Business goals are a great thing to strive for, but human nature gets in the way. Take the MRSA infection. (We pronounce it “Mersa,” and get used to it. It may one day become part of your life.) MRSA is a particularly nasty set of bugs that find their way into cuts, wounds, or openings of any kind. It’s the catchall phrase for “staph infections” and their various buddies. It’s a hospital problem, and by now we all know of more than one person who came out of a local hospital with a MRSA infection. And New York residents are one-third more likely to get it. I’d like to give you a breakdown so you could make some reasoned choices about which hospitals to use and which to avoid. But there has been a resistance to letting that information out. As the resistance to MRSA infections has lowered, the resistance to talking about it has increased.

What do MRSA’s have to do with business? Simple. Any hospital on Long Island could distinguish itself by posting a 20% or less infection rate. And every hospital has the raw materials for a solution. This is a “human” problem. Certain behaviors have to be followed, every time, and they all concern a heightened awareness to a threat no one can see, but everyone has to believe is there. It’s a matter of cleaning your equipment, watching that nothing extraneous is introduced into the surgical arena, people washing their hands thirty seconds or more in a prescribed fashion, people changing gloves when they approach a new patient, and keeping dirty laundry away from clean laundry.

So what would it take to align human nature with business goals? What kind of commitment would the hospitals have to make to be able to bring us good news within the year? As Fred Strauss tells us repeatedly, it’s “Practice, practice and more practice.” The behaviors of success would have to be identified and clarified in conversations with everyone in the building. Then they would have to be monitored. Any fudging would be discovered quickly, as the patient got an infection. The process would be self-correcting in that regard. The hospital’s business goals would have to find articulation in the daily process on the floors.

It’s not easy, but it’s do-able. And it’s entirely within the grasp of any hospital on Long Island. As long as the organization can lick the problem of human nature. Because people are not keeping the surgical arena clean. They are not changing gloves. They are not washing their hands. Not with the commitment that’s needed.

I personally know each and every one of you who receives this e-newsletter. This is important to you and your family. Betsy McCaughey, former Lt. Governor of New York chairs R.I.D. at www.hospitalinfections.org and you ought to log on and be part of this. And the broader question is the pursuit of goals in the companies where you consult. Is human nature interfering? Is the company staffed by people with the best of intentions, who drop the ball when it comes to execution?

In addition to your consulting duties, you may need to be conducting groups of the sort I suggested for the hospitals. You ought to be moderating Noetic Roundtable Discussions in addition to your sales, marketing, IT, legal or other services. Come by and observe our process. Learn it. Do it where you consult. Because I believe this gap between goals and reality will continue to remain large, unless the issue of human nature is dealt with in some advanced fashion. In the meantime, try to stay healthy. Until we get some data from the hospitals. Until they begin a competition to see who’ll deliver the best health care with the least MRSA infections.