Podcasts

Episode 24- Decoding AQ with Ross Thornley Feat. Dr. Gary Richter - Unlocking innovation through flexibility & cross-industry learning

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Intro

Hi, and welcome to Decoding AQ, helping you to learn the tools, mindsets, and actions to thrive in an ever-changing world.

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Ross

Hi, and welcome to decoding AQ, I've got a really good friend of mine today that I can't wait to share his amazing experience knowledge and as a fellow vegan, we've spent some good time together. So I have Gary Richter, who is from Oakland in California, and one of the just most beautiful human beings I've met. I've lost board games to him, and we're still friends. And I can't wait. So welcome, Gary.

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Gary 

Thank you. Thank you. Good morning. Or I guess good evening in your day. 

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Ross  

Could be, who knows when people might listen. So tell us a little bit about your background. And yeah, just start off there a little bit about it.

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Gary

Sure. So I am a veterinarian. I've been in practice a little over 20 years in the San Francisco Bay area. So Oakland specifically. And really my practice focuses around what we would call integrative medicine. So in other words, rather than sort of pigeonholing ourselves to one form of medicine, whether it be sort of conventional Western medicine or Chinese medicine or whatever other form of medicine, what I do in my practice is I will utilize the best that many, many different styles and modalities of medicine have to offer, for any given individual to get a better outcome than we would be able to with any one specific type of medicine. 

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Ross  

Was there a trigger in either your education and university or places along your path that led you to that kind of view of this sort of flexible approach? Rather than focusing in on one modality was there an event or trigger or just the way your mind thought?

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Gary 

You know what there were really two things. One thing and I think the thing that really got this started was, as a doctor, I think maybe a lot of people that are not in medicine don't really think much about it, but practicing medicine is largely following an algorithm. So your patient comes in with a set of symptoms based on those symptoms, you run a certain test, based on the results of the test, you then either run more tests or provide treatment, etc. And you just work your way down the algorithm for the most part, and like every other algorithm, it has an endpoint. 

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And after being in practice for a number of years, and sort of seeing the same type of diagnoses come up again, and again, what you really start to see, as you really start to see where the hard stops are, as far as treatment goes. Where you get to a point with diagnostics and treatment, where realistically speaking, I had to go to a pet owner and say, “You know what, there's nothing else we can do here, take your pet home, keep them comfortable. And let me know when you think it's time to say goodbye.” 

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And on some level, that is a reality of healthcare, but it never sat great with me, from the perspective of the point at which I had to have that conversation, I just felt like, I wanted to be able to do more to be able to offer more. And it was that it really led me to start looking into other modalities of treatment. So Chinese medicine, for example, acupuncture, chiropractic, herbal therapy. And what I found as I started educating myself and learning about these various modalities is they can be highly effective in ways that Western medicine is not. 

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And all of a sudden, that endpoint on my algorithm got pushed way out down the road. And as I have explained it to people, sort of once you see that, you can't unsee it, you can't turn around and walk away from that if as a doctor, if the thing that gets you out of bed in the morning is how do I help my patients, then it just becomes a pattern of behavior of, “Okay, here's my endpoint now. Now what can I do to push that out a little bit further?”

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So that kind of really led me down a path many, many years ago of just always looking for what is another modality that I can add? What is another treatment that we can offer that is going to improve the quality of life of these patients, that is going to hopefully improve the quantity of life of these patients as well. And really that's pretty much what I do at this point.

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Ross  

And it's a lovely kind of principle and way of thinking of an expansion of healthspan and lifespan. And your approach in order to do that is through curiosity, and innovation and discovery to say, “Okay, what exists now?” Each day is a new day of opportunity that exists in the world and looking with that curious mind to say “How will now different combinations of things, different modalities help expand my goal,” to extend healthspan and extend lifespan just happens to be that your area is with pets. 

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But that same principle, I think, listeners could attach that to whether it's pet, or it's a product, or it's a service, or it's a professional endeavor, if you want to extend its lifespan or health span, or how long it serves value, look for ways to innovate different modalities to do it. I think that's a really interesting thing that you've shared that.

