Spotlight On: Chris Outram, Visiting Professor at UCL GBSH – Q&A

Credited as the visionary behind the original concept of the UCL Global Business School for Health (GBSH), Chris Outram is also the founder of OC&C Strategy Consultants. In 40 years of strategy consulting, he has addressed the full range of strategic issues from corporate strategy to divisional performance, embracing mergers & acquisitions and organisational advice. 

He is also the author of two books; “Making Your Strategy Work” and “Digital Stractics”, the latter dealing with the digital battle between Pure Internet Players and more traditional companies who have a strategic need to be winners in the new e-Commerce channels. 

We spoke with Chris to find out more about himself and the new MBA Health programme:

Tell me more about your background – It would be great to find out more about your education and career so far.

I got a scholarship in my lower sixth form to attend the Atlantic College, which was, in those days, a very innovative school founded by Kurt Hahn. Its students were truly internationally representative of all continents.

The school was all about good education but also about the need to mesh this with a healthy dose of physical exercise and a range of activities which had true social impact, the concept being that you needed more than just academics to make a human being. That was fairly life-changing for me as it taught me to question practically everything in the world. One thing it allowed me to question was my parents who wanted me to do the same degree as my brother and become an engineer of some sort, which was the last thing I wanted to do. So, I looked at many UK universities and came across one, Birmingham University, which would allow me to read two degrees simultaneously. I placated my parents with one being Mechanical engineering and the other Industrial Economics. This allowed me to be quite prolific in my career choices. 

I first went into business with The Mobil Oil Company. I then moved on to Air Products, where I became an accountant, and then I worked with a small company where I did mostly marketing. Then I discovered business school. 

I rather liked the idea of INSEAD because it was a little bit more radical, not least because it was only a ten-month course; you were also in France with good food, so I really enjoyed that. The rumour was when I got there, that if you were anybody and fancied yourself, you would end up in strategy consulting – long story short, I ended up in strategy consulting with a company called Boston Consulting Group. 

After a couple of years, I went on to work with one of our clients in Amsterdam where I had a wonderful few years. Then I came back to the UK and did more consulting. I eventually decided to found my own strategy consultancy which was called OC&C Strategy Consultants – of which I’m the O. I retired last year after 33 years at it – I had a bundle of fun, worked with wonderful executives in that time, and, more importantly, our recruits were amazing. 

Having founded this strategy consulting company, I never left it because it continued to grow – it has around 600 consultants around the world and operates out of 9 or so countries – and is the last remaining strategy specialist consulting company in the world. 

In the last ten years, I decided to work in small organisations and headed up a charity for eating disorders, chaired a small start-up which is now worth a couple hundred million, and then took on another charity which is growing at an astronomical level. So, I became very entrepreneurial, against my natural instincts – I’ve never been particularly entrepreneurial. OC&C wasn’t really an entrepreneurial exercise for me because I never sat in bed and thought ‘I have to found a consulting company.’ It just seemed the right thing to do at the time.

I’m told you were the visionary behind the concept for UCL GBSH, pitching to UCL the idea of a health-focused business school. Why did you think a school like this was needed then, and how important is it now?

About five or six years ago, I started thinking about my company and the fact that it recruited an awful lot of MBAs from the best business schools around the world. The one thing I could never wrap my mind around was the fact that all these amazing business schools were generalist. I actually had a chat with the Dean of INSEAD, and said: “how come you’ve never specialised at all?” The answer was that they don’t need to – people are queuing up to get into that business school, so why would they specialise? 

I went away and thought maybe I was wrong about specialised business schools. To test the concept, I worked with one of our researchers and tried to analyse all the sectors in the economy and come up with a ranking of complexity. We ended up with two top-ranking sectors – one was finance and the second was health. Health really interested me because healthcare has always been complex – you have lots of players: doctors, nurses, porters, administrators. And because it’s such a big part of GDP – in poorer countries it’s 2-3%, in medium-rich countries like the UK it’s about 10%, and goes up to a maximum of around 17-18% in the US. 

If anything, the pandemic has brought into focus how complex healthcare is. Not only have we had to deal with pandemic sufferers, but what do we do with all those people who we’ve put on the back burner in terms of the healthcare they should have had access to? 

In order to deal with them, we have to operate our health system much more efficiently than we have been doing. Every country has a different health system and mix of state and private participants. Part of that is politics, part of that is economics, and part of it is that we just haven’t spent time thinking about what works and what doesn’t. All of that says that there really does need to be a business school focused on health. 

I decided to work with the Dean of Birmingham Business School and we worked up a business plan for a business school dedicated to healthcare. Birmingham sadly had other priorities, so I took it to UCL about 3 and a half years ago, and I am pleased to say they adopted it. 

You gained an MBA from INSEAD business school. In our ever-changing world, what should MBAs now teach students to prepare them for the future?

Historically, business schools have focused on a couple of things. They focus on the theory of business: accounting, economics, cost, price, markets, customers, consumers, marketing, etc. They also deal with how it works in practice: how regulation affects it, how you deal with HR, and all those sorts of things. They’ve done a good job of giving students a good grounding in those two elements - the theory of business and how it works in practice. 

