See the Human Being First (ft. Phoebe Yang)

Ultimately, at the end of the day, everything comes back to the people.

What most people who try to disrupt healthcare from a technology perspective underestimate is the importance of the people and the culture. And it's really the only industry in which the greatest predictor of success is directly tied to how well you see the human being as first. But that relationship is one built on trust. And so if you can't orient yourself around that model of trust, It's gonna be very hard to be successful. 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.

Hey everyone, welcome to another edition of Digital Voices. So excited as I am every week because we have the greatest guests. And today, in this episode, we have Phoebe Yang. Phoebe, welcome to Digital Voices.

Thank you so much, Ed. I love listening to your podcast, and so it's exciting to be here. Thanks for having me.

And you're like this icon in the industry. I know everyone knows you, and we'll dig a little bit deeper, maybe some areas that people don't know as much about you, but you're just a fabulous person, and we just really sort of met I think just digitally, if you will, we, I followed all your stuff and you've been an, like I mentioned, an icon in the industry. So I've really listened and learned a lot from your experiences that you share so well. But the most important question, Phoebe, that we have in the entire program is what songs are on your playlist? What kind of music do you like to listen to?

You know what? The songs on my playlist, they vary from Rise Up, To Gregorian chants. I love jazz. I love classical. Um, um, and, and I love the really ancient music, uh, too, that, that you don't hear so much anymore.

So. I, I love that too. And we're going to add that. We do have a Digital Voices Spotify playlist and we always add to it based on our guests. And I don't think we have any Gregorian chants. So add some, but yeah, I've been down to listening lately to some Aramaic. from the time of Christ, you know, in that region of, of the world. And it is so beautiful. Uh, and then one, you know how it works with algorithms, one led to another, led to another. And I was like, I, it's been like up on my screen for, for months now. So it's great.

Amazing. Oh, you'll have to send them to me because I know I would enjoy them. Ancient music is very, uh, both meditative but inspiring. There's something, you know, just, just qualitatively different.

What about, Life message or mantra? Are there words that kind of guide you to how you live?

Yes, there are quite a few, but I would say the way that I orient my life or try to, and I fail every day, but I work at it every day, is there was a great commencement. It's my favorite commencement speech. Barbara Bush gave it in 1990 at Wellesley College, and she was not— the student body there did not want to receive her as their commencement speaker. They wanted Alice Walker from The Color Purple. But It was an 11-minute speech. You can still hear it, and I sometimes go back and listen to it. It was just brilliant. And one of the things she said in that speech was, at the end of your life, you are not going to care about whether you passed that test or closed that deal or won that case. What you're going to care about is, did you spend time with the important people in your life and how did you invest your life in that way? And so I try each day to make sure that even if I'm on the road a lot, that I have made a point to make sure that the people in my life and those in my life most important to me know that they are most important to me because sometimes what's in our on our calendar doesn't really reflect the priorities of our hearts. So.

No, that's a great reminder. I'm going to look that speech up, especially since it's only 11 minutes. What's your story like? Tell us about your time growing up.

Yeah. So my origin story is I'm the daughter of a single-parent immigrant who was a father, not a mother. A lot of times it's a single mother, but it was a single father who had 3 daughters, and I'm the oldest of the 3 daughters. He came to the United States in the '60s to get his master's. The first place he stopped was in Harlem and then ended up at Atlanta University, which is an HBCU now called Clark University. Met my mother and ended up staying in the United States after his His father, who had been a single parent also, who fled communism in China and went to Taiwan while my father was a teenager, he ended up meeting my mother. And so when his father passed away, he decided to stay and he got a job in Arkansas teaching at another HBCU.

Wow.

And so I was born in a small town called Pine Bluff, in Arkansas, which is in the Mississippi Delta. Grew up there with the exception of 3 very influential years when I lived in Nebraska where my dad did his PhD. And then during that time, my parents split up and my father ended up becoming a single parent. We moved back to Arkansas and people, my hometown, the same year that it was ranked by Rand McNally as the worst city to live in the United States. It was also ranked the top volunteer community in America, and it was a wonderful place to grow up. The whole town becomes your family. But needless to say, in a predominantly African American community, I looked a little different. And then I looked even more different because I had a single-parent father, and then he was an immigrant. And so it was an interesting upbringing, but I wouldn't trade it for anything.

Yeah.

Defined who I was.

I love that. That's a pretty cool story. Was there a pivotal moment in your life, could have been when you were younger, as you were describing, or older in life, that fundamentally changed the direction of your life?

