Chapter 20: Growing Research and Faculty Careers
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Description
Here Dr. Mendelsohn focuses on his leadership style and its application to academic growth at MD Anderson. His aim, he states, is to “build what I’m working on into the best.” He does this by building units internally and also by building collaboratively, “when there is excellence nearby.” MD Anderson, he notes, is a very top-down institution, and so it was important to set up a structure with clear leadership for different operational areas: the CFO and vice presidents for education, care, and research. He also talks about the importance of involving faculty when undertaking new initiatives and uses the example of the growth of South Campus. He admits that the sheer size of MD Anderson has been a challenge as his experience was with much smaller environments. He maintained personal contact with faculty during his presidency and talks about individuals coming to him for career advice, giving an example of a discussion about taking a chairmanship at another institution. He states that a leader of MD Anderson needs to state and restate his/her vision “like a mantra” and confirms that Dr. DePinho has stated a very clear vision, one that he classifies as “a big hairy goal.”
Identifier
MendelsohnJ_03_20121017_C20
Publication Date
10-17-2012
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
John Mendelsohn, MD, Oral History Interview, October 17, 2012
Topics Covered
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center - The AdministratorThe Administrator The Leader Understanding the Institution MD Anderson Culture Leadership Institutional Processes Professional Practice The Professional at Work Professional Values, Ethics, Purpose On Leadership
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Disciplines
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Oncology | Oral History
Transcript
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What else can you tell me about your philosophy of leadership and particularly how you led MD Anderson?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
I think becoming president of MD Anderson was the best course in how to be a leader. When I came here, the place was in much disarray, and we’ve gone into that a bit. I learned that you need to set up structure where it’s very clear who is in charge of what. When I came here, there were 2 independent financial officers; one for the hospital and one for the cancer center. The hospital is part of the cancer center, so it was crazy. I spent a lot of time on this, and we did set up the structure, which I think works well, where we have 3 executive vice-presidents. One is in charge of the business and infrastructure, one is in charge of the academics, which is research and education, and one is in charge of the clinical care. The way I set it up was I wanted to know what was going on in all of their bailiwicks, and I wanted to be involved in the decisions that involve major strategic questions and allocations of resources, but I wanted them to run their areas. You have to have strong people, but also people that are willing to lay their cards out and don’t hold them close to the chest, at least with the rest of the executive leadership. We had meetings every week. As travel increased, we probably averaged every other week, the 4 of us, along with Adrienne Lang, who is from my office, who became a 5th member of that group as a vice-president. She made sure we were tracking together. I also met individually with each executive vice president on a weekly basis.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What was Adrienne Lang’s role?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
She had a very unusual title; we used a title that had come from Dr. LeMaistre, and it really wasn’t the right title. Now she is the Vice-President of Executive Operations. That’s a new title. That seemed to work. When we do new things, I like the faculty to be involved in the thinking; but in many ways this is a very top-down organization. The president has huge amounts of control, but if you use it wisely and the people that work here know you’re listening to their opinions, you get a lot more done than if you just announce, “This is what we’re going to do.” Adrienne Lang coordinated this balance of input into our decision making. For instance, when we want to decide how to grow our programs on the south campus, I had a good idea in my mind, with Dr. Kripke, of what we wanted to do . But, we were willing to say, “The faculty may come up with some things we haven’t thought of.” So we got faculty leaders together, and we had these meetings that are called “retreats” on Saturday mornings and took minutes. Then we had subcommittees that went into the areas that seemed the most promising. When we started developing programs on the south campus, it was very interesting because people knew we were going to be putting up new buildings and money would go into certain programs. Quite honestly, I didn’t get 1 complaint from a faculty member, “What happened to my program?” They knew that this was a group decision, not top-down, and that their peers had been in the room, their chair had been in the room, and I think an organization works better that way. It was easier when we had 700 faculty than when we have 1500 faculty. Bigness is a new challenge, but my leadership philosophy was created working in smaller environments. It began at