From Surgeon to CEO, Mission-Driven Leadership in Healthcare (ft. Marlon Levy MD)

Welcome to Digital Voices, where healthcare and life science leaders explore the real work behind transformation. This podcast is about people, leadership, and the conversations that move healthcare forward. Now your host, Ed Marx.

Welcome to another edition of Digital Voices. Thank you so much for listening and following us. We just hit our 1.6 million downloads. And it's because of great guests like Dr. Marlon Levy. Marlon, welcome to Digital Voices.

Thank you, Ed. It's an absolute thrill to be here with you.

No, as a fellow Texan, we'll get into your story a little bit, but you're the CEO of VCU Health System, and that is just amazing. I mean, we're going to talk about VCU. I've had an opportunity to visit. I was so impressed and so amazed. So, so I'm, I'm really looking forward to getting, getting into this. And I think that's the first time we met in person, even though we both have these Texas roots, is when I was on the campus and, and with your, with your board at your retreat and with your leadership team. So that, that was the first time. But Marlon, the most important question that we have in this entire together are what songs are on your playlist? What kind of music do you like to listen to?

Oh, so that's the one question that's going to cause me the greatest anxiety. And I'll tell you why. And that's because people are immediately going to tune out and go, this dude is just too square. He's just not hip. So I kind of knew this question would be coming because I did a little homework on your podcast. So let me just lay it out there that sadly, I'm probably as square as I seem to be these days. For, I would say the last few weeks to months, I've kind of been tripping down memory lane and going back to songs that I listened to in, well, more artists I listened to in heavy rotation, maybe I don't know, 15 to even 20 years ago. So who would that be? Well, for example, Kacey Chambers, La Lovett, John Prine, Joan Osborne, people like that. Songs that tell a story and that feel like they have a real human connection.

Yeah, no, I love it. Well, look at me. I'm wearing a Fleetwood Mac shirt.

So there you go. Yeah. So that's not on my playlist, no offense, but it is what it is.

But it goes back, it hearkens back to a different day. What about life message and mantra? Are there sort of words that you live by or quotes that sort of guide you?

I don't know if I can pull a specific quote. I'd say more a frame of mind of what I would be guided by. And that is a sense of optimism. I tend to be a guy that focuses on what's coming next. What's the future? What does the future hold? How can we shape it? I think I heard maybe somebody from Stanford say the best way to predict the future is to invent it. I wouldn't say that's my mantra, but I do get accused, I think very fairly, to have my brain always 2 or 3 years in the future and not enough in the past. And maybe people are telling me I need to absorb lessons a little bit better, but I would say a real sense of optimism and of what's possible, of entrepreneurship, Um, that sort of mentality.

No, I, I, I love that. So let's talk a little bit about you. We're going to get into VCU in a minute, but like, who are you? What is your story? We know a little bit already. You know, you have some Texan roots, but tell us about your life growing up. Yeah.

So I guess I should start at the beginning, but I'll start at not so much at the beginning, but how I've landed here. So a career transplant surgeon, abdominal transplants, right? Liver, kidney, pancreas, multi-organ transplant now. More than 30 years into it, I sometimes think of myself as an accidental CEO because that's that never was on the map. And we can talk a little bit about the the professional journey, but the roots go the roots go way back. I would say that a career in medicine was probably from the age of 15 onwards was was where I wanted to be, not necessarily in surgery that came a little bit later, but the idea of being in a helping profession and in in medicine was definitely part of that. But a long career as a as a transplant surgeon, taking care of individual patients, but also leading. leading and organizing teams and developing projects. That all led me to being recruited to VCU now 10 years ago to lead their transplant team, which was an incredible honor. And I thought that was really the top of the mountain. And it is for a transplant surgeon to be able to lead an academic medical center, particularly a transplant program like VCU that has such a rich history, 62-year history at the time. And then I ended up going to business school thinking I needed to shore up the the business of running a transplant team. And one thing led to another. And so I landed in this office now 3 years ago.

Wow. Well, was there a pivotal moment in life, whether it was, you know, as a 15-year-old or later in your career that fundamentally changed your trajectory?