Yes, there was one probably most pivotal moment. So I went to law school thinking that I was going to do a traditional career of being a law professor and maybe a judge or something like that, because I had a long history, ancestral history of Supreme Court justices and attorney generals and diplomats and judges in my family. My father, who was the only son and the oldest, decided to veer from that and became a professor. And I wanted to be a professor, but he really wanted me to be a lawyer. And so we kind of compromised and I said, okay, I'll be a law professor. And so I went through law school and did my summer work, et cetera, with the assumption that I might do something in that realm. And then the year after he graduated, I was clerking for a judge, which a lot of law students do after they graduate from law school. And my father was diagnosed quite unexpectedly with late-stage colorectal cancer, and he was given 4 to 6 months to live. He lived 4 and a half months. And, um, and so that really changed the way I thought about my life, but also what I ended up doing. Um, he had said to me when I was 12 years old, I'll never forget it. He came, I still see his silhouette in my bedroom door. And he, and I was already in bed almost asleep. And he came in and he had been thinking, I guess. And he said, uh, standing in the doorway, if anything ever happens to me, You were to quit school, go to work, and make sure your younger sisters can get through school. Well, fast forward 15 years later, almost 15, 14 years later, that happened. And even though I had just graduated, I had 2 younger sisters, one of whom was in a graduate program and the other who was still an undergraduate. And so I decided I was going to go work and earn a living. So I went to a big law firm. The reality is my sisters are very accomplished in their own right and they didn't need me, but I didn't know what would happen and I was pretty dutiful at that point. And at the same time, I did a lot of soul searching and I knew fundamentally I don't actually enjoy fighting. And lawyers, you kind of have to like the fight. Well, I like to compete, but I don't like to fight sort of adversarially. I really like to build. And so I did a lot of soul searching around that and I decided, you know what, I'm not going to be a litigator, which means I'm not going to end up being a judge. I'm going to go the business route because I want to build things and I want to bring people together and I want to align interests and then see output that isn't a zero-sum game. And so that really, if my father had continued to live, I'm not sure I would've come to that point. Yeah. But it really kind of changed the trajectory and how I thought about the rest of my life.

That's an amazing story. Yeah. The power of words, right? Especially from a loved one. And yeah, walk us through a little bit of your career from that point. You, 'cause you went from sort of this public service which was historically in your family, into C-suite roles in major tech and healthcare companies. So let's talk about that pivot a little bit.

Yeah. Well, first I went to a law firm and then I went, and while I was at the law firm, which was a great firm, I really actually enjoyed practicing law, but I really detested billing hours, which is the way the legal profession is built. That's going to change, by the way. AI is going to change the economics of law firms, and it's sooner than people realize. I had worked for a law firm in Asia during the summer of one of my law school years, and very exciting things were happening in China where I had spent a little bit of time. China was looking to accede to the WTO, And I was asked to go into the government to work on a presidential initiative to help bring China into what we would consider global standards around rule of law to prepare them for WTO accession. That initiative was really successful on a number of fronts, but most importantly, beyond the initiative, China was successful in acceding to the WTO, and a lot of multinationals were looking to go to China at the time to start, to launch businesses there. But notably, they were not interested in hiring local Chinese because they were nervous about acquiring talent that may or may not have the cultural alignment or the practices and the disciplines of Western business. And so even though I came from Arkansas, I was being very heavily recruited to go to China because I spoke Chinese and I have a face that looks Chinese. Anyway, I end up going and with the blessing of my law firm intending to go back to my law firm. My law firm said this is an incredible opportunity. You you know coming out of government, you should go take this. So I ended up going and helping AOL Time Warner to start a China office. At the time, they had a lot of divisional representatives representing you know Turner Broadcasting, Warner Music, a number of businesses AOL after the merger of AOL Time Warner, but they didn't have any corporate presence and they were running up against each other and contradicting each other in front of the Chinese government. So I ended up being the person who was trying to bring some of those issues and perspectives and viewpoints and positions together. It was a policy role, but it was a business and strategy You had to have a business and strategy perspective to do that role effectively. And, but I really wanted, and my deal was I would come back to the United States and go into one of the business units, 'cause I really wanted to understand how businesses operated. Well, some very well-publicized things happened at AOL, which was the business unit I had intended to going into. It was, you know, the advent of the internet. We're probably of the same vintage, right, Ed? So, like, It was the advent of the internet, and it was, I was so interested in what was happening, but some very well-publicized things, including an SEC investigation was happening in that business unit. And I just decided at that point, I never wanted to be at a company and not see that coming.

