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News
April 1, 2009
From the gridiron to the C-suite
Dan Wilford brought intensity, focus to his leadership of Memorial Hermann
By Jessica Zigmond (Article posted on March 23, 2009 in Modern Healthcare)
It’s
fitting that former Memorial Hermann Healthcare System President and
Chief Executive Officer Dan Wilford, a retired National Football
League official, would name Tom Landry, Bill Walsh and Mike Ditka as
his favorite NFL coaches, and keep a quote by the iconic Vince
Lombardi in his office for years.
As Wilford, 68, is inducted into Modern Healthcare’s Hall of Fame,
his friends and former colleagues—without knowing it—have described
traits that he shares in common with the NFL Hall of Famers he has
so long admired.
First, there’s his Methodist upbringing and deep devotion to the
Christian faith, which mirrors longtime Dallas Cowboys coach Landry,
Wilford’s favorite coach and the one who his twin brother, Ned, says
Wilford most resembles. A 1972 Sports Illustrated article says
Landry, a former president of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes,
used to host Sunday morning, pregame devotional meetings in which
guest speakers urged players to be “good Christian warriors.”
Wilford, the son of a Methodist minister, began each board meeting
with a prayer and says he views his career as a calling.
Like the late San Francisco 49ers coach Walsh, Wilford is known for
his keen ability to evaluate talent, a skill that former Memorial
Hermann Chief Operating Officer Ken Wine says Wilford used deftly as
he shifted employees into other departments where they performed
better.
With Ditka (the Chicago Bear who was inducted into the Pro Football
Hall of Fame in 1988 as a player, not a coach), Wilford shares a
love of fierce competition. Richard Bettis, former president and CEO
of the Texas Hospital Association, says Wilford’s intensity is
infectious. “It’s not to intimidate you,” Bettis says. “It’s almost
to shame you. He’s so intense—why am I not as intense?”
And then there’s Lombardi. Wilford’s brother says the former Green
Bay Packers coach was too rigid, too hard-nosed, for there to be any
fair comparison between the two men. But while their personal styles
may have been different, their work ethic and attitude toward
achievement were very much the same. “The quality of a man’s life is
in direct proportion to his commitment to excellence, regardless of
his chosen field of endeavor,” reads the Lombardi quote in Wilford’s
office.
That determination helped Lombardi transform professional football
in America, as it helped Wilford transform Houston’s Memorial
Hospital into what is now the Memorial Hermann Healthcare System in
the Texas Medical Center. And if that 1997 merger between Memorial
and Hermann Hospital was the pinnacle of Wilford’s career—his Super
Bowl, so to speak—then his journey there was just as arduous,
disciplined and well-executed as a winning season.
Born in Memphis, Tenn., on June 11, 1940, Wilford grew up in
Arkansas with his parents, older sister, Ann, and twin brother, Ned.
The family moved to a handful of towns in the state before Dan and
Ned graduated from high school in 1958 and left for the University
of Mississippi, where Dan played fullback and end, while Ned played
running back. Their love of football continued to grow, and both men
would serve later as officials in college football, with Dan in the
Missouri Valley Conference, then the Southwest Conference, and,
eventually, in the NFL in the early to mid-1980s.
In 1962, the two brothers finished college as distinguished military
graduates in the Army’s Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. The
genesis of their careers in healthcare began there, as both men—then
second lieutenants—chose the medical service corps, which introduced
them to hospital management.
Dan spent two years at the U.S. Army Hospital in Fort Leonard Wood,
Mo., before he left for Washington University in St. Louis, where he
earned a master’s degree in hospital administration. By this time,
he had married his high school sweetheart, Anne, and the couple had
their first child, a daughter named Kelly. The program at Washington
University required a year of study and a year of residency, in
which graduate students rotated through all of the departments of a
hospital. Wilford was eager to make his way to Tulsa, Okla., where
he heard good things from his classmates about Jim Harvey, then the
progressive, 36-year-old CEO of Hillcrest Medical Center. Wilford
considers the late Harvey as one of his mentors.