UCSD, where I was, as an associate professor, appointed head of a new cancer center that needed to be built. It was a matrix cancer center. I didn’t have control of the surgeons. I didn’t have control of the radiotherapists. I also was head of medical oncology, so I had control of the medical oncologists. When you’re in that position, you’re putting together a cancer center in a medical school, you’ve got to have the chairman of medicine, the chairman of surgery, and the dean behind you. I learned a lot about how to listen to people and set up environments where they feel their opinions are being taken into consideration as plans are being made. It’s much easier when the cancer center is also the academic center, and I had that experience at Sloan-Kettering and then here. I believe there are no secrets, and I believe that there has to be transparency, and there has to be fairness in terms of salary levels and resource allocations. There are 2 philosophies in American universities. One is you go find some superstars and give them the huge resources, and everybody else doesn’t get the same deals. Then there’s the philosophy that everybody gets the same deals. I’m somewhere in the middle, but during my 15 years as president, I tried to be sure we’re giving assistant professors here the protected time and the resources so that they could build their careers. It isn’t just that I want to get the superstars into the national academy. I wanted every faculty member working here feeling that their career was important to me, and I talked about that. I believe it’s true. I often had people come to me for career advice, and the deal was you’re not talking to me as president; you’re talking to me as someone who has been around and had experience. When you consider accepting a job as chairman of a department elsewhere while you’re working at MD Anderson and having a great time and doing wonderful research, what are the pros and cons of taking on the leadership responsibilities? If you can do it here, fine, but there isn’t room for everybody to be a leader here. We talked a lot about that with people at the assistant, associate, and full professor level and people that were serving as department chairs here that were given opportunities to run cancer centers. If you’re going to retain those people here, and I’d like to retain them, they’ve got to feel they’re getting opportunities and resources. Anybody being recruited is always offered a wonderful package. If they feel they’ve been treated fairly and have resources to do what they want to do, you’re in a much stronger position to say, “Look, you go to X medical school and you’ll have more authority, but you’re also going to have more accountability. You’re going to be competing for resources with the academic cardiologists there and the large psychiatry department there and many other disciplines, and you’re not going to have what you have here, which is a clinic that is focused on cancer and filled with people in your specialty.” If you’re a surgeon caring for breast cancer patients, you’ve got outstanding medical breast people and radiation breast people and imaging breast people and pathologists working together in your clinical specialty. You’re a research engine. If you go somewhere else, you’re going to have to set that up, but you will not be able to turn to 50 other people that are only interested in breast cancer. You have to decide what gives you your kicks. If being a boss is important to you and creating a program, even though it may be smaller in scope, it’s your program; it could be reasonable to go somewhere. Those are the kind of discussions we have. That gets back to the idea that we started this little sector. I feel everyone that’s here on our faculty should merit and should get enough resources to build their career. It’s never a totally level playing field, because there are superstars, research leaders in their field, and you want to give them what they need, and they need more.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Is there anything else you wanted to add about your leadership philosophy?
John Mendelsohn, MD:
I learned that as the leader of MD Anderson, one of his or her key goals is to have a vision for where the institution could and ought to go and say it over and over and over again. It becomes a mantra. If you go to the airport and look at all the books that are for sale about how to become a successful businessman, this is said over and over again, and it’s true. We spend a lot of time on that, and I think the vision statement is really important. I think Dr. DePinho stated a very clear vision. In his most recent meetings with the faculty, he said we’re going to take 5 cancers and create Moon Shot programs to greatly impact these patients. The other cancers are going to get resources, too; they’re just not as developed for rapid, major clinical impact, so they’re not going to be the Moon Shots. We’re not ready to go to the moon in some areas. He’s setting what they call in the textbooks “big, hairy goals,” and we did that too. Dr. Clark did that, and Dr. LeMaistre did that, so I think Anderson has been fortunate having presidents who propose big, hairy goals.
Recommended Citation
Mendelsohn, John MD and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 20: Growing Research and Faculty Careers" (2012). Interview Chapters. 1436.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1436
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