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Gary

Yeah. I mean, it's just a question of finding a different approach to achieve the goal that you're looking to get to.

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Ross  

So in terms of right now, what's the date today? It's interesting that time of year, people are saying,“Oh , April day 57 of April.” 

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Gary

Right.

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Ross  

It seems to be Groundhog Day for many. So we're at 23rd of April. And what is it like in Oakland in terms of the effect of COVID-19? And how has that affected your veterinary care center and your team?

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Gary

Sure. So I mean, Oakland and the San Francisco Bay area, I think is treating this situation like many larger metropolitan areas are in the sense that, I mean the town in many ways is locked down. So a lot of businesses are closed. We've been very fortunate in the bay area that I think because we locked down so early, the cases have not gotten out of hand here. Hopefully it stays that way. Obviously, there's always that looming question of is it going to blow up on us later, but for now, so far, so good. 

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So the good news is there's not really, especially after those first couple of weeks, I think sort of the mass panic has kind of calmed down a little bit. And now, what we start to see is people are starting to figure out how to resume their lives within the framework of, what you can and can't do these days. So from the perspective of a veterinary hospital, and specifically, holistic veterinary care, here in Oakland, the way that we're approaching this is we are still seeing patients. 

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However, we are no longer having the pet owner come in with the pet. So we're collecting animals at the door, we're actually putting our leash on the dog, for example, and giving the owner the dog's leash and collar just to again, just to limit any sort of potential transmission issue. And then what we're doing is we're setting up the client with a link for a Zoom call. So effectively, we're putting them in the exam room virtually. So generally speaking, what's happening is they're sitting in their car, and we're having a video chat while they can see their pet right there, they can see what the exam go on, we can talk about their concerns. 

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So we're doing what we can do to make this as comfortable a situation as possible, given what we have to work with. And what we found is that people are incredibly receptive, and really, really grateful for this. Because, they don't want to be sort of separated from that interaction. They want to be part of that interaction, and they're so grateful that we're open and then we're able to help their pet so I mean, it's really, really worked out, very well. I mean, I was telling somebody the other day, if this madness had happened 10 years ago, it would have been a completely different story from what we would have been able to do on the technology side to make all this work.

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Ross  

I think that's one of the things is, how do we find the gift in challenging times? And to respond in a way that is still positive? So the innovations that yes and technology is available, so you've used it 10 years ago, we didn't have Zoom right? But we would have found whatever the technology was.  

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Gary 

We would have done it on the phone. 

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Ross  

We would have known any better, yeah we would telephone them. 

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Gary

They would just gone over the phone. 

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Ross  

You know over the phone I'm sure the same level of gratitude and feeling grateful that they can still be involved in there would have still felt, it's all relative. And in terms of it, by the way, I have a question is Timeless the cafe, are they doing takeaways? Can you still get the vegan treats?

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Gary

That's exactly what they're doing. So yeah, the the vegan coffee shop and bakery up the street from my office, you could order online, you order through their website, and then you just go in and pick it up. All of the goodies are still there. So, if there's any way you can get to Oakland, you can eat, we can feed you.

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Ross  

The challenge of getting to Oakland might be a bit more difficult. So the the experience then, for the pet owner has changed slightly, as you say they sit in perhaps their car, and they engage in that way. In terms of your team and team members, are you considered a workforce that is essential, therefore, they can all come into work? And how are they adapting or feeling differently? What's some of the, perhaps challenges you've faced? And how did the team overcome them?

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Gary

Sure. So, veterinary medicine is considered an essential business. So we are, we are still allowed to be open. As far as the staff goes, obviously right at the outset of all of this, everybody was a little apprehensive, nobody knew what was going to happen. But one of the things that very rapidly happened in sort of in the lives of our staff members is almost everybody that they knew in their sort of general, sort of social circles, friends circles, almost everybody that they knew lost their job. They know a lot, my staff, I mean, a lot of their friends, they're in their restaurant industry, they work in a bar, or some sort of hospitality thing. 

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All those people lost their job within a week. And many of my employees here, they're literally the only person in their immediate friend group that's still working and getting paid. So, the great news about that is, they're incredibly grateful about the fact that they, partially financially and partially just from a sanity perspective, that they still get to come to work and do stuff and interact with animals and interact with each other. And they're not sitting at home, just percolating and going nuts.

