Doctors have their knickers in a twist. The bee in their bonnet, apparently, is that a non-medical professional has been appointed to head the health ministry docket. Frankly speaking, I think it is much ado about nothing, a storm in a teacup really. The reason for using all the English idioms is to protect myself using a discourse of constructive semantics when I next go on my doctor’s visit and get challenged on today’s opinion. In other words, I’m covering my backside for the following attack: There is absolutely nothing wrong with a commercial banker heading the Ministry of Health. Capisce? Let me give you doctors some tidbits about organizations.

Number one: did you know that not a single university in this country (and most likely the world) offers a degree in banking? Yet the world is full of bankers. I worked in the banking industry for ten years and met people with a varied range of degrees from chemical engineering and actuarial science to agricultural economists and dental science. You will note, of course, that there were no rocket scientists. Why? Because banking is NOT rocket science. I [as well as those before and after me] learnt my banking on the job, almost like an articled apprenticeship. You picked the field you wanted to grow in [or you got thrown into the field through no choice of yours] be it operations, sales, credit and risk management, finance, or treasury and you learnt on the job. Years of doing the same job with ever growing scope of responsibility churns out seasoned bankers. The more senior you grew in the organization, the less your technical skills mattered as much as your leadership skills and ability to grasp the key components of across the banking sphere that would enable you to steer the ship to a profitable harbor, maintain regulatory compliance and motivate employees to deliver.

Number two: There are some CEOs of banks who have never even been to university but have steered their organizations through stable profit growth.

Number three: There have been CEOs of hospitals who have never been doctors but got the job done. There have also been CEOs of hospitals who were doctors and just simply didn’t get the job done.

Number four: The medicine [pun fully intended] for an organization that is guzzling money on the intake and churning out poor service, minimal drug distribution and massive corruption is a good dose of management. Not a clinical diagnosis of physical symptoms but an intellectual intervention that will staunch the massive bleeding of cash and drugs. The technical stuff, well, that’s what the Director of Medical Services and all those other civil servants within the Ministry are supposed to do. After all neither the captain of an airplane nor a ship can fix the vessel if the electronics or engine go kaput!

Number five: The great thing about putting in someone who doesn’t know the first thing about the first thing is that he will always say, “I don’t know, please tell me more about this.” In the process he will a) learn more b) interrogate why something has always been done in a certain way and c) go out of his way to learn more so that the “I don’t knows” become far less and the “Why don’t we do it this way” become more. It is also instructive that some organizations have seen the benefit of bringing in people from entirely different industries into management as they dilute the in-breeding culture that hiring from competition can create in terms of a complete cookie-cutter conventional way of thinking across a certain industry. One of my best hires when I was a banker was someone from the Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) industry. He didn’t have to be told that head office was a zone for checking into once a month and his time was better spent out in the trenches at branches motivating staff, meeting customers and solving problems at the distribution point. It was instinctual for him as that is what FMCG is all about, being on the ground, ensuring your distribution channels are performing swimmingly and minimizing time spent from production [of services such as transactions and loans] to consumption by bank customers.

Number six: The health ministry, like any organization, has a mandate to its customers, the citizens of Kenya. That mandate is to deliver health services within a certain policy framework. It is that policy framework that we must pay close attention to as well as to the persons who both draft it as well as execute it. Are they professionals? Do they know what they are talking about? Can they execute? Can they provide effective monitoring and evaluation? It’s very likely that the answer to all those questions is a resounding yes. They however do not need a doctor to make sure that they are doing their job well. They need a great orchestrator, a formidable choirmaster who can get all the voices to sing in different harmonies but generate a beautiful tune.

Number seven: Finally, health management, like banking is not rocket science. It is about input of management skills to manage financial and human resources that in turn generate an output of great service delivery to the health customers. Whether you’ve managed an airline, a manufacturing business or a not-for-profit organization you are fit and able to steer both people and finances to create a result. If in doubt, refer to point number one.

Execution is the art of getting things done. We need to turn our focus on keeping our government accountable for the effective use of our hard earned tax shillings. The fact that established managers with unassailable track records should give us great comfort that the right people are on the job. Their leadership skills will certainly be put to the test. I wish them well.

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Twitter: @carolmusyoka