Case - Kent Thiry and DaVita

Case Study > Case - Kent Thiry and DaVita - OB54-PDF-ENG

University of St Thomas MGMT 625 However, this had not been a typical turnaround. Instead, a closer look at DaVita’s culture and leadership showed that the DaVita management team’s focus had been on creating a strong and positive values-based organization where all levels of the organization had an emotional commitment to its success. The foundation was the Mission and Va ...[Show More]

University of St Thomas
MGMT 625
However, this had not been a typical turnaround. Instead, a closer look at DaVita’s culture and leadership showed that the DaVita management team’s focus had been on creating a strong and positive values-based organization where all levels of the organization had an emotional commitment to its success. The foundation was the Mission and Values, first created by 700 of the company’s managers in 2000 and now widely practiced throughout the company. To the management team, the company’s rebirth strategy was based on the belief that they had to create something larger than themselves in order to be successful. Thiry commented:

At Vivra [another kidney dialysis company where many of DaVita’s senior leaders had worked together], we implemented many people, team, and culturefriendly policies. They were consistent with my basic values, but the extra energy I brought to them was because they were a means to the end of having a successful company. This time it is different. This time the building of a successful company is a means to the end of building a healthy community. Because humans spend more waking hours at work than anywhere else, if you are a leader who purports to care about your team, it makes no sense to create a paradigm which concedes all that time needs to be spent in [a] relatively vanilla values or sterile emotional commitment environment.2

Because of this, Thiry and his team flagged several important challenges they believed needed to be addressed if DaVita was to continue its successful evolution of both operations and culture. The question was: how could they use the culture to achieve even greater operational excellence?

1) The Gambro Integration

One immediate task entailed integrating Gambro into the DaVita way of managing and its culture. Gambro was significantly more hierarchical and formal than DaVita, and did not have a strong people-oriented culture. Prior to the merger, DaVita had been disparaged inside Gambro with Thiry described as “a compliance maverick, reckless, and egotistical.” Ironically, Gambro had itself purchased Vivra in 1997, then a smaller, publicly traded dialysis company led and transformed by Thiry during the 1990s. As the leader of the combined organization, Thiry’s goal was to be respectful of Gambro, its people and its capabilities, while maintaining DaVita’s unique culture and way of management.

2) Personal Touch in a Growing Organization