Irwin Rubin, PhD, Veritas Health Care Founding Member

Irv is the President of Temenos, Inc. and The Temenos Foundation in Honolulu, Hawaii. For the past 30 years, his work has focused on working with health care organizations who share a simple but powerful premise: “‘Staff’ infections in the board room culture of a health care organization are as potentially lethal as ‘staph’ infections in the culture of the organization’s treatment room.”

Irv received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While an Associate Professor there, he was co-director (along with Richard Beckhard) of M.I.T.’s Project in Health Care Management (funded by the Carnegie and R.W. Johnson Foundations). The focus of that project was on the transfer of managerial technology to the health care industry. His many writings about health care have received wide acclaim. In reviewing his book, My Pulse Is Not What It Used to Be: The Leadership Challenges in Health Care (co-authored with Dr. Ray Fernandez; published by The Temenos Foundation), JAMA noted: “[his] sensitivity to organizational issues would facilitate the transformation of the health care system!” James A. Autry called his most recent book, The ABCs of Effective Feedback: A Guide For Caring Professionals (co-authored with Dr. Tom Campbell; published by Jossey-Bass) “an essential tool for anyone wanting to make the transition from management to leadership.” In 1985, he was elected the first honorary non-physician member of the American College of Physician Executives.

He has consulted with health care organizations in the United States, Australia and New Zealand, a few of which include the Cleveland Clinic, St. Mary’s Hospital of Grand Rapids, Michigan, Group Health Cooperative, Mercy Health Plan of St. Louis, Missouri, Veterans Health Administration, the University of Pennsylvania Medical School and the Ministry of Health of New Zealand. A major focus of Irv’s current work is on the relationship between performance management, feedback systems, and the creation of healthy—non-toxic—caring organizational cultures. This work includes both organizational development and training interventions and the development of computer technologies to support such culture change efforts.