I’m so pleased that Goal Play! continues to find attentive audiences around the world. Here’s a tweet from a reader in Vancouver!
It’s been a while since I’ve posted a Goal Play! update on these pages. The book continues to resonate with audiences around the world. My most recent appearance was in Tel Aviv, Israel, for the annual conference of the Israel Society for Quality in Health Care. The audience comprised 1,200 healthcare professionals from around the country, and I was pleased to impart some of my favorite stories from Goal Play!
Meanwhile, sales of the book (paper, ebook, and audiobook) continue apace, now reaching over 12,000 in just under 5 years.
I’ve been so heartened by the continued success of Goal Play! in the books stores and on Amazon and other e-commerce sites. People from all around the world and in all walks have life have found it engaging and helpful. Thanks so much for your support.
It is always a pleasure to attend the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s annual forum, and I was fortunate to meet some great folks there. One is Barry Lyons, a pharmacist from Saskatchewan. Here you see him and me at the bookstore, holding one of our favorite books!
It was even nicer to receive this note from Barry today:
“We met briefly at the IHI conference in December, and I just came across your business card today, and remembered that I had said that I would share my presentation about leadership in pharmacy, using my experience as a baseball coach, modeled on your book.
“Here is the link to the presentation: http://prezi.com/xrfibhsge5pd/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy&rc=ex0share
“I hope that you find it of some interest.”
Check it out. I think he does a really fine job with the topic.
What a nice surprise to see this notification on Twitter!
Many thanks to Damian Ferrie, CEO of Inner South Community Health, for the invitation to explore leaderships issues with a number of his staff people. As explained on their website:
We provide health and community services in the inner southern region of Melbourne. We cover all ages from children to older people, and work along different stages from prevention and early intervention, through to treatment and the long-term management of complex or chronic conditions. Our funding comes from local, state and federal Government funders, philanthropic organisations, private donors and bequests.
As expected, I found a dedicated and thoughtful group of people. Some are shown here, along with their copies of Goal Play!
We had a nice chance to get acquainted and explore several of the leadership lessons contained in the book.
I was invited to be the keynote speaker at the Alfred Health Top 100 Leadership Conference, a session devoted to the topic “Transforming Health Services.” As is often the case, I illustrated the concept of “a learning organization” with references from Goal Play!, and all of the attendees received a copy of the book. It’s remarkable what lessons the 12- and 14-year-old soccer players have to offer to people in health care and other fields!
The surprise for me today was the presence of Karen Ginnivan, a staff member trained in visual note-taking, who made an artistic rendition of my presentation in real time as I was speaking. Here is one sample, depicting one of the chapters from Goal Play! I think she did a great job!
It’s always an honor to be invited to present to leadership forums of different kinds of companies, but especially in the health care world. There are so many overlapping leadership lessons to be learned between sports and hospitals. After all, in both settings, leaders are, in essence, coaches, trying to help their teams become learning organizations. I’ve found that my stories about coaching little girls resonate well with doctors and nurses and hospital administrators. After all, we’re just trying to grow and learn individually and collectively.
Here’s a scene from my recent presentation to the Southwest Sydney Local Health District. The setting was a leadership development forum for clinicians and admininstrators. As you can see, Goal Play! was a prominent part of the talk.
I’ve been having a wonderful time meeting with folks at the New South Wales Clinical Excellence Commission. This is an agency with a broad-ranging agenda to improve the safety and quality of patient based care in Australia’s largest state. Today’s audience were principally the Directors of Clinical Governance, the people responsible for enhancing clinical care in the 17 local health districts spread across the state. Also attending was Kim Oates (left), Director of Undergraduate Quality and Safety Education for the CEC.
My primary topic was on leadership approaches that help bring about the cultural change necessary to reduce harm in hospitals, drawing especially on lessons from my book Goal Play!
Following this, we engaged in a negotiation module using one of my favorite exercises, Michael Wheeler’s “Win as Much as You Can.” Here you see some reactions of the participants as they experienced relationship changes with some of their colleagues as the game progressed. It was an important lesson in considering the structure, context, and people engaged in a negotiation, all with an eye to creating sustainable negotiated agreements that can bring value to the parties.
I was so pleased to be invited to speak at the annual meeting of the Hospital Association of South Africa and talk about “The Role of Leadership in Leading Quality Improvement.” In honor of the occasion, I proudly wore my Bafana Bafana jersey, the uniform of the South African national soccer team. Of course, the lessons and stories from Goal Play! featured prominently in the speech.
I pointed out that my leadership lessons were already working, in that the team (admittedly one of the worst in the world) had–during my short stay in South Africa–maintained a undefeated record. People were kind to avoiding pointing out that the period in question just covered two matches!
Goal Play! 