MBA Program

President
Aetna Inc.
Hartford, Conn.

When Ron Williams joined Aetna in 2001, the major health insurer was in deep financial difficulty. To achieve the company's remarkable turnaround, Williams, who was then executive vice president and head of health operations, employed both hard skills and soft skills.

The need for hard skills was obvious. “We had simply not organized our data into information for meaningful decision making,” Williams explains.

To address the gap, Williams spearheaded the creation of Aetna's Executive Management Information System (EMIS), a powerful data analysis and reporting system that gathers information from across the business to provide detailed reports on a wide variety of performance measures.

The ability to capture information consistently and in real time allows leadership to spot trends early and manage Aetna's expansive business operations more effectively, Williams says.

Yet soft skills proved equally important in a business turnaround that demanded quick action and nearly immediate results. Williams charged Aetna's IT organization to have EMIS up and running within four months — far beyond the expectations of the corporate culture at that time.

Instilling a shared vision

“When you ask people to do what is considered undoable, you have to work with them, coach them, and remove barriers,” says Williams. “It all starts with the belief that people want to do the right things. But they may not know how, or may not see a way to circumvent perceived constraints. At Aetna, with 28,000 employees, achieving a turnaround meant large-scale organizational change. To do that, you have to unlock people's discretionary energy. You have to ask them to engage in our collective success, to think of their work as more than just their jobs. A big part of that is sharing a vision that people intrinsically understand and want to work toward.”

Other key elements are values. According to Williams, senior executives must continually talk about values and act as examples. They must also set expectations, and change those expectations over time as various objectives are met and different areas for improvement present themselves.

Improving health care

Williams discovered his interest in business while in graduate school in clinical psychology at Roosevelt University, where he also earned his undergraduate degree.

After MIT Sloan, he gravitated to the growth industries of information technology and health care. These experiences meshed at Aetna, where, Williams points out, the IT organization would be among the nation's largest technology companies if it were a separate business.

Information, he says, offers an enormous opportunity to raise the quality of health care in our society. For example, linking data components about an individual — from pharmacy, hospitalization, and laboratory records — can improve care and outcomes by providing the basis for evidence-based decisions on the part of the insurer working together with the physician.

The perfect environment

“There's nothing like being put together with some of the brightest people in the world, each with a different point of view,” observes Williams of his experience at MIT Sloan.

He chose MIT Sloan because of the comprehensive approach that transforms specialists into general managers. He particularly values the exposure to senior executives, the high standards, and the level of intellectual curiosity.

“There's just no substitute for the intellectual stimulation, analytical rigor, and global view of business you find at MIT Sloan,” he says. “It's the perfect environment for developing leadership skills.”

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