, the arts and healthcare to offer a unique take each month on the challenges we face and the opportunities before us.
Image Credit: Shannon Threadgill