Man.

So I, but in order to see that coming, I had to understand finance and operations better than I did. And so ultimately I left, Took a pause, decided that— did a little research on my family history on the side, and then decided I was going to join Discovery, which owned the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet, all the real-world television networks. This was the heyday of the 300-channel universe of television. And I joined the corporate development team. And I was the only member of the corporate development team who had not gone to Wharton, worked at McKinsey, and been sort of a certain track. They were all men. They were all lovely men, but I just looked and seemed quite different. But I had this international experience and I was willing to roll up my sleeves. And I still have, just as a memento, I still have my Excel for Dummies book on my bookshelf to remind me that I learned how to run discounted cash flow analyses. I'm looking right now at my McKinsey valuation book. I learned how to value companies. And I remember my boss one day coming by my office and it was late. He left every day at 5. It was 7 and I would stay till 11. He said, why are you still here? And I said, 'cause I'm learning this stuff. And he said, you don't have to do this. I said, yeah, but that's why I took this job is to learn it.

Yeah.

So, but in that process, I really learned at least the financial labors of successful and unsuccessful businesses, but I wanted to operate too. And so while I was there, I ended up being asked to help turn around a business before we became public. It was Discovery Health, which is, At the time, Dr. Oz. At the same time, things were starting to disrupt the media industry. The media industry was the first to really be disrupted and impacted by digital forces. And we had a fledgling business unit called the New Media Business Unit. And I raised my hand and I went to go be the operator in that business unit. And I was a VP, so I could sign for the company, but I wasn't senior enough to win in any internal jockeying that was happening around Which deals you got to do. And so everybody was jockeying for the big deals with Comcast and DirecTV, and I got stuck, in air quotes, doing the little deals that nobody else wanted to do that would never make any money, like with Amazon and with Microsoft and with Nokia and Google. And it was a interesting time to be there because you had this sort of emerging new industry that was forming, and the technology players didn't understand our business, and our business didn't understand what they had to do to be successful in the technology space. But I rolled up my sleeves and, you know, got my hands dirty in the space, and it really kind of changed my trajectory.

Yeah, that's super interesting. And then, And then ultimately, you made it into the best industry there is, into healthcare. So tell us about, like, that transition and some of the things that you've done in healthcare.

Well, you know, it's interesting. Sometimes you don't realize what's happening in your life until you have the benefit of hindsight, right? And so my first foray into health was really at Discovery when I helped turn around that health business. Then I went into the Obama administration, Where the Affordable Care Act was the big initiative happening. And I was at the FCC working on a national broadband plan to make broadband the next big infrastructure, transformative infrastructure like highways and electricity and railroads and telephony in prior generations. And we were putting together a national plan to make broadband that. But what was justifying the investment in this plan was really what we called national purposes, healthcare, education, energy, and how those industries really needed and could benefit from the acceleration of broadband technologies. And so I ended up Taking a particular interest in healthcare. And so when I was asked to stay after the broadband plan was complete to be the chairman's senior advisor on broadband, I said, I really wanna focus on healthcare. And the reason for that was probably multifold, but I didn't realize it until after I really entered the healthcare industry full force when I went to work for the advisory board company. Remember the advisory board company?

Yeah, I followed you.

Yeah, so it was great. And I was their first corp dev person, so I learned a little bit of discovery. I was able to take over. But it was a really interesting time because we were looking at the transformation of health systems from hospitals and acute care into really thinking about what's happening in the broader Yes. Lives of the patients or people that we were really trying to serve in those communities. And so I really wanted to be at the forefront of that and decided to really kind of pivot into that. And candidly, at the same time, I had gotten married and had a child. And so my life was looking very different, became very personal. Healthcare became very personal But like everybody, most people I know who are drawn to healthcare, we all have a personal story where the healthcare system didn't work for us.

Yeah.

And mine was my father. And so I was determined that when you look at the quotient of brokenness to potential impact or impact to potential brokenness, the quotient is actually quite high there. And you You come to a point where you say in your life, I wanna have impact, right? And so I made that sort of intentional switch into healthcare, but really always through the lens of what can technology help us do and do better?

Yeah, no, I like that a lot. And you've been very blessed and fortunate because of all this great experience and your leadership to have many board roles, and you continue to do so. Some of the companies would be like GE, Doximity, CommonSpirit. Can you share one or two key lessons? 'Cause, you know, a lot of people aspire to eventually, right, in their career, take a board role and give back in that way. Are there one or two key lessons that you've learned from some of these board roles?