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Ross  

It's really profound and simple statement of, you don't know what you've got till it's gone. And often, we take so many things for granted. And we look for the holes, we look for the thing that didn't quite go right that day. And that is our entity to choose to look for the things that are going right is a mindset, but then when the whole world changes, and you suddenly realize, “Wow, there's a lot going right for me, I'm grateful and respectful of that.”

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That's really interesting. And in terms of, you said they've changed, they're feeling very grateful for that, the sanity of having something, to do, to contribute and to serve. Has there been areas where your vision for the future, now learning some of these things is evolving or changing? So you’re thinking about new ways to create a future that's different, perhaps, than you had planned before? And tell us a little bit if that's true or not?

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Gary 

It is true to an extent I mean, medicine on some level, it requires hands on stuff. So, certainly from a veterinarian perspective, there's no way that our office is going to be able to convert to a largely online presence or remote presence, because, it's just a hands on sort of thing. Particularly a lot of the things that we do here, like physical therapy, acupuncture, that sort of thing, clearly that's tough to accomplish on a Zoom call.

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Ross  

Maybe, haptics in the future, could be maybe haptic suits in the future.

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Gary

Yeah there you go. Maybe I can like take control of the owner and sort of make them do that. 

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Ross  

Yeah, or even that it's placed on like a thunder jacket and you have the algorithms of what puts the pressure and sensors. 

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Gary 

I like it, I like it. That's a good invention. So all that said, we are really starting to explore what are the things that we can do remotely. So for example, if we have a person that's at home with say, an older arthritic dog and for whatever reason, they're not able to come in, through a video call we can start to show them like, here are some exercises that you can do with your dog at home, to help them get a little stronger and move around a little bit easier. 

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So, there are certain things that we can do and from a legal perspective, there are some limitations to what we can do, as far as like telemedicine goes. But for example, for patients that we're already regularly seeing, if something should come up, we can now have a video conference with that owner, talk to them about what's going on and give them advice on how to resolve it all. 

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So, we're doing that and the other thing that we're doing, and I think as you know we were doing this before, the whole Corona thing happened anyway, but we're always pushing towards getting information out online for people to take better care of their pets. Like I say, we were doing that long ago, but we've really sort of stepped up our efforts to do that. So for those folks that can't get out, they still have a resource on how do I take the best care of my pet.

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Ross  

And that's an interesting area, because there's so many different dimensions of pet ownership, of the health aspects when it's a emergency or critical situation. And then there's the management of conditions or pain, but then there's how do I maximize the joy of the relationship and life of this other member of a family? Maybe there's huge opportunities. 

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And I know we've had lots of conversations in the past about your visions of what the future might look like for that, and the sort of crossovers between pet and human, and where innovations lie, and which can drive innovations in different areas. What do you think maybe other areas of a pet owners life could be thought about and looked about in different ways, other than just saying veterinary care that you're excited about and you've got some thoughts for the future on?

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Gary  

Sure. I mean, I think there's a couple of ways to look at that. Number one, there is a very definitive and direct link between how people approach veterinary care and how people approach their own care. And interestingly, sometimes veterinary care actually becomes a gateway to human health care, from the standpoint of, let's say somebody's pet has a medical issue and they bring them in and all of a sudden, that pet gets better by virtue of some sort of natural therapy, or acupuncture or some integrative solution. That opens up the door for that person to sort of reevaluate how they approach their own healthcare, and say, “Wow, if this helped my dog or my cat, maybe that can help my chronic problem,” and then they can seek out integrative medicine for themselves. 

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You know, it's interesting, although perhaps not surprising. That it's, it's actually quite common when I talk to people when we're doing these sort of alternative therapies on their pet. I asked them if they've ever done any kind of alternative therapies for themselves and frequently the answer is no. So in many ways, they're prioritizing their pet's health care over themselves. 