Yeah, I think there was. I would point to 2. One is at age 10, my family immigrated. And so we were immigrants from France. And so as a 10-year-old, I was parachuted Into Texas, of all places, knowing not a word of English and not having to reinvent myself because I may every ten-year-old reinvents themselves, right? But definitely the being being parachuted into the United States was one has to think of as a pivotal moment in anyone's life, given the enormous opportunities and the fantastic things that that can and do happen in this country. And the other moment I would point to was being accepted for to medical school, getting that letter that says you're in, which for almost everybody who receives such a letter that. That charts a course. Now that course has many different avenues, right? It's a, it's a very broad field, medicine. But definitely I think it's, again, a defining moment in anyone's life who receives, finally receives that acceptance notice.

I didn't know that about you. And I had the same journey as a 10-year-old, but I came from Germany. And so our family, right?

And look, we get along. France and Germany get along these days. How cool is that?

Yeah. Uh, Germany's still a little bit better in soccer, but you know, it's all, it's all good.

Well, it is what it is. I hear you. I think the French wine is better than the German wine. Yes.

Yeah, no doubt about that. No, that's fascinating. Well, the next time we're together, we'll talk more about that. It's super fascinating. So I'm also fascinated by transplant and obviously a very small percentage of our listeners would be able to relate to being a transplant surgeon. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Like, I know we can't get into any super specifics, but tell us about like what that's like, especially like a multi-organ transplant.

Like, it's, first of all, it's, it's an incredible career to be able to, as a, as from one human to another, to be able to step into another human's life. And in a matter of, uh, you know, seemingly a matter of a few hours, which is a transplant episode, literally, you know, save someone's life or significantly extend or prolong life. It's, it's an incredible privilege. And, you know, a lot of doctors and nurses, a lot of healthcare professionals, of course, can say that, but that to me really helps to define transplantation. And the idea fundamentally that often it's a field that gets to turn, not necessarily turn tragedy into triumph, but get to triumph despite a tragedy. So, you know, folks who pass away, who donate their organs, that's still the predominant transplant, you know, worldwide, certainly in the United States, organs from people who, you know, who have passed on and to be able to give new life, extend life, despite the fact that one life has is incredibly fantastic. Again, I use the words gift and privilege because that's what it is to me. Early in my career, I was doing a, I think it may have been a media interview, may have been television at the time. I don't think podcasts existed. And I described the whole episode as miraculous and I still feel that way. It's just incredible to think that one can do that. And of course, for an obsessive-compulsive professional who is Perfectionist and detail-oriented. Transplants, particularly liver transplants, which has been a lot of my career, are technically very demanding. They're physically demanding. They're long operations. They demand incredible precision and judgment. And so all of those things, of course, are very gratifying to people like me with big egos, you know?

Yeah. That's amazing. I'm so thankful for clinicians like yourself who've dedicated their life to that work.

And yeah.

Do that. It'd be fun to talk about the tech changes as well. Like you said, especially at VCU where I think you said, what, 67 years history or 60-plus years?

Yeah, at least. I think first transplanted here at this institution in 1957 before I was even born. So yeah, it's amazing.

Yeah. Yeah. So grateful for that capability. Let's talk about VCU. Can you share a little bit about the heart of VCU?

Absolutely. VCU is an amazing place.

So it's an academic health system.

anchored by an academic medical center, a very large set of hospitals on a downtown campus in Richmond, a mid-sized city. I think the population of Richmond area is about 1.2, 1.3 million. So definitely not a metropolis the way that we have in other parts of the country, but still a vibrant urban environment. I'm often asked, hey, Levy, what are you guys? Are you an academic medical center where there's a bunch of research and discovery, or are you a safety net hospital? People try to pin me down into an either or. And I give them the Bo Jackson answer or maybe the Deion Sanders answer, which is we're both and we are both. So largest safety net hospital in Virginia, 50,000 hospital discharges, 1.3 million outpatient visits a year. Our territory spans 300 square miles, 15,000 team members, just an incredible enterprise. I would say the defining characteristic of this institution throughout all of VCU Health is There's a sense of mission. The people here really are so focused and so intent on giving back, on doing their best, on helping others in time of need. And like in so many hospitals, when people are in the hospital, they're at a very vulnerable point in their life and having some of the worst days of their life. And to be part of the team that helps them through that, very often quite successfully, is amazing.

Yeah, no, that's, that's really great. And I did take an opportunity to walk through some of the hospitals and the children's hospital. And I had that sense from, from everyone that I, you know, I just walked through, you know, like a lobby or what have you. And, and you could tell, you could just tell by the, by the interactions, by the way people held themselves that they were really proud of what they were doing and very mission focused. So let's talk and pivot a little bit around technology. How do you as a CEO? View technology, like, you know, digital capabilities?