One of the key predictors of success is what I call curious humility. Understanding that you don't know everything, but actually being interested, not just at the surface level, but root causes and why organizations operate and function the way that they do and why they're successful and why they're not. And in a board role, you have to step out, you have to be willing to step out of an operator's role, but bring your operator's experience and lens into seeing around corners, recognizing patterns of intrinsic value, but also of lost opportunity. And help to guide around those corners, particularly by asking questions and not dictating outcomes. And so, it's a different sort of hat that you wear, but the operator's experience is so critical to, I think, success in a board role. And where I've seen the most successful And the most impactful board conversations has always tended to be in that intersection of understanding operations, but lifting up and seeing 5, 10 years down the road of what the potential could be.

You've already described your background so well. I think many people know you already. I mean, all this experience, right, as in the legal profession, sort of as a diplomat, as a operator, and as a board member, it's just a wide variety, but you're also very technical. And we didn't talk yet about some of the leadership that you've had in more technical roles. So I want to sort of pivot towards healthcare specifically and technology and talk a little bit about AI. So share with us, you're still in the game, totally. Aren't you like on the faculty and teaching AI? What are some of the things you think about with that? And then maybe we'll pivot to, you know, application in healthcare?

Well, thank you, Ed. I would consider myself a continuous learner. But on the AI front, the course that I designed and am teaching is really around the business of AI because what I'm finding is that there are people in the industry who are deeply, deeply, deeply technical, But haven't yet lifted up to think about the business and really where demand might be. And then there are people who are maybe casual users or even intense users, but haven't thought about the implications of the use. And so, and in the legal realm, You have great experts, intellectual property, privacy, compliance, security. And in the broader realm, you have IT professionals, HR professionals, you have sort of lots of functional expertise around sales and marketing. But in the realm of AI, we need to be able to bring all those perspectives together almost into And so, what I, the class I have been teaching is around business leadership in the age of AI, particularly in this case, it was for lawyers. But I will tell you that the CIO of J&J, who was a guest speaker at my class, he was fantastic. And he said, you know, I want all IT professionals to take this class too, because we talked about, you know, strategy and industry and market shifts and how you think about market share and what are the prerequisites around successful AI adoption. And then we talked about operating performance and financial performance and really what, you know, where the rubber meets the road, both whether you're a frontier model or you're an app developer or you're a casual user, you know, within a larger business. And so, I think all of those are really, really important. But that notion of business partnership as opposed to just understanding your narrow silo is really important in the age of AI because this is uncharted territory and we don't have norms yet. And that sort of business partnership and leadership are really crucial.

What about any thoughts like on healthcare where you think AI might be disruptive, or from a board perspective, you know, what sort of things do you think about?

I think there will be a direct correlation between disruption and naivete or ignorance. We've heard the maxim, you know, you won't be displaced by AI, you'll be displaced by someone who knows how to use AI. But beyond that, you know, nice maxim, I actually think that those who refuse to learn the parameters of where AI is safe and where it's not safe and be able to manage it, they miss the opportunity to maintain agency. And so I really believe that the word agent is a bit of a misnomer. I think we can think of AI agents as tools. Some think of them as workers. I prefer to think of them as a partner in what we do. And if you don't learn how to design, manage, leverage, channel, and contain these agents or AI partners, then you're missing the opportunity to, not just for productivity, but for creativity as well. And operating and financial performance, but you also create a lot of risk for yourself and for your companies and the enterprises and the society that you live and work in. And so you want to maintain agency, but how do you maintain agency is to learn how to use the tools and actually set up the right guardrails and learn how to engage in effective ways. So that would be what I would say. Now, what people don't understand about healthcare, and which I learned when I was at Amazon, is a lot of times technologists think, oh, let's just bring in the tech and it will displace, it will replace, it will disrupt. What most people who try to disrupt healthcare from a technology perspective underestimate is the importance of the people and the culture.

Yes.

And it's really the only industry in which the greatest predictor of success, but also the most important measure of performance, is directly tied to how well you see the human being as first. It doesn't matter whether you are a physician, a pharmacist, a payer, a medical device manufacturer, a digital, you know, SaaS provider, an AI player, it really doesn't matter. Fundamentally, all of those players in an ecosystem revolve around one relationship. And that relationship is between the person who's providing care and the person who's receiving care. And fundamentally, everybody else is either trying to sell into or monetize or equip that relationship. But that relationship is one built on trust. And so if you can't orient yourself around that model of trust, it's gonna be very hard to be successful, right? But if you do orient yourself around that, relationship of trust, you can exponentially grow, right? And so it's a really interesting industry. Now, many other industries maybe replicate in that in some form, but ours I think is the most acutely deterministic of that measure of trust.

Yeah. No, I think it's spot on. I think we do get distracted a bit by the technology and we forget the people part. And when that happens, we don't achieve the expectations that we were hoping for. So it's always good to double back down on that. Where do you go when you're feeling drained? So I want to sort of end on maybe a helpful leadership tip from you. So we all get drained for one reason or another. Life comes at us, all the stuff going on in all of our work and family and all those sort of things. Is there anything that you do that kind of like rebases you and reenergizes you?

You know what I do? Well, there are 2 things I do. One is I go to a mountain or I go to a body of water where there's no cell coverage. I love to be in silence. And occasionally if I can't do that, I remember one time I was in Rome and I went and found this church and my favorite painter is Caravaggio. And there are these 2 amazing Caravaggio paintings. in the Santa Maria del Popolo. And I sat there all day and just journaled and read and prayed. And so it was just wonderful. What I really, if I need to have a charge to remember where I came from, which is I love to go back to my hometown in Arkansas, be with people who are a lot older than I am and hear their stories. Because the stories of resilience around people who made it through the Depression and the World War II, and even more recently, you know, some of the challenges of COVID and others. We'll have our own stories to tell, but they're really inspiring.

My favorite painting in the world, Caravaggio, and I think it's in that church. It's the Crucifixion of St. Peter.

Peter, yes. So that's one of my two, and it sits right across from Saul on the Road to Emmaus.

Yes. Oh, wow. When you start—

I knew we were connected somehow, but there are many ways, but I wouldn't have guessed that would be it. Right.

I have a giant rendering of that in our house. Um, it's just, it shakes me, you know, it takes me back to the fundamentals.

What he said when he painted it, or what Peter, what the legend of Peter is that he said, I'm not I'm not worthy, you know, to die as my Savior did. And that was just so powerful to me. It really, really sort of was grounding. So.

Yeah. I knew you were amazing already. I mean, I'm super touched by all of your stories. We did start off, you know, on a similar theme of Gregorian chants when we talked about some of the music and then we talked about life message and how important people were. And yeah, we'll say it again. Everyone should go look up the Barbara Bush video of her commencement speech from 1990. And then your story, I mean, that explains it all. I mean, people who have the beliefs and are grounded like yourself have this kind of story about your dad and just the way that you were raised and things like that. And the pivotal moment when your dad passed away from cancer. And you took us through your career. It's been an amazing career, a lot of different areas still going on. It's still continues to today. And we talked a little bit about healthcare tech. We didn't have enough time to break down as far down as we wanted to go. So glad to have you back. But we talked about AI and the class that you're teaching at Stanford, kind of the business side of AI. But ultimately, at the end of the day, everything comes back to the people. And then we talked a little bit about leadership and just silence, how that can really rebase you and reenergize you. We all need that time away. And that, you know, concepts of being a continuous learner and the concept of being curious and humble, What did we miss, or is there anything you want to double down on? I'll give you the last word.

Yeah. You know, one of the things, because I'm fresh from my class, is I'll just share, you know, Socrates was afraid. He bemoaned the invention of writing. He thought the written texts would weaken our mental acumen and dull our memory and prevent us from developing deep wisdom. And he prized interactive learning, right? That's why we call Socratic discussions interactive learning. But look at how much writing has done for us. And with every invention, farming, fire, printing, steam power, televisions, air travel, the internet, mobile technologies, we face similar questions where there are those who bemoan their invention and fear what they might lead to, and those who are super excited about what they might bring. And I think AI is similar. And as we sort of move into what is really human, next weekend I'll have the privilege of being the respondent to Monsignor Renzo Poggiolaro at the Catholic Health Association's first AI summit. And he will be giving the keynote and he leads the Pontifical Council for Life, which oversees AI for the Vatican. One of the key questions that I think came out of my class is, what does it mean to be human?

Yeah.

And there's some things that are uniquely human. And just to leave you with a message of hope, the dean of the school when I was at Stanford, I had coffee with him and he said, what has surprised you most about teaching? And I told him, What has really surprised me is I have been bemoaning, perhaps not unlike others, where we're heading as a society, the impact of screens on mental acuity and values of the next generation of people. But what I discovered is when I opened up the conversation in my classroom, a couple of weeks ago is the students are very values-driven. And a lot of the core values that we hold to be true about the good in human nature and the things that we can fear about human nature, they carry forward and the next