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But again, once they start to see the results, then all of a sudden, I think that creates a paradigm shift in their mind as far as how to approach their own healthcare. I think the other facet of it is, what's out there and we're constantly looking for these things, but what's out there that actually will improve not only the life of the pet, but the life of the owner, sort of, in a more to use the term a more holistic fashion, so things that are going to improve the quality of life of both the pet and the owner. 

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And sometimes that's information in education, sometimes it's some physical thing, like a product, I mean, there's fascinating sort of tech products that are coming out now. Things that can for example, electronically monitor how your pet's health is, in much the same way like a Fitbit or an Aura ring or something to that effect would be and a human. And because of that, if we're able to closely monitor an animal's health and detect problems early, then ultimately we're improving the life of both the pet and the owner because it's that much less that they have to worry about, and presumably those pets will live longer and better lives because their medical issues will be addressed sooner.

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Ross  

I think a lot of the holy grail of many healthcare endeavors are about preventative and predicting and personalized. So the more data we can get, and I think one of the challenges, particularly in your industry and area is one of data and communication. In human health, you've got lots more data points and lots more communication points to, as you said, feed into that algorithm of the symptoms and things. And with the vast range of animals we have as pets, and then equally some of the challenges around the data and communication with them.

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I mean, I want to change tax slightly now to what you look for because you've run anumber of veterinary hospitals and centers and you've employed and scaled businesses, and gone through lots of challenges of how do you identify great team members? How do you develop and nurture them? In order that they can grow themselves? What are the sort of techniques and aspects you look for, for people who come and join your firm? Because you're always expanding every time I speak to you, you're growing, you're taking on new team members, new veterinary practitioners. What makes someone really good that would suit your kind of vision?

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Gary 

It's an interesting question. I mean, healthcare in general, there's a very particular personality type of people that sort of gravitate towards health care. And in fact if you look at a DISC profile of most people that are in health care, they're all the same. They're all high compassion, tend to be not particularly financially driven people, they're rule followers for the most part, I mean, it's the personality type that gravitates towards health care. 

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So we see a lot of those people. And ultimately the goal is to find those people that not only have the compassion, but also have the drive and the level of intelligence to do the job. I mean, health care quite obviously it's not an easy job, both intellectually or emotionally. I mean, it definitely takes its toll.

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So I'm always looking for this sort of combination of compassion, intelligence and somebody that ultimately can function without direct supervision. I don't want to have to spend my day constantly looking over somebody's shoulder to make sure that they're doing their job, right. 

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And furthermore, and I've said this for years, what I really want my ideal employee is the employee that turns around to me, after I asked them to do something, and they say, “Are you sure you really want to do it that way?” like I'm not infallible and I have no problem whatsoever with somebody asking a question and saying, “Don't you think maybe this would be a better way to do it?” Because you know what, that we all keep each other safe that way. I mean, medicine is one of these professions, where a mistake can literally cost the life. 

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And there is not a doctor out there that has been practicing for any period of time who has not made a mistake. It's just a thing. So to have really qualified people around you, that can look at it, and then go, “Wait a minute, can we talk about this for a second?” That is an invaluable thing. And I think the flip side of that, the way that you keep those people engaged in a way that you keep them in your organization, is they have to believe that management and ownership cares about them. 

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And I think that's something that we see becoming a real problem in veterinary medicine, as a lot of veterinary hospitals are being bought up by large corporations. What winds up happening is that corporation may be able to run things very efficiently from a balance sheet perspective. What happens is, in many cases, the love gets lost. And people that work in health care, we're sort of very emotional people on the sense that we need to believe that everybody cares. And we need to believe that the people that are above us in a hierarchy are really thinking about patient care before they're thinking about how much money are we making.

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And I've seen that happen with a veterinary hospital that I sold a few years ago. Almost as soon as it's sold, morale went in the toilet, because all of a sudden the staff didn't feel like the people that were running the hospital cared about them anymore, and it literally took a matter of a couple of months between, for everything to kind of fall apart. So for example, when I sat down with the staff when this whole COVID thing started, we talked about how we were going to do things. And one of the things I told them was, is one of my primary goals as we move into this uncharted territory, is I want to make sure that all of them stay safe, keep their jobs, continue to get paid, that it's very important to me that they are taken cared of.

