KIT: Healthcare requirements

Strategic tools for the practising manager

INDIA CURRENTLY requires an additional 1.1 million hospital beds.

THE BED TO population ratio is 1:5.

A TOTAL OF 880 million square feet is required to meet the current need of hospital beds.

NEARLY 20.000 ACRES (floor space index 1:1) of land is needed.

BY 2017, 2.6 MILLIONbeds will be required along with 2 billion square feet of built up space.

NUGGETS
Selections from management journals

UNDERSTANDING HOW competitors will respond to your actions should be a critical component of decision making. Few companies, however, incorporate such insights into their strategic decisions, in large part because most methods for obtaining them are complex and unreliable. The authors have drawn on their research and work with companies to develop an approach for predicting rivals’ behaviour that appears accurate and easy to apply. It involves considering just three questions: Will the competitor react at all? What options will the competitor actively consider? And which option will the competitor most likely choose? The key is to get inside your rival’s head and look at the situation from that perspective, not yours.

Predicting your competitor’s reaction
By Kevin P Coyne and John Horn
Harvard Business Review, April 2009
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AFTER MORE THEN TWO decades of research into corporate downsizing, there remains a fundamental question: How can managers and employees rethink their organisations even as they confront the need to downsize? More specifically, how can organisations support learning, innovation and creativity while at the same time finding effective ways to improve costs, quality and productivity? Some might argue that these goals are at odds with one another — that you can’t build a better and a leaner organisation. The authors disagree. Strong organisations need to develop resilience so they could take advantage of new opportunities that arise during periods of economic retrenchment. Downsizing isn’t just about “doing more with less.” It is also about creating flexibility, innovation and better communication that lead to increased trust and empowerment between managers and employees.

Downsizing the company without downsizing morale
By Aneil K Mishra, Karen E Mishra and Gretchen M Spreitzer
MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring Issue, 2009
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WHILE GOVERNMENTS deliberate responses to the financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath, one important question should not be overlooked: What will be the long-term impact of the crisis on technological innovation? As part of the fallout from the financial crisis, funds for many types of economic activity have become far more scarce — and that includes research and development. As economists know, innovation is a key driver of economic growth. Any significant decline in the rate of invention would have a much bigger impact on growth over the next 10 to 20 years than whatever few percentage points of GDP we may lose during the next couple of years because of recession. Thus, we need to be concerned about the impact of the financial crisis on the system of innovative activity.

A dearth of exit strategies
By Joshua Gans
MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring Issue, 2009
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A STUDY OF THE operational practices of more than 25 global pharmaceutical manufacturers finds that top ones are more than twice as productive as their average counterparts. A look at how the leaders manage cost, quality and speed to market offers lessons for drugmakers around the world, including large European and North American companies grappling with stagnating growth and ageing patented-drug portfolios. The rewards for improvement are significant: by matching the top players’ total labour productivity (capital productivity shows comparable results), average drugmakers would enjoy annual labour and unit-cost savings worth five to six percentage points of earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT). At the industry level, the value of that opportunity exceeds $65 billion.

Maximising efficiency in pharma operations
By Philipp Cremer, Martin Lösch and Ulf Schrader
The McKinsey Quarterly, April 2009
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