Not for the aesthetic. Those were just the bowls we had.
We drank out of beakers, too.
My dad was a cardiologist. My mom taught at Vanderbilt med school. My sister became a clinical psychologist. Their friends were all doctors. Functionally, our household was a medical practice with a kitchen attached.
Fast forward to my disastrous semester of molecular biology in college, and I quickly discovered the world would be a safer place if I never practiced medicine. You’re welcome.
Still, I’ve spent the last 30 years in the business of healthcare. And growing up the way I did taught me something most business people learn the hard way:
Doctors do not think like the rest of us.
It’s not personality. It’s training.
Lawyers are trained to identify and mitigate risk. Finance people model scenarios to engineer profit. Accountants are trained to follow rules. Creative finance gets you the corner office. Creative accounting gets you incarcerated.
Medicine has its own operating system, and one principle sits above all the others:
First, do no harm.
That changes everything.
Doctors are trained to test. Observe. Wait. Reassess. Ask the patient to call if anything changes. Every decision carries weight because the cost of being wrong is a person.
Business rewards a very different instinct. Move quickly. Make decisions with incomplete information. Iterate in public. Entire industries celebrate the idea of “go fast and break things.”
Healthcare doesn’t have that luxury.
Ulili Onovakpuri, managing partner at Kapor Capital, said it perfectly:
“The thing about healthcare is you can’t go fast and break things, because the things you’re breaking are people.”
So when you ask a physician to make a quick business decision with imperfect data, you are not asking them to be bold. You are asking them to override one of the deepest reflexes of their professional training.
In medicine, decisions without evidence end up in front of a review board. That instinct does not disappear just because the conversation moved from a patient chart to a P&L.
Over the years, I’ve worked with surgeons, therapists, and clinicians of every stripe. Most are brilliant, generous, fascinating people doing extraordinary work.
The stereotype that doctors make poor business leaders is lazy and incomplete. But it exists because medicine and business optimize for different things. One minimizes harm. The other often rewards speed.
The real work is learning how to translate between those two worlds.
And honestly, the best lesson I ever learned about business came from watching my dad practice medicine.
Whenever another physician referred him a patient, he wrote them a letter.
Patient summary. Treatment plan. Outcome. A sincere thank you.
Every single time.
Doctors across the state kept referring patients to him for 30 years.
At the time, I thought it was just professionalism. Looking back, it was something more powerful than that.
He closed the loop.
He never left people wondering what happened next.
Applied to business, that habit is a superpower.
If you work with physicians on the business side of healthcare, three things carry most of the weight:
Lead with outcomes. Start where they start. Who benefits? What problem gets solved? What does success look like?
Bring data. Physicians are evidence-driven by training. They do not want to be first without proof. Show them the metrics that connect your plan to the outcome they care about.
Follow up. Report back on what worked, what didn’t, and what comes next. Close the loop. Every time.
That’s most of the job.
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