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And that sort of stuff is invaluable. From the standpoint of staff retention, from the standpoint of staff being motivated and wanting to go above and beyond what they're asked to do. Everybody functions better in an environment where they think people care about them. And I think it's very easy for businesses to get to a place where that gets lost. And it doesn't take long for things to go back.

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Ross  

I think you've picked up so many great points. And of course, the environment that we're in means that we might have to dig deeper in certain situations. Many businesses that are in this survival mode, that now is absolutely the time to show just how much you care. And some of it, yes, we have to make difficult decisions. But we don't have to then deliver them in a way in which is inhumane. 

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Gary 

Exactly. 

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Ross  

And I want to pick up on a couple of bits. So the first one was about emotional, almost resilience. It's incredibly impactful to deal with challenging situations where the outcome is sometimes not the desired one. And that is a hit on people's emotions of being able to be resilient to come back with joy, with love with compassion and care and not be broken from that is a special characteristic. Do you think that's something that's innate or do you think you can develop that over time by the support of people around you and things? What's your kind of aspect on that? Because maybe listeners are feeling some emotional impact of the changes, there's almost been a death of certain things, maybe their job, their bits? How, in what you've seen, that has built an environment of high emotional resilience from dealing with trauma over time? How might we learn from that, for others that may be facing it? That's less regular for them?

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Gary

Sure. So, I think to answer your question, some of this is innate in people. I mean, some people are just inherently better at sort of dealing with these kinds of things and moving on and others. I think not to get too far into the weeds here. But when you look at sort of the brain physiology of people, for example, you can have two people that experienced the same traumatic event, and one of them has PTSD, and has a really hard time dealing with it, and the other one just kind of moves right on. And, honestly, some of that's brain chemistry, some of us are better at doing that than others. And you see this in healthcare, the people that either have a hard time doing that innately or cannot adapt to it, they burn out. 

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Because you cannot, if you get deeply emotionally attached to your patients, it's very, very difficult to do this job, whether it's veterinary or human medicine. I mean, look at what these healthcare workers on the human side are dealing with right now. I mean, it's unimaginable to me, if I think about it too much, I start to tear up it. Just the level of suffering and the level of death that they're having to manage right now. I can't even imagine how they're going to process all that.

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But you do learn how to do it and it's a balance between, it's very important that you stay emotionally attached to what you're doing. I mean, you can't become the borg about this and just do it like you're working on an assembly line, but at the same time you have to keep a little bit of distance so you don't get too close and wrapped up in it and things spiral in a bad way. 

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So, absolutely, there are sort of adaptive ways to do this. And I think it's very important for people to realize, whether you're talking about patients in health care or sort of everything that everybody's dealing with right now, whether it's family, financial, what have you. You know what, the sun also rises, this will pass, it's not the end of the world. And we'll be fine in the grander scheme of things. 

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And, I mean, I think it's very, very easy and very understandable that you can get kind of wrapped up in this vortex of “Oh, my God, things are horrible,” but we just need to retain some perspective. Certainly one thing that I would suggest that people do is if they're, I mean, be careful about how much how much news media you take in, during the course of the day, I mean, it it just repeats over and over again, it's not like they're giving you new information every hour. 

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But boy, if you watch that too much, and I found myself getting sucked into that, like, I'll come home after work, and watch, like two hours on the news, and boy, am I not in a real good mental space after that. So I mean, I think, take in what you need to take in and then move on and focus on something positive, whether it's playing music, or reading a book, or spending time with family or whatever, wherever your joy is you just have to keep focusing on that.

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Ross  

I think there's one of the communities that I'm in and where I met your wife, Lee a strategic coach, and one of the gifts that I feel I've gained from there is this practice of mindset of positivity. And I feel it is a practice, the gratitude circles that lead us with the team and things like that they are great antidotes to difficult challenging times, that it trains, the eyes and the ears and the mind to look for the positive aspects in life, the sunrising, having a meal with a family member, being able to connect via Zoom to a treatment that's in the room, 50 yards inside the building. So I think that is a definite thing that whether somebody has the brain makeup, the innate ability, what we can do is look for the good, it might be hard to find it. But if we look for it, the chances are we might find it, if we're not even looking for it, then the chances are desperate.