“He was a big believer in strategic planning, which was not new but
not many people had sophisticated planning processes,” Wilford says.
“He was big into management by objectives: setting goals, measuring
performance. That was relatively new then,” he adds. “He kind of
thought the hospital should be a laboratory to try new things.”
On to Tulsa
After finishing graduate school in 1966, Wilford moved with his
young family—which now included son Jeff—to Tulsa, where he worked
as Hillcrest’s associate administrator (a COO in today’s terms) for
nearly 10 years.
“I left Tulsa in 1974 and went to North Mississippi Medical Center,
a 600-bed hospital” in Tupelo, says Wilford, who served as the
facility’s president. “I didn’t know how much I didn’t know.”
The experience there proved to be a good training ground. A decade
later, Wilford took the helm of Memorial Hospital in Houston, a
position he would hold for 18 years, including the top job at the
merged organization. He says the two most critical aspects of being
a CEO include being able to work well with hospital board members
and physicians. “Having the right instincts and the right training
was really a key to success,” he says.
Ask anyone who has worked with Wilford, though, and they will tell
you his success had more to do with his discipline and the long
hours he devoted to his work. His good friend Gus Blackshear, a
former managing partner with the law firm Fulbright & Jaworsky, met
Wilford in 1984 when Blackshear worked as an attorney for Memorial.
He says Wilford would typically arrive at the office at 7 a.m. or
before; would leave around 6 p.m. to have dinner with his family;
and would work again until midnight. Blackshear also commented on
Wilford’s strong spiritual side, something that undoubtedly fostered
the strong moral code Wilford lived by personally and
professionally.
“I remember him saying, ‘It was impossible to do the wrong thing
right. … If we do the right thing, the bottom line and financial
success will follow,’ ” says former Memorial Hermann COO Wine. “We
worked hard to have a successful financial operation—but that was an
outcome; it wasn’t where we started,” Wine adds.
1996 was a big year for the then-56-year-old Wilford. The American
College of Healthcare Executives honored him with the association’s
Gold Medal Award as the nation’s outstanding healthcare executive in
the same year that Hermann approached Memorial about a merger. A
teaching hospital, Hermann lost $64 million the year before it
merged with Memorial, a loss that Wilford attributes to the
hospital’s strategy of purchasing physician practices throughout
Houston with the hope that they would provide services to patients
at Hermann, a costly decision that ultimately failed. And Memorial
had to contend with another challenge: Hermann was a major teaching
hospital, and Memorial was not.
“Over the years, if you worked with doctors, you can work with them
in a private setting,” Wilford says. “The medical school structure
and bureaucracy is something we had to be patient with. Within two
years, we were in the black.”
Today, more than 4,000 physicians at Memorial Hermann—which
celebrated its centennial in 2007—serve the Houston area through
nine hospitals with two additional campuses. Wilford continued as
the system’s CEO until the fall of 2002, when he decided to retire
early at age 62.
After years of long hours and working weekends, Wilford and his
wife, Anne, were eager to enjoy retirement at their newly purchased
second home in Tellico Village, Tenn., 35 miles outside of
Knoxville. The dream was short-lived, however. On March 13, 2003, as
the couple drove to their new place, they were caught in a horrible
rainstorm, which resulted in a car crash that killed Anne instantly
and left Wilford with critical injuries. One former colleague
remembers there being nearly 400 people to greet Wilford as he
arrived by helicopter to Memorial Hermann Southwest, where he spent
11 days in the hospital’s intensive-care unit.
Wilford recovered, and eventually remarried. Now living with his
wife, Cindy, in Sugar Land, Texas, the accomplished former CEO—who
has co-authored two books, Trust Matters: New Directions in Health
Care Leadership (1998) and You Threw the Flag … Now … You Make the
Call: A Primer on Leadership Accountabilities (with his brother,
Ned, in 2002)—looks back on his career in America’s hospitals with
both satisfaction and appreciation.
“Some people are blessed by their professions and some are cursed by
their professions,” Wilford says. “I think I was called into
hospital management, and I enjoyed every day of it.”