15 Larry McEvoy

Interview by Gary Gunderson

 

An emergency physician, healthcare executive, and entrepreneur, Larry McEvoy’s diverse perspective renders him an inspiring, design-oriented leader, strategist, advisor, facilitator, and speaker. His extensive track record of real-life strategic and operational results—and a unique facility with ecosystems, neuroscience, social intelligence, and human networks—helps you understand and capacitate entire systems, small and large, to optimize performance, adaptation, and vitality.  He has wide experience in shaping the challenges of our complex times into outstanding results, rapid learning, and energized professional cultures.

Larry’s mission is to deepen the vigor, resilience, and sustainability of leaders, the people they lead, and the organizations they create. Particularly focused on the shared work between executives, clinicians, and clinical leaders, Larry’s experience as both a CEO and a clinician deepens his skill in facilitating dynamic shifts in mindset, method, and performance. His background as a strategic innovator and “designer-in-chaos” has led him to increasing work outside of health care as organizations and corporations seek to create value via both stability andrapid reconfiguration in environments of velocity and volatility.

His career has comprised the renewal of multiple environments of distrust, stress, and dispirited dynamics.  He focuses on creating a practical approach to the acceleration of systemic shifts in results, adaptation, and professional vitality; the linkage between leadership evolution, stewardship ethic, and business value; and the activation of “positive epidemics” through the understanding and application of complexity principles, network science, and neuroscience.  As one of his clients puts it, “I learn more from him in an hour than I do from anyone else in a year.  His emotional intelligence is off the charts, and his strategic acumen is of the highest order.”

From 2008 to 2012, Larry served as the CEO of Memorial Health System in Colorado Springs, CO, facilitating a $100 million turnaround, the emergence of a culture of collaboration and commitment, and Memorial’s transformation from an at-risk and unfunded municipal hospital to the threshold of its merger with the University of Colorado Health system. Prior to that he was a senior executive and emergency physician at the Billings Clinic in Billings, MT, from 1995 to 2008. He completed his training in emergency medicine at Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis, MN, in 1995. After earning a BA in English Writing from Carroll College (MT) in 1987, Larry graduated from Stanford University Medical School in 1992.

He serves as an Executive-in-Residence at the Center for Creative Leadership and as a Principal at Brenva Group. He is on the faculty of the American Association of Physician Leaders,The Governance Institute, and The Leadership Development Group, and has presented at the Conference Board, The Executive Development Roundtable, and the American Medical Group Association as well as at numerous health care organizations nationwide. He co-founded PracticingExcellence, a web-based professional collegial community which focuses on the clinician experience as the foundation of healthcare performance, patient experience, and meaning.   Most recently he has founded Epidemic Leadership, where he focuses on the executive work of creating organizations of exponential health and vigor—where performance, learning, and vitality rise in parallel and are abundant, infectious, sustained and sustaining.