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Gary 

Yeah, you're absolutely right. And you brought up something really great that maybe we should expand upon a little bit. My wife Lee and the gratitude circle. I think this is something that is completely foreign to most people. But really all that is about is gathering who's ever around, standing in a circle, and just going one person at a time and saying one thing that you're grateful for at this moment. And you start to do that and yes, it absolutely changes your mindset, you just start to look at things a little bit different. I mean, I'm no expert in psychology, but you absolutely can see and feel the difference in people, once there is this conversation of let's talk about what we're grateful for. It's actually something that we do every time I have a staff meeting here in the office, we always start the staff meeting by going around and everybody saying one thing that they're grateful for, it really sets the tone for a positive meeting and positive outlook.

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Ross  

And I have to say, I had the pleasure of experiencing that with your team back at the beginning of the year. And coach calls it Positive Focus, start every meeting in that way, leaves us on the gratitude circle. I think it's just, choosing how do we want to live our lives. And being one of the things I noticed was no matter how you turn up, that it becomes accumulative and it layers. So whether I am feeling grateful right now or not, if I see three other people around me share what they're grateful for it affects me and it rubs off on me in a positive way and it lifts just the whole frequency of.

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Now I'm not sure whether that's because of who I am, I allow that to happen rather than I go in the gap and say, “Oh, they've got loads of things to be grateful for, what have I got to be grateful for?” So I think it's built up and something that has become just the part of your culture and the way you do things. And that's resonated, that it allows people to find that in other areas outside of the gratitude circle. So maybe when they are finding a challenging time or something didn't go right, that they're are able to bring that to their sense. 

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Gary  

Yeah, I mean, it's an acquired sort of coping mechanism like once you see it, then I mean it's kind of like what we were talking about earlier about alternative medicine like once you see that out there as an option for you, all of a sudden you realize it's there for you.

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Ross  

Yeah, yeah, I think it is a super powerful piece of just personal practice. And doing it in a group is at a level up and a power up for everybody and which are finding it very challenging. I think that's important. The other bit that I wanted to pick up on is the change that happened when one of your previous centers that you sold went into a different trajectory, should we say. Maybe the leadership changed, some of the care changed and team's ability to react and adapt to that, and for the organization to still grow and thrive.

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I think there's going to be many businesses facing this, this challenge where things aren't going to be the same. Certain people will not be back, certain businesses will not be back and it will be a new environment. So if you could or had have been involved in more of that, during the transition, how might you have managed that differently with all of your experiences, so that maybe others could learn from that kind of experience that you can see? 

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Gary

Sure, I mean and I think we talked about it a little bit before. And you know what this is true, whether you're talking about employees or whether you're talking about your kids, regardless of what it is, the magic in the interaction is the people that you're working with need to believe that you care. I mean, I can go to my staff and say, “You know what this just happened, this is going to affect us in a way that's not going to be super fun but, it might be tough, but we're going to work together, we're going to get through it. This is our plan and this is how we're going to be better off when it's all said and done.”

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It's very much a we're all in this together, rather than me saying, walking in the room and saying, “This is your new reality, deal with it. See you, bye.” and that I think that is the core difference in many cases between success and failure, you can approach the same problem with the same solution and get very different results. If the people that are ultimately going to solve that problem for you are personally invested in a solution or not.

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Ross  

I think there's so many things that are just simple to say. They make sense but it takes deliberate intention to do.

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Gary

It absolutely does.

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Ross

And it's something that needs repeating. This is not an intervention that's just done when there's a crisis, it's how does it build to become part of the operating system and the operating model for an organization? It's not “Oh, it's care week, so we're all going to show how we care.”

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Gary

Sure. 

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Ross  

It's being around, specifically your environment and team. I've spent lots of time with so many different organizations that have come together to solve a particular challenge. It's about innovation, or it's about a positioning piece or a marketing piece. And you can tell, it's so unnatural for them in the way that they're interacting, doing things even being asked for their opinion, sometimes.  

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Gary  

Sure.