One area in which I think that the pandemic has fanned the flames – one we were already worried about – is dealing with unpredictability. How do you manage things that don’t quite go right? In one of the businesses I’m chairman of at the moment, our product accidentally got banned in China – our biggest market for the product in the world. How do you deal with that?

Dealing with unpredictability is very important and can come in many different forms: pandemics, freak events, geopolitical issues. There are many instances in which unpredictability can become an issue, and how organisations respond to that is really important. And in the health service, there is an even greater degree of unpredictability than in most sectors. I think in the future, business schools will have to spend time on that. 

What can the school, and the MBA Health specifically, offer to students that apply?

I think it can provide an insight into how you apply business principles to a sector so central to the economy - 10% of GDP is a huge amount of money – so the MBA Health can address the issue of how to use business principles and ways of organising to better manage health and get more people healthy. I think it will help with dealing with a sector that has got multiple goals – and they’re not simple goals. 

The first goal is outcomes - getting people better. The second is economics – getting people better at a reasonable cost. And the third is social – getting people better at a reasonable cost without bias.

What jobs do you envisage MBA Health graduates pursuing? And do you see a need for graduates in the sector?

I would like to think there are no limits really. I hope that the UCL GBSH will establish itself as not just a business school dedicated to healthcare, but one of the best business schools in the world that just happens to be dedicated to healthcare. If you graduate from that type of organisation, you will be reasonably equipped to run healthcare organisations, whether it’s a care home or hospital or the whole healthcare system in your country. 

A hospital is a £2 billion pound organisation – that’s bigger than most companies in Britain. Being in charge of a hospital is a huge responsibility, so I think you’ll be better able to run that sort of organisation. You’ll also be able to critically compare health systems around the world to understand what’s good or bad and use the good in your health system.

You’ll have a better sense of how to promote entrepreneurialism. We have seen in the pandemic an amazing shift from ten-year medicine approval processes to 12-18 months. Society is massively better off for that. But how much of that will endure?

There are also lots of jobs in areas such as consulting and banking. Areas that are interested in advising the healthcare system on the best ways to get financed or run the business.

I see many opportunities for grads to get employed in some really fascinating areas. The objective is ultimately to deliver better healthcare at a lower cost, faster. 

What are you looking for in ideal candidates that apply to the MBA Health?

The first one is pretty obvious: be interested in healthcare. And have the ability to show that interest. 

I think they’ve got to be really smart. If we are aspirational that we are going to provide the future managers of hospitals or the WHO or health systems, then you’re going to have to be pretty smart to wrestle those things to the ground.

You’ve got to be happy in unfamiliar situations and you’ve got to be able to move fast and be ambitious for healthcare and themselves. 

Why are you excited to join UCL GBSH as a visiting professor?

In my experience of 40 years of consulting, new enterprises need lots of effort and support, and I believe UCL GBSH is no different. 

There really is a poor supply of specialist schools. In fact, there is no MBA school dedicated to healthcare in the world – I know that because I did the research. There are business schools that do a bit of health – and during the pandemic, the number of these will have gone up, but UCL GBSH is still unique, and I love unique things because they can plot their way forward much more easily. 

What MBA Health modules will you be involved with and why are these important for students to learn? 

I think there are some fundamentals around strategy that are very different when it comes to healthcare – and I will be searching for what they are and trying to explain them. 

The whole area of strategy is really interesting because you can work out what the objective of strategy for a commercial organisation is: it’s to make more money sustainably and in an acceptable way and reward shareholders and employees appropriately. When you apply that to healthcare systems or organisations, it gets a little more complicated. Strategy is all about the future allocation of resources to maximise success, and I think success in healthcare is about getting better and faster outcomes, getting them cheaper, and getting them available to all, and doing all this in a fair and open way.

Business is all about competition, but that is not how healthcare is going to work. We do not want to beat anybody – we want everyone to get better. If we can share our secrets with America or Russia or Madagascar, let's share them!

What contribution do you want to bring to the school and future students?

I’m good at networking and talking to a lot of people to find different types of support. If we’re going to do work on comparing health systems around the world, then we're going to have to find people willing to participate, and I’m interested in being of use in that area. My knowledge of strategy built up over 40 years will also be of value. Strategy is all very well, but if you can’t implement it, it’s useless.

I’d also like to persuade people that a sense of endeavour is a very useful thing to have. The world is increasingly not a place where you can find easy answers. There has been a lot of thought about a lot of things, so good answers are going to be more complicated, sophisticated, and elusive. What we need to be able to do is address really tough questions, and not be frightened about this.

Because of the enormity of the objectives we’re trying to achieve, I want to instil a sense of ambition in whatever people do. I believe anyone coming out of this business school and having an impact on the amelioration of healthcare is doing a good thing. And instilling in people that a sense of commitment can go a long way. You can get a lot done if you’re very committed and a little bit tenacious. 

There is so much to do in healthcare, the sooner we get on and do it the better. I am confident that UCL GBSH will be able to lead the way in terms of delivering outstanding healthcare leadership and management. We need to be ambitious and committed to growing UCL GBSH as fast as reasonably possible. If we do that, I am confident we will make a contribution to making the world a better place to live in.