World-renowned leadership and management expert Jon Chilingerian was fascinated by how organizations work — and how to make them work better.
Recruited to Brandeis in 1987 by economist Stuart Altman, the Sol C. Chaikin Professor of National Health Policy and then-dean of the Heller School, Chilingerian spent the next 36 years channeling that expertise and fascination into developing and teaching courses for graduate students on management, organizational theory and behavior, and health services research; creating professional development programs for physicians; and designing pioneering degree programs at Heller and beyond.
One of those programs was the Tufts School of Medicine-Heller School dual MD/MBA in Health Management, of which Chilingerian became founding director in 1995. The four-year program combined the study of medicine, business, and healthcare systems, and quickly became the largest of its kind in the country. Another was Heller’s signature Social Impact MBA. Launched in 1998, the program was intended to teach skills such as performance management and financial sustainability to students planning to work in mission-driven organizations.
Meanwhile, challenges in the U.S. healthcare sector were mounting in both number and complexity, from rising costs to falling patient revenue, from novel technologies to emerging pandemics. Chilingerian was convinced that clinical leaders, not business types, were best positioned to develop effective ways of improving healthcare delivery and patient outcomes. “Who should manage companies like Google? People trained in software engineering,” he said. “So who should lead healthcare organizations? The answer is physicians.”
Accordingly, as director of executive education at Heller, in 2004 he devised the one-week residential Brandeis Health Leadership Program, sponsored in part by the American College of Surgeons and the Thoracic Surgery Foundation for Research and Education; the program helps physicians and surgeons develop ways to improve the quality, cost-effectiveness, and efficiency of healthcare delivery and play an active role in healthcare policy and reform. This became the first of many programs he designed over the next 20 years with the needs of physician leaders at the forefront. He also collaborated with the Massachusetts Medical Society to create the Training Physician Leaders to Advance a More Just Workplace program. And, based on his earlier work with Maine’s statewide Physician Executive Leadership Institute (PELI), he created the Heller School-Hanley Center PELI Advanced Executive Leadership Course.
While it was not unheard of for doctors to pursue an MBA, Chilingerian began to conceive of a program specifically designed to give physicians a toolkit of concepts and skills — in financial management, health policy, organizational behavior, and more — which they then could deploy to change their institutions for the better. Research suggested that hospitals and medical centers run by doctors had better outcomes on an array of fronts, from financial margins to patient safety. His own experience and research led him to believe that physicians learning in the classroom with and from other physicians was the best model for the program.
Man on a Mission
Drawing on his experience creating the MBA, MD/MBA, and executive education programs, Chilingerian worked with Heller colleagues for years to develop and refine a curriculum that would bring together medicine and management in a format that busy physicians could realistically take part in: a combination of in-person and online coursework. Finally, in 2015, he received a green light from the University to launch Heller’s Executive MBA for Physicians, which would become one of only a handful of such programs in the country dedicated exclusively to practicing physicians. But, he was told, he’d need to assemble his own team to execute the rollout and support ongoing operations.
Amy DiMattia, whom Chilingerian hired that September as the EMBA’s associate director, recalls her reaction when she learned that the “team” would initially consist of just Chilingerian and herself. She had just a few months, she says, to work closely with him “to take a vision out of his head and make it real.”
By October, Chilingerian and DiMattia were traveling to medical conferences across the country to recruit doctors for a program that had yet to begin. DiMattia remarks, “I was recruiting for something that was new — new to me, new to Brandeis, and new to many physicians who were just beginning to think about what skills they needed to better impact healthcare delivery.” Together, they succeeded, with 36 physicians enrolling as the program welcomed its first cohort in January 2016. Sixteen months later, all 36 graduated.
The accelerated program is necessarily demanding, but, DiMattia says, Chilingerian was concerned about more than just rigorous content: “Jon had this sense of commitment and sense of service. He wanted to provide an environment physicians could really learn in. They of course would do all the work, but we would find ways to best support them through the process.”
For example, in addition to homogenizing the layout of all pages in the course management site, the EMBA team provided a weekly task list that would help students plan ahead. “Jon was keen on that level of attention and support. He wanted the physicians to feel very taken care of,” DiMattia says. “He genuinely wanted to know what their challenges were and wanted to help connect them with resources that they might not otherwise have. He saw this as his life’s work.”
According to Brenda Anderson, former director of the Heller MBA and current director of the EMBA (in which she also teaches the Healthcare Financial Reporting and Analysis and Managerial Accounting courses), “Jon wanted to do more than deliver leading-edge academic content. He always said, ‘We are building relationships that will support these individuals as they move forward in their leadership journey.’”
Those relationships extend to the faculty, Anderson adds: “We get so connected to the students, we don’t want them to leave when they graduate.”
Early on, Chilingerian recruited Carole Carlson, a professor of the practice at Heller and an expert in strategic management and social entrepreneurship, to teach the EMBA courses Healthcare Strategy and Healthcare Entrepreneurship. He subsequently enlisted her to lead the Executive Team Consulting Project Workshop, which requires each participant to identify a problem in their hospital or medical center and, over three semesters, assemble an in-house team that will design and implement an initiative to solve it. The workshop, Carlson says, “serves as an inflection point in people’s careers. It showcases their ability to do something significant for the institution, and it almost always leads to more responsibility. So it both solves problems in the institutions and it creates more professional opportunities for the physicians.”
Chilingerian had been collaborating for some time with two co-editors on a collection of these team-based, clinician-implemented projects developed in the workshop over the years. Eighteen of them were written up as case studies and collected in the book “The New Science of Medicine & Management: A Comprehensive, Case-Based Guide for Clinical Leaders” (Springer Nature, 2023). When Chilingerian died, in May of 2023, the book was just weeks from being published.
A Legacy that Lives On
“One of the best decisions I made as dean of the Heller School was convincing Jon Chilingerian to join our faculty,” Altman says. “Jon was a true force of nature.”
As for the EMBA’s nearly 250 alumni, most of whom have ascended to positions of leadership in their healthcare institutions, here are just some of the ways Chilingerian is remembered:
“Incredible mentor.”
“Thought leader.”
“Passionate.”
“All-time favorite professor.”
“Engaging and gifted teacher.”
“A legend with a tremendous legacy.”
“Jon was not a physician,” one member of the EMBA Class of 2019 wrote in remembrance. “But, he taught me how to think about medicine like no physician I have ever met.” (Read more tributes by alumni and colleagues on the Jon C. Chilingerian kudoboard.)
As DiMattia sees it, “Jon still exists in our alums, because they got so much out of knowing him, having a working relationship with him for so long. Many talk about how much he impacted them and how much they still have his voice in their head today.” She and Anderson are eager to find ways to involve more alumni in the program, because “they have been applying all of this knowledge in the exact ways that [Jon] always wanted.”
While Chilingerian has been amply lauded for his extraordinary vision, devoted mentorship, award-winning scholarship, and numerous books, he was also known as the lively and engaging instructor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior who cared deeply about his students and was prone to cry, “Fantastico!” in moments of high enthusiasm. Not surprisingly, he received a 2022 Excellence in Teaching Award from the Tufts MD/MBA program and, based on votes by EMBA students, a Heller Teaching Award in 2023.
“For everything that he was good at and for everything that he was passionate about,” DiMattia says, “when Jon was in the classroom, it just was magical.”