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Ross  

When I came, the just comfort in that environment of collaborative problem solving, that their voice was being listened to, it was wanted to be heard, I think is rare. And I actually believe, I read I'm just trying to wrap my brains of the book, and I think it's, it'll come to me but there's an example in healthcare, where a pilot's wife goes in for routine operation for a sinuses and end up dying. And the doctor was being, should we say, told or requested to do something different by a subordinate. And because of his hierarchy, and various things, he dismissed that, he was so in the moment of the situation that he couldn't see what was going on and the subordinate could see what was going on, was trying to say, “I think we should be doing something different right now.” 

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Gary  

Yeap.

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Ross  

And one of the challenges in the book was talking about open feedback loops and closed feedback loops. Blackbox Thinking, that's the book. And a lot of what happens unfortunately in healthcare is these situations will then just stay inside that room. Maybe it's inside just that one practice center but it's certainly not shared across the industry, when things aren't quite right. Opposite to aviation, where something will happen and there's a industry that really…

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Gary

Then everything's out in the open.

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Ross  

Everything's out in the open and that openness for that feedback loop allows everyone to co-elevate and improve. I think that the challenges in healthcare is how open we are to what works or doesn't work and the openness to different modalities. So how would you like to? Or how do you think your approach could be embraced in other areas of healthcare to be more open minded? Or is that just an innate challenge? Because it's high risk?

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Gary  

I mean, the example that you just cited, I mean that is exactly the reason why I said earlier that you need to have those employees that will turn around and say, “Do you really want to do that? Are you sure you really want to do that?” because you know what, a good nurse makes you a better doctor. Because they will see things that you don't see. 

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And at the end of the day, I mean, I think I once heard somebody say that doctors don't actually treat patients, nurses treat patients, doctors diagnose and nurses actually treat patients. So a really good nurse will see things from a perspective that I will not see them from. And I will say that many times over my career, I think I've had better outcomes in my cases because of the input that I've gotten from my nurses. 

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And part of the issue that you bring up here, particularly as it pertains to human health care, because there's so much out there from the standpoint of liability, and lawsuits and that sort of thing, in many cases, physicians in particular are often counseled when things go wrong, to never actually admit that they could have done better or a mistake was made. Whereas it's so many times if you go to a person and you say, “You know what, look, this is what happened, this is what should have happened. I'm really sorry that this happened.” Clearly, that's not going to make that particular person's wife come back. But I think that that creates a very different scenario than what looks like a cover up. 

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Ross

The system orientates more around cover up and protection, and therefore it's almost the ball and chain to overall progress beyond that.

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Gary

It's very true. And as I was saying before, there's no doctor out there that's been practicing for any period of time, who hasn't done something that he wishes he did differently. I mean that's just the case and the more that we can be open about that stuff and share that stuff, the less likely maybe somebody else is going to make that mistake. And that's clearly true across the board, whether it's medicine or any other business, if we can be open and share with each other what worked, what didn't work, that just elevates everybody and makes everything better. Sometimes that is a difficult thing for people to accomplish though, whether or not it's sort of viscerally, emotionally, or from a legal standpoint, what they can say and can't say in a public forum. It's a tricky landscape they have to navigate.

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Ross  

I think it's an interesting one where it's about the risk size of prize and what's the gain of a lot of these things. And certainly an innovation when I was doing a lot in our innovation consultancy, was the concept of celebrating failure and fail forward. And all of these things, and you have organizations like Google that have killed by Google website of all the projects that they've killed, celebrating their failures. So learn from in healthcare, that is a really perverse concept I think, to celebrate failures is just not the way the system has been built.

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Gary  

Because in any cases, the failure is the death of a patient.

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Ross  

Death of a patient and liability and risks and all of those things. But how much more if I could wave a magic wand, what would healthcare look like? If for the last 10 years we've celebrated failure? How many more lives could we save in the future if that was something we embraced. I think it would be a very, very different world, it would be hard even to wrap our brains around what that might look like. But it would be interesting. Where is the line, where does the pendulum land between all of these different industries that can learn from each other in order to create a better tomorrow, because that's what it's about, right? 

