Michael Samuelson
President and CEO, The Health & Wellness Institute
The Disruptive Mountaineer
Ten years. That’s how long Michael Samuelson has been cancer-free. In that time, he has trekked to mountaintops in Europe, Asia and Africa, shared biannual lunches with President George HW Bush, authored three published books on health and human behavior, built a national health and wellness institute and, is currently planning for an autumn visit to Havana where he will discuss public health policy with Cuban officials.
“All these activities are seemingly unrelated to what I do, but they trigger absolutely new and fresh ideas,” explains Samuelson. “I’m convinced that having the ability to seek, learn and synthesize from other fields and cultures —in essence taking things out of context to later bring them back in—leads to true, disruptive innovation.”
The BIF-5 Summit marks Samuelson’s return to our center stage. His first story, told at BIF-1, was a reflection of lessons learned from his cancer journey—lessons that he was able to apply to life and business. At the time, he was recently hired by a health insurance corporation and tasked with creating a new company focused solely on health promotion and disease prevention. With critical help and support from his colleagues and parent company, he formed the Health and Wellness Institute (HWI), a wholly owned subsidiary of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Rhode Island.
“What an interesting and, at times, very challenging process—to take a disruptive, relatively new idea and grow it inside a traditional, and very conservative insurance company,” he recalls. “At times I felt very much like a stranger in a strange land. And, I’m certain—particularly in the early days—I was viewed that way by my colleagues.”
Given the striking cultural differences between a traditional well-established local company and a fast paced, entrepreneurial national start-up, it wasn’t long before Samuelson and HWI needed to find a new physical home outside of the insurance company. “It was time to leave home,” Samuelson recalls.
An avid mountaineer, Samuelson likens the experience of developing HWI to his climb on Mt. Kilimanjaro and his trek to the Mt. Everest Basecamp: “Endless hours of trekking over an icy glacier criss-crossed with echoless crevasses; pick-axing your way up steep and slippery slopes; stopping for breath-taking moments of exhilaration; climbing over fragile rock; and navigating through deadly but beautiful whiteouts.”
“I tell my employees that mountains, problems and opportunities exist independent of our desires—they are neutral,” Samuelson says. “It’s our conscious interaction with our physical and social environment that determines success or failure.”
Samuelson is both a Sherpa and a bridge-builder, guiding HWI with tenacity, passion and confidence “just shy of hubris” as the company paves new “disruptive” ground. At the same time, he’s also maintaining a healthy relationship with HWI’s parent organization—where he’s still a senior vice president—which means that in a strange way, he’s both a disruptor and a sustainer. “It’s an interesting and valuable intersection,” he says.
Samuelson continues to advise government policy makers in Washington and travels extensively throughout the US to help facilitate the health care reform discussion. He doesn’t, however, wear rose-colored glasses when it comes to catalyzing change. “We’ve been spoon-feeding a lot of data into the marketplace for years,” he says. “While people may intellectually know that the current healthcare system is broken, change will not come until people are viscerally affected.”
“For decades, Americans have played only one role in the healthcare game; that of patient,” says Samuelson. “Fixing the problems and paying for the uninsured were someone else’s concern, someone else’s responsibility and someone else’s dime. Yet, our current healthcare system is economically unsustainable.”
In the spirit of Locke, Rousseau, Jefferson and Socrates, Samuelson bullishly advocates for a new healthcare social contract in which people give up certain freedoms in exchange for healthcare opportunities that are both accessible and affordable. “Now we’re saying, ‘OK, fine. I’ll give you awareness, access and affordability.’ But you have to put skin in the game too,” he explains. “It’s a whole different empowerment model—with mutual responsibility, penalties and rewards. It’s a big step forward to more visceral changes.”
Samuelson relishes his leadership role and is keenly aware of his responsibility for grooming the next generation of healthcare leaders. “I tell my staff all the time that I’ll be delighted when someone calls saying they need a director of health promotion in Wisconsin and I can point to one of them and say, ‘You’re ready to go!’” HWI as an incubator for tomorrow’s leaders? “What a great legacy,” Samuelson says.
