Episode #188 Check Your Premise: What to do when a great product and a thriving market don’t equal a growing business with Mike Murphy Managing Partner, Sunstone Management Advisors

On the show today is Mike Murphy, a distinguished growth leader with over 30 years experience as a C-level executive, specializing in healthcare and insurance. Mike’s expertise spans M&A due diligence, post-merger integration, and turnaround strategies, consistently improving earnings and gross profit. Examples of some of his significant achievements include propelling a new insurance division from a cold start to $435M in revenues and $22M in EBITDA in four years and guiding successful product launches, most notably UnitedHealthcare’s inaugural national dental product portfolio. His leadership, strategic acumen, and deep industry knowledge make him a transformative force in high-performance teams and change management.

Our conversation took a lot of twists and turns today, but in Mike’s words, here’s the 30,000 foot view. We covered the following:

• Mike’s take on the current state of the healthcare system, the powers that are keeping us entrenched in a “sick care” system, and the revolution that’s coming.
• When looking at how to succeed in the business of healthcare, the importance of asking the right questions and trusting cognitive dissonance instead of pushing through it.
• Why leadership must create an environment where everyone, at all levels, feels valued and heard. 
• How to adapt to a changing business environment where capital is hard to come by and point solution fatigue is real.
• The fatal flaw of the “Divine Right of Kings” mentality in leadership.

I so enjoyed talking to Mike. His approach is down-to-earth, practical, and incredibly humanistic. There are so many organizations in healthcare today that could benefit from “looking under the hood”, as Mike says, ask the tough questions, and then crowd source the solutions from all levels of the organization, not just the C-suite. This is a must-listen episode about the current business of healthcare from someone who’s seen it from all sides.