August 5, 2026 Salus Health Care Forum

The twenty-third Salus forum was held on August 5, 2026. In attendance were Mitch Applegate, Bill Bergquist, Jeremy Fish, Bill Gillanders, Walt Mills, Perry Pugno, Gay Teurman, Mark Vukalcic, and Jack Westfall. Howard Haft was an honored guest. The Trigger topic for this forum was provided by Drs. Fish and Mills who introduced the topic of masterful, adaptive leadership, which will be the focus of the Forum for several sessions. Drs. Fish and Mills attended to the first word in this phrase: Masterful.

Following is a Narrative based on the Forum conversation:

Jeremy

Many of you remember that Walt Mills, a longtime friend of mine and a participant in our Salus Forum presented us with master adaptive leadership some months ago. And after that introduction, we collectively decided to parse it into kind of three parts, mastery, adaptive, and then the broader just term of leadership over the next three or four months. Walt and I were asked to begin with the mastery aspects of master adaptive leadership. And so I’m going to go over a little bit of the fundamentals or steps. We’ve created kind of a stepwise progress towards mastery. As most of us know, we all started as novices and then we build towards mastery as someone who encapsulates what is masterful. I’m going to briefly talk about three figures in history who demonstrate self-knowing and self-regulation. They then move into self-efficacy and self-agency.

George Washington is the first figure that came to mind when discussing the topics of self-knowing and self-regulation, in part because I think he’s quite famous for having an absolutely volcanic temper. And yet that is based on public knowledge of only once or twice him ever losing his cool. So, very early in his life, Washington figured out he needed to work on some self-restraint. I think his self-knowing led to self-regulation to a profound degree. The couple of times his temper did burst onto the scene, descriptions like the tree’s leaves shook from his volcanic voice, shouting at a general who was retreating, who he didn’t want to retreat as an example. And another example was a cabinet meeting. He’s only had one cabinet meeting where he lost his temper. I think the self-regulation piece of self-mastery often gets overlooked. This is the inner traveling that we must do before we embark on trying to regulate other people. This point is often skipped by leaders when they want to transform the system by requiring that everyone else changes. We’re going to change all of you. It’s really a fantasy to believe that these massive changes can happen. Meantime, as the leader, I’m not going to change at all. I think that is all too common. I think Washington really demonstrated that in a profound way. Mastery is a culmination of skill sets and expertise that can transcend whatever topic is being considered.