Yeah, it's a bit, boy, that, that is, seems like the question of the moment. You know, every meeting I go to, probably for the last 12 months, but definitely over the last 6 months, the only thing any healthcare executive or my peers are speaking about is AI, what to, what to do with it, how to harness it, how to, how to understand what they call the value proposition, right? Because we are literally, we are bombarded by folks who are trying to tell us that their system, their product, their whatever is going to unlock incredible efficiencies and so forth. And it's not that they won't, it's just we're still scratching our heads trying to understand what does that, in financial terms and in operational terms, what does that really mean? Is it going to help us solve some really critical labor issues that we have with finding qualified staff to help us take care of the patients or read our X-rays or what have you? So, Just a real, I think, existential moment in healthcare about what is in the technology space that'll help us deliver the mission and take care of these patients that we're talking about. So, a lot of unknown unknowns, as they say, and I think the job is to try to navigate that as best we can. Healthcare is immensely technology dependent, as all industries are. We're also, I think, in many ways lagging other industries, retail, travel, banking, financial services, all of those things have deployed technology in ways that are much more sophisticated than healthcare has. And so, I think a lot of us are trying to understand how do we get there faster? How do we get there better, smarter? How do we not you know, waste financial resources that are so precious because we need them. Those are the conversations that we're having and the things that we think about.

Yeah, no, it makes a lot of sense. And you have to take a very measured approach like you are. And you're fortunate, you have an amazing, I have to make a shout out to your tech leadership and Ellen, you know, she's like the, she just won this national award for best CIO in healthcare. And the other members, either CMIO and And your analytics officer, they're, they're, they are great, great leaders. So you're very blessed in that way.

Yeah, I appreciate your saying that. They, they're so emblematic of the people that we have at VCU and, you know, most of them don't touch the patients, but boy, they're, they're absolutely essential to those of us who do touch the patients. Incredible.

So what advice, Marlon, might you give to a tech leader? So a lot of our audience come from sort of technical roles. It could be a CIO like Ellen. Or they may be a director, but aspires, you know, to not everyone, but many people aspire to be in the C-suite. And what advice might you give to a tech leader that has sort of that aspiration to continue to grow in their career and how they should ideally interact with the CEO or other members of the C-suite?

Yeah, well, in healthcare in particular, I think what's essential is to understand the journey that the nurses and the doctors have gone through, but also go through. What's it like to be at the bedside? What's it like to be having having very difficult conversations with patients who are so afraid of hearing terrible news about them or about their loved ones who want to understand how to heal, how to get better. I think that one doesn't have to be a medical professional to run a complex healthcare organization, but if one is not, one definitely needs to understand what makes nurses and doctors and other healthcare professionals tick. How do they see the world? How do they prioritize the things that they should prioritize on? I think that's essential. It's also important, I think, to a healthy amount of humility to really, to not only know what you don't know, but to confess what you don't know. And you were asking me a little earlier about, are there some words that I live by? And one of the things that I think I need to say more often is I don't know. I know what I don't know, and, or I don't know when somebody asks me the answer. I think I don't think it's a CEO's job to know, actually. I think it's a CEO's job to know when they don't know and to know who to turn to to get the answer that they need to get, if that makes sense.

Yeah, absolutely. No, those fantastic insights. And I know I can speak for the audience that they appreciate hearing that from a CEO because, yeah, a lot of times I think just we're sort of forced down this route of having to know everything or think we have to know everything, which is impossible. And so that really frees, I think, people up quite a bit. Thank you. So let's shift now more to leadership. We talked a lot about your journey, uh, sort of growing up and your, your career in transplant. What are one or two key skills that you think when you look back have sort of enabled your leadership transformation as you went from, you know, surgeon to leading transplant teams to being a CEO?

Well, Of course, you'd have to ask other people what my skills are. I think we're often blind to our own skills. What I wish people would say is the following. I wish people would say that this guy listens well and is, um, and is more of a listener than he is a talker. That's probably a stretch because I kind of be a little, I tend to be a little talkative, but really, I think that's a trait that would serve all leaders really well is to, is to, to speak with their ears, if you will, and, and to be, to be great listeners, uh, and to pay attention to, to what people are saying, to pay attention to what they're not saying, equally important.