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Gary

Yeah, absolutely. And you know what I mean, in the defense of healthcare, in many or most healthcare circles, doctors will do what are called M&M Rounds, which is morbidity and mortality rounds. So they will sit down together and bring cases of things that didn't go well. And that's not necessarily because somebody did something wrong. It's just that sometimes things in medicine don't go well, they don't go as expected. And it's a forum for everybody to sit down and say, “Okay, this is what went wrong, what could we have done differently in this case to get a better outcome? So that way it elevates everybody and everybody does better.”

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And I think, perhaps that's something that other businesses can look at doing as well. Just look at it from an M&M Round standpoint of like, “Okay, this interaction with this client or this business transaction, we did everything like we were supposed to do, but it didn't work out right. What happened and how can we prevent that happening in the future?”

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Ross  

I think it's great. And then some of the last bits in the wrap up the last five minutes was, I was having a conversation on another podcast guest and it was about scenario planning. And this ability strategically to foresight scenarios. And we didn't have scenario planning for the current pandemic, we don't have like we do for war games, the plans of building up the protocols, the logistics, the supply chains, of all of these things, we hadn't done that for pandemics.

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And I think there's the aftermath that we've just been talking about of what might have gone wrong in whatever it is the activity we've been doing. But this scenario planning of if something was to go wrong, what would it be beforehand, so it can be more of a strategic thought around, looking for them the opportunities for innovation. And often businesses are so busy in the business as usual, the things that are being faced with them right now to be able to come out and say, “How would we reinvent things?” 

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And I think you're a rarity in the industry that is part of your operating system is to be curious to look for the new things, not just because it's a new shiny object, but because you want to bring it in, understand how this might extend health and life and serve that to the world, which I think is a really beautiful thing that you work to do. Long may it continue and inspire others to do the same.

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If some of the listeners have been inspired by what you're up to or doing, they might even be in the same industry, or perhaps even another one. And they'd like to reach out to you to talk to you about any other concepts or thoughts, how could they get in touch?

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Gary 

They can get in touch through my office website would probably be the best way to go. The office website is clientservice@holisticvetcare.com

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Ross  

Okay. 

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Gary 

So if people want to send an email with a question or something that'll get forwarded to me. And I think it's also worth saying that I very much appreciate everything that you've said about me and about the business and you know what, it is very much a team effort. This is not a one man show. Both by sheer numbers and by gender, it is not a one man show. I have some very, very good and very capable people around me. And certainly, you know my wife, Lee. None of this happens without her. She is the person that in many ways is the visionary. 

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You know, I mean, from a medical perspective I’m the one that's always looking for something new, but from a business perspective, Lee’s the one who's always got her eyes on the horizon. Whereas very frequently I'm focused on, I have to treat this patient today or I have to get this accomplished today. So, it really takes a variety of skill sets. And it really just speaks to the old adage of always try to surround yourself with people smarter than you are because that is the key to success at the end of the day.

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Ross  

I couldn't agree more. And I think this balance of surrounding yourself with smart people, but smart in the right ways. Lee, who's a great maximizer and different people are required for businesses to grow. And you're absolutely right. It's full team effort and a great team that you've got. And a last piece I want you to share the story about the Tshirts that you had in school, in your veterinary school. As a last little piece of insight into you, that just made me smile of those things. So if you if you're up for sharing. 

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Gary 

Sure, sure. So one of the things that you do in veterinary school or as a veterinarian, depending on what types of animals you treat, is you do what's called palpate cows and palpating cows is a way to determine if they're pregnant. And the way that you do this is you stick your entire arm up their back end and you can feel their ovaries and their uterus, etc. It is as disgusting as it sounds. 

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So some enterprising person in my vet school put together a shirt. I went to University of Florida. And there was a picture like a cartoon picture of a person like with their arm inside a cow and it said, “University of Florida, College of Veterinary Medicine, the hardest part is getting in.”

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Ross  

Love it, love it. Thank you, you’ve been a great guest. And I wish you, Lee and Abby your daughter, a fantastic future. And thank you very much for sharing.

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Gary 

Thank you so much. It's been wonderful.

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Voiceover  

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Outro

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