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September 28, 2009
Q&A: Earl Lewis, Fred Sanfilippo and Mike Mandl
Leading from a position of strength

What originally had been intended as an 18-month evaluation process of the strategic plan was accelerated to an eight-month assessment period as Emory, along with other universities across the country, adjusted its planning in light of new economic realities.

“Many, many people worked extremely hard to say here’s what we want to do, here’s where we want to make investments. We applaud the Emory community, who worked so diligently through pretty difficult times, for advocating that we accelerate the process, and for participating so enthusiastically and successfully in it,” says Provost Earl Lewis, executive vice president for academic affairs, and other members of the strategic plan implementation executive committee: Mike Mandl, executive vice president for finance and administration; and Fred Sanfilippo, executive vice president for health affairs and CEO, Woodruff Health Sciences Center.

In interviews with Emory Report, Lewis, Mandl and Sanfilippo discussed how the plan’s three strategic priorities resonate throughout the University:

Quality

Emory Report: What moves Emory forward on the path from excellence to eminence?
Earl Lewis: The people who comprise our community are the keys: we start with the faculty who are first-rate teachers, scholars and clinicians — individuals who are in very fundamental ways altering what we know.

Then we want to be a place that attracts bright students on the undergraduate, graduate and professional levels, because it’s those students who are the key to sustaining whatever we do. They are the ones who will ask questions that will make us look in a new way at issues we think we have resolved.

Add to that mix a high-quality staff. What you realize when you work for a university, particularly in senior administration, is that faculty are important, students are important, but in a complex organization with 23,000 employees you rely from the very beginning on a highly qualified and motivated staff in all areas.
I think it’s these individuals, their quality and development, that we have to focus on, and the strategic plan moves us along the path to doing so.

ER: What investments will we make to maintain the quality and development of Emory community members?
Lewis: We’ll continue to work with deans and faculty in identifying individuals and clusters of faculty who relate to the highest priorities of both schools and colleges, and of the University.

The Faculty Distinction Fund will focus on recruiting our top choices in a select number of fields. We have to hire our first choices if we want to continue to make the right kinds of investment in the short term.
One of the most explicit investments for staff coming out of the strategic plan are programs addressing work-balance issues sponsored through the WorkLife Resource Center.

For undergraduate students, our emphasis will remain on recruitment and financial aid, with a special focus on securing the funds to sustain the Emory Advantage program. And once we get students here, we want to create a signature experience for undergraduate students by focusing on programs related to student engagement, and link experiential learning to classroom learning.

My office is working with academic divisions, Campus Life, the Office of University-Community Partnerships and other units across the University to ensure that undergraduates are having the experience they want and what we think they should have. Outside of the strategic plan, we spent a lot of time last year talking with undergraduates about their experiences at Emory, and as a result we’ll begin putting efforts in place to improve the overall undergraduate experience.

Distinction

Emory Report: What will make Emory distinctive?
Fred Sanfilippo: Developing innovative, high-value programs that are hard to duplicate elsewhere. This happens when outstanding faculty and staff interface across different areas of interests in an environment that stimulates and facilitates such interactions. It’s not easy — if it was, everyone would be doing it — it means taking people out of their comfort zones.

ER: What are the challenges?
Sanfilippo: There are structural and programmatic barriers: Structural challenges require resources, including space, people and funds, to promote interdisciplinary interactions; while the programmatic challenges are to overcome the discomfort of working outside one’s discipline and area of control.

ER: How is Emory creating distinctive programs?
Sanfilippo: We have internal and external assets that help make this happen, and the strategic plan provides resources to stimulate interdisciplinary initiatives at a university level.

In the health sciences, for example, our new Orthopaedics & Spine Hospital has brought together neurosurgeons, orthopedists, cell biologists, and many other disciplines in a focused physical setting, while our new Center for Critical Care Medicine is bringing together a range of specialties across multiple hospitals.

We also have extraordinary relationships and opportunities with external groups. No one else in the country has a cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional program such as the top-ranked biomedical engineering department we have with Georgia Tech. The NIH grant that established the Atlanta Clinical and Translational Science Institute last year partners Emory with Morehouse School of Medicine, Georgia Tech, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, and many other collaborators including the Georgia Research Alliance, UGA, and the CDC. The P30 grant at Winship Cancer Institute that gave us recognition this year as the only National Cancer Institute-designated cancer center in Georgia includes Georgia Tech, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and Grady Memorial Hospital, and our new Center for Comprehensive Informatics serves as another highly successful model.

These relationships — cutting across disciplines and organizations — continue to develop with enormous benefits to our faculty, students and patients, as well as to society as a whole.

ER: What will the next five years bring in health care?
Sanfilippo: Emory should be a leader in terms of identifying all treatment modalities — conventional and alternative — and those approaches should be developed through predictive personalized health models to enhance health and healing.

We know that there are many advances that have proven effective in some people, but we don’t have a clue as to why. So we need to develop risk-benefit profiles for individuals reflecting the fact that what may work for one person may not work for another. This approach takes traditional medicine out of its comfort zone of “standard of care,” but this is where health care is headed.

The key to improving the quality, value and effectiveness of health care is to have continuous and easy access to an integrated health provider team that helps each of us understand and consider the true risks and benefits of all potential options. Emory can and should lead the way in transforming health and healing together with our partners to make this happen.

Financial Strength and Resource Stewardship

Emory Report: How can Emory increase resources to fulfill its strategic priorities?
Mike Mandl: We need to operate from a position of strength. This means, in light of new economic realities, that we need to right-size our activities and invest in areas that support Emory’s quality and distinction while ceasing activities that do not directly forward our highest priorities. Developing a more pervasive entrepreneurial spirit also will be important in the years ahead.

ER: What is an example of right-sizing?
Mandl: A minor but illustrative example: Many years ago Emory funded a community recycling program in Emory Village when no alternative service was available in the community. Now that the county provides this community service at a minor cost to residents, we decided to cease funding recycling activities in the village and direct our resources to initiatives more closely related to our core priorities.

This recycling program had value, no question — many of the activities that we will need to stop have value — but these are the trade-offs that we will have to make in light of where we are and what is demanded of us today. It’s natural over time to do new things and to cease doing others; there’s a value in evolution.

ER: How do we make these decisions?
Mandl: Emory leaders need to provide good, transparent information, along with tools and resources, so deans, department chairs and directors can make well-informed decisions and can effectively assess trade-offs that are appropriate for their individual schools and units.

This information, in turn, has to be shared throughout the organization. There are a lot of smart, talented people here who care deeply about Emory and our mission, and who have many good ideas and are excited about the path we are on. There is a growing entrepreneurial spirit here, and broad-based active engagement, with people working creatively in leveraging support across the University and piggybacking off of other units to get projects done.

ER: How can we be effective stewards of Emory’s resources?
Mandl: By always keeping in mind that Emory’s resources are entrusted to us by our constituents, and we have a collective responsibility to be accountable and wise in our use of all resources, keeping with our vision of ethical engagement.

There is a growing, deeper philanthropic culture building among Emory’s friends, alumni and the greater community, a growing realization that Emory is making an important difference, and that we are a place providing enormous benefits to society.