Where do you go when you feel drained or maybe you're looking for creative inspiration? You know, and we all deal with sort of burnout in our, in our industry. How do you sort of refresh or replenish yourself?

Yeah, another great question. 'Cause I think that's, that's so essential. And as I've gotten older, I try to pay much more attention to personal health, to obviously nutrition, sleep, exercise, weight management, all of those things that we humans should be doing. In my personality profile, I thought it was, I thought I leaned extrovert. Turns out I probably lean introvert. And so when I need to refresh, I usually turn inward a little bit. I go walk the dog, I go exercise. I try to unplug and not necessarily look outward, but more power down, if you will, and be more reflective. Sometimes when I have trouble sleeping, I don't fight it. I just lay there and just let my brain go. I often turned out to solve a lot of problems that way, actually, or at least I think I do. I'm that person that tends a little bit more inward when they need to de-stress.

Yeah. Yeah. I like that. What is one thing that you learned the hard way?

Oh, I, you know, what I learned the hard way is that you've got to fail before you succeed. And, you know, other people, what I consider to be really great accomplished people, Winston Churchill, for example, has famously said that if you don't have failure, you'll never have success. So that's probably the hardest lesson. Is when things don't work out to get past the emotional pain of that and understand, okay, what are the lessons for me here and how can I do it better? And sadly, that happens in medicine sometimes at the expense, if you will, of people's lives. And it happens to all surgeons. It's happened to me in my career. And you want it to happen as least as possible, but when it happens, it's devastating and you've got to pick up the pieces and move on because if you don't, then you can't help the next person. comes along, right?

Yeah. Yeah. It's tough. What's something that your parents made you do, Marlon, as a kid that maybe you rolled your eyes a little bit figuratively or otherwise, but then in hindsight, like today you look back and you're like, man, I'm glad they sort of made me do that.

Yeah. I'll have to think about that a little bit. My parents definitely were my heroes. I know it sounds very cliché, but I think if you were to ask me who who shaped my life the way that they did. Definitely it was them, not so much by beating me into it, not at all actually, because that never happened, but by modeling it, by modeling hard work, by modeling curiosity and interest, by modeling ethical behavior. I think that's probably the biggest lesson and the most impactful things that I could point to.

Yeah, no, they sound like fabulous people. And like I said, someday it'll be fun to learn a little bit Yeah. More about your journey from France. So Marlon, this has been amazing. Everything from talking about songs on your playlist, and we covered some of the, the sort of the words that you live by, including I think the one that you emphasized, you know, later in our conversation was, hey, I don't know. And it's okay to, to say that. Learned a little bit about you growing up, as I mentioned, and your career and your development. And then we talked a lot about leadership and some of the important things. And I think the main thing that came out is really listen more than you talk and then learn a lot about how you sort of decompress and gave us some good ideas about that. What did we miss or anything you want to double down on? I'll give you the last word.

Yeah. Well, first of all, thanks for giving me the last word. I'll double down on this. So for those who either have an idea of what it's like to be in the corner office or who aspire to get to the corner office, Regardless of the industry, healthcare or otherwise. I think I'm sometimes asked, hey, Levy, what's it like to be, to have reached the top of the pyramid? And my answer is as follows, and this I do say pretty frequently, and that is you're totally right that it's a pyramid, 100%. But I think the image is wrong. It's not an upright pyramid, it's an inverted pyramid. And the CEO does sit at the tip of the of the pyramid, but the CEO sits at the very bottom of an inverted pyramid. And the CEO's job is to make sure that everybody in that pyramid has everything that they need to be at their best. That's how I visualize the work that I do and the seat that I sit in currently.

Dr. Levy, you're an amazing leader. I knew that when we met. I just had this, well, I saw it in your interactions first, because I was observing. I saw it how you interacted with your people, with your teams, And your servant leadership and your humility. And then when we interacted, I could tell, and it just comes out, you know, very naturally in, in our discussion. I, I, I'm so blessed to have this conversation with you and to share it with the world, uh, cuz I know it'll be really helpful to people. And I'm just so glad there's clinicians and leaders like yourself that are doing great things in their communities and beyond. So thank you again for being my guest today.

Well, it's my privilege, Ed. Thanks for having me on and thanks for letting me spread the word about what amazing place VCU Health is.

Thank you for listening to Digital Voices. We hope today's conversation sparked ideas, reflection, and connection. Subscribe on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify Podcasts so you don't miss an episode.