“We need more than the old way of parachuting in and then leaving.”
February 26, 2019 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Continued from Promoting Unusual Partnerships
At first glance, the idea of a business school partnering with a medical foundation seems a bit unusual.
Dr. Mack Cheney certainly felt so, at least initially. He’s a co-founder of the Steven C. and Carmella R. Kletjian Foundation, which strives to improve the safety, affordability, and quality of surgery in the world’s poorest places. The work of the organization is vital. According to The Lancet Commission on Global Surgery, a staggering 5 billion people do not have access to safe and affordable surgical and anesthesia care.
Cheney co-founded the Kletjian Foundation with Carmella Kletjian, a member of Babson’s Board of Trustees, and she pushed for the Boston-based organization to work with the college. “It was very insightful and visionary that she took this approach. I didn’t understand it at first,” admits Cheney, a professor at Harvard Medical School. “I remember thinking, why would we partner with an entrepreneurial school?”
The unlikely partnership still puzzles many clinicians whom Cheney knows. “A lot of my surgical friends,” he says, “shake their heads and say, ‘Why would you do that?’” But setting up surgical care in a developing country is a complicated endeavor, requiring far more than medical expertise. Innovative approaches to business, leadership, and entrepreneurship also are necessities. With Babson’s expertise, the foundation aims to establish surgical care that is self-sufficient, sustainable, and not dependent on the outside help of clinician volunteers, who typically travel to developing countries to perform care but soon depart.
“We need more than the old way of parachuting in and then leaving,” says Kletjian. “It isn’t sustainable. We need to build an ecosystem. Having surgery, running hospitals — it’s a business. We need to teach others how to do it.”
Excerpt from “Coming Together to Address a Drastic Need” by John Crawford, published in the Babson Magazine spring 2018 issue.