Published on Friday, September 05, 2008
(Editor’s note: This introduces a new twice-a-month column featuring Tucson area CEOs.)
There is no shortage of high-profile, egotistical, high maintenance chief executive officers in the business press. It makes one wonder whether ordinary, humble leaders stand a chance. A discussion with Ted Ranney, CEO of Pima Heart, shows the answer is: most definitely.
Pima Heart is a partnership of 21 physicians who are both shareholders wanting to maximize revenue and profits and employees with all the challenges employees bring to any manager. The team consists of 160 medical and other professionals providing cardiac care throughout Southern Arizona.
In 1994 Ranney completed business school in Cleveland. As a child he had no specific career plans.
"I had no specific dreams that I had to give up," he said about his career in business. "My experience is that it is very difficult to plan a life. The way things happen is that you just try and be open to the things that come your way; with eyes open and a realistic sense of yourself. Then, when things come along you can measure your gut-level reaction about whether something is a good fit."
Ranney knew he wanted to work in a dynamic industry — one with many opportunities to exercise his creativity.
He narrowed his choices to computing or healthcare, ultimately choosing the latter. He went to work for a medical insurance company that enrolled him in their Los Angeles management development program. Ranney was subsequently assigned to the managed care side of the company’s business. By 1999, a series of mergers and acquisitions found Ted managing the Tucson market for PacifiCare, another large medical insurer.
Ranney says he is "the kind of person who likes to ask why — a lot!"
More than simple curiosity, why provides the context for his understanding of how things fit together — what he calls "pattern recognition."
It’s his ability to observe loosely related facts and events and discover the subtle relationships that connect them all — that create the context in which they exist. This is one of several skills Ranney considers important to the success of a CEO.
At PacifiCare Ranney found it difficult to find answers to his why questions and he began to look elsewhere. In 1999 Pima Heart was seeking a new CEO. At 34 years old, Ranney saw this as an opportunity to exercise his creativity, and create his own context.
He has served as Pima Heart’s chief executive for nine years. The group is doing as well or better than 90 percent of similar organizations nationwide. Clearly Ranney has found a formula that works.
He says his major contribution is diplomacy, a critical skill for managing a partnership. He’s also "good at navigating through and focusing on those things that actually have an impact."
Ranney considers himself a facilitator who applies the laws of conservation of energy to managing an organization.
"We have a limited amount of energy," he says. "If I focus on myself or internally on the organization, we won’t have sufficient energy for our customers. The most important job of management is ensuring that the organization’s energy remains focused on serving its customers."
He makes it sound easy. The most difficult part, he says, is seeing "the fine line between playing a prominent role in the resolution of an issue and being prominently identified with one side or the other." The former is the CEO’s job and the latter may ultimately alienate everybody and be the beginning of the end in a partnership environment.
"People will hang all sorts of baubles on the truth" he says. "To succeed in this job we need to deal with what’s true and avoid focusing on the story, the personal aspect of the issue."
When asked what keeps him sane Ranney says he meditates, but more importantly, he has learned not to take things personally.
"If you’re open to the lessons that are out there" he says "life teaches you everything you need to know. There are always options and we can see them if we can avoid getting caught up in the drama."
For those who might be considering a "C-level" position or starting his or her own business, Ranney suggests you "need to be oriented to service to others before service to self. If you want to unlock energy in others, that’s the key."
In addition to service, he places a strong value on selflessness — the idea that whatever the problem or challenge, "it’s not about me."
"If someone is critical or appears eager to take advantage, the solution is not in the story but rather in how I interpret and react to the story. As we grow we realize that every story is simply one more piece of useful information," he says.
The average healthcare CEO serves for less than nine years. Now that he’s in his ninth year at Pima Heart, Ranney has found a way to pursue profits without sacrificing personal integrity — even with 21 cooks in the kitchen.
As he said near the close of our interview, "Sometimes you just have to get yourself out of the way!"
Contact Gary Hirsch at gary.hirsch@vistage.com or (520) 225-0373 to suggest a CEO or business owner for future "Inner-view." Hirsch is a group chair and executive coach with Vistage International - www.vistage.com. He leads a group of Tucson CEOs, company presidents and business owners who meet monthly to become better leaders, make better decisions and achieve better results, typically growing their businesses two to third times faster after joining. Members have access to expert speakers, executive coaching and an online community of 14,000 CEOs and business owners. Inner-view appears the second and fourth week of each month in Inside Tucson Business.
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