The Lens We Look Through: Framing and Reframing
Featured Narrative: Dan Michelson, CEO, Strata Decision Technology
I actually never had an objective to be a CEO, I never thought I would be a CEO, and never interviewed for a CEO position until the one I’m in right now. I guess I’m sort of an accidental CEO.
A self-described recluse during high school and a mediocre athlete at best, Dan Michelson was often an observer, someone on the outside looking in. His parents divorced when he was two years old, when his mother was an unemployed schoolteacher with only a few hundred dollars in her bank account. Now about to turn 50, Dan hasn’t seen his father in 40 years. Upon graduating from college, Dan tells me,
My only real goal in life was to have a place of my own at some point. I really didn’t have much confidence or much of a plan. I wouldn’t say I didn’t have any ambition, but I just didn’t think too highly of myself and where I would end up.
But end up, he did. Once among those last picked for sports teams in high school, the CEO of Strata Decision Technology has run 15 marathons, among them, the elite Boston Marathon, for which he qualified six times, and a Chicago marathon where he placed among the top 150 runners. Married and a father of two teenagers, he and his wife founded a nonprofit, Project Music, which raises money to send children living in a group home in Chicago to overnight camp. He has excelled in business and leadership. Dan was a member of the core executive team that took Allscripts, a small health care information technology company, from 26 million dollars in revenue to over 1.4 billion. Now the CEO of Strata, under Dan’s leadership the company has quadrupled in size. After being brought in as its CEO, he led the company to sale a few years later for $140 million.
So what happened in those intervening years? Did Dan Michelson rebuild himself, creating a superman capable of running long distances and leading companies? Or did he become himself, finding a natural home for his talents? How, exactly, did he get from there to here, I want to know. How did a kid without much confidence, who once had a difficult time making conversation at the dinner table, become a CEO who regularly conveys meaning and context to those whom he leads?
“I think my twenties were really a turning point for me,” Dan shares during our interview. His natural curiosity drew him to new experiences, and looking back, he doesn’t know if it was a skill he’d always had or that he just liked to work really hard, but running, and running long distances, suited him. One day’s three-mile run turned into six. Before long, he’d signed up to run a half-marathon and then a full. He was happy to finish that first 26.2-mile race. By his third attempt, he was among those top 150 marathon finishers in Chicago. And although he’d stumbled into it somewhat, marathon running would become one of the significant “marbles in the jar” of experiences that built his confidence. And, too, there was the grad school professor whose teachings on communication gave him more skill and greater ease. Dan recalls,
There were a number of epiphanies during the two classes that I took with him that both opened me up and gave me some more confidence to tell my story even though I didn’t feel like I had much of a story to tell.
Professional life after college took him from an initial entry-level position in sales to ascending rungs at different organizations, each with increasing responsibility, culminating in his role as Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer at Allscripts. He would be there for 12 years. “We were literally trying to create a company and an industry at the same time. It’s an incredibly difficult thing to do,” Dan explains. The challenges built his confidence, the mistakes and successes informed his learnings. When he got the call to join Strata as its CEO, he was intrigued. Years earlier, he’d chosen health care as the sphere in which he wanted to make his career, make an impact. “It’s a huge set of problems and there’s a human element to it,” Dan says. One of the requirements of the job was taking a 50 percent pay cut. But, he’d taken a cut in salary when he joined Allscripts, and when I ask him about the risk, particularly at this time in his life, he says,
I just want to work on things that are interesting to me and that are big problems that I think need to be solved, where I think I can make a difference and where I’m working with people who I really like and respect. And that set of principles was in place both times where I made a decision.
Perhaps, more than anything, he finally convinced himself that he was ready to learn something new and take on some risk.
But that perspective and his confidence weren’t solely the product of the experiences he’d collected or the communication skills he’d acquired. Shoved into his wallet were pieces of paper filled with “mantras,” as Dan called them, quotes written in his small handwriting that he found personally meaningful and that he’d been writing down since his 20s. One of his favorites “Barn’s burnt down, now I can see the moon”1 spoke to seeing bad things as good things. Whether he knew it at the time, he had carefully been grinding the lens through which he looked. Its shape was defined by “getting excited about where you’re at versus down about where you’ve been, or distracted by where you’re going, but to live in the now and be excited about it,” Dan tells me. And that lens, one that seems to blend his contrarianism, pragmatism, and hope for what is possible, even in the midst of struggle, allows him to frame and reframe, to turn things upside down and take another look, to very deliberately choose how he will think about and approach challenge. It is the lens he looks through as CEO as he guides his team at Strata. Dan says,
We have situations here where things can get really tough, as every company does. I always counsel people that when they encounter something really challenging, they are lucky and it is awesome. Now, when they get to the other side of this, which they will, they’re going to have that experience of having worked through something that was really hard. The next time they walk down that street, they’re going to recognize what it looks like, and know where to step and where not to. If things had gone smoothly, they would never have had that experience, and that would have been a huge miss.
It is in this role as CEO that the whole of his experiences came together to inform his leadership. His natural curiosity and his proclivity for finding and liking to work on “things that are in the gray,” as he describes it, were tremendous assets. He saw and created vital new markets for Strata where competitors weren’t looking. And, yes, some of the experiences of his childhood were painful. But the emotional weight that he carried as a kid, the experience of being an outsider and an observer, gave him a sense of people that was crucial to leadership. “It’s made me much more empathetic as a leader,” he says. Even the insecurity was helpful. It pushed him to strive, to want to become better. Those challenges had been exceptional preparation for the requirements of being a CEO. And it’s clear during our conversation that Dan has spent time considering what it means to sit in that seat and to be a leader.
“In addition to going through their own reviews and evaluations, everyone on our team does a performance review of me,” Dan says. His review is blinded, it’s qualitative and quantitative, and he shares the results with others. He quite purposefully wants to set the tone that “everyone, from top to bottom, is always working on things that they could be better at.” The idea is to change the mindset from a traditional review, in this case, Dan says, by “putting the onus on the employee to want, and need to, have that coaching and feedback, while providing me as the example.” If managers don’t give team members at least two things to work on, they’re not doing their job.
Dan emphasizes that feedback must be connected to context, to the meaning of someone’s work. It is not an extra, a layer of icing, at Strata; it is essential. He explains:
Merely presenting a scoreboard to somebody at a point in time but them not being able to tie that back to what they’re doing on a daily basis, or what they’re doing within the throes of the game, is useless. That lack of context is crippling to both the individual and the organization.
And meaning is not always about the scoreboard. He is known to go out of his way to explain to the team how their contributions are important. “Just those simple things, the little things, end up mattering a ton. And context is king. You have to be maniacal about it.”
Framing is as important for success as it is for challenge, Dan tells me. “What we’re trying to do at Strata is bend the cost curve in health care, and that’s a pretty ambitious thing to work on,” he says. Business is a roller coaster, and while achievement is celebrated, it’s never taken for granted. Things can change quickly and being “able to prepare people for the other side of that” is crucial, he says. Those who thrive in a continually changing, and challenging, business climate, who enjoy the “constant process of tweaking and iterating and improving,” will likely enjoy the journey.
Although Dan has chosen the lens he looks through, it has not shielded him against some of life’s more painful events. He is careful to point out that adversity still visits him, that there have been significant personal trials. “My family dealt with some pretty tough issues over the last couple of years,” he tells me. His wife had breast cancer, and the man who became his father after his mother remarried, who was the best man at Dan’s own wedding, battled melanoma. “Those are really, really tough, but they are also reminders as to what a privilege it is to work in health care and try to make a difference,” he says.
Toward the end of our interview, as he considers the whole of his journey and the boy who was once a recluse, Dan thinks back to the teacher in high school who saw his potential that Dan could not and the tremendous difference that it made. Finding people who believe in us is crucial, he says. He understands now that the best bet is the one that you make on yourself, although he’s not sure he would have understood it at the time. If there is anything that would have been more helpful, it might have been to have had more experiences early on, because one simply doesn’t know what might transpire from them. He says,
Just go through as many doors as you can, and grab as many experiences as you can, doing as many different things as you can. It doesn’t have to be from a work perspective. Pursue your passions and integrate them into your life.
Although he never expected to become a CEO, I wonder if Dan found his place, one where his talents and experiences, all of them, combine with his efforts to the greatest impact and effect. And I wonder if the person who fought to interpret the events of his life in such a way that he could move forward isn’t ideally suited for a role that is infinitely challenging and where others look to him for direction and guidance. Dan says,
People search for meaning, in their work, and in their daily lives just in general. Being able to provide that context is incredibly, incredibly important. As a leader, I don’t know if there’s a more important part of the job.
As for his own direction, inside Dan’s wallet are those pieces of paper from his 20s. And he continues to add more.
1 Mizuta Masahide, Haiku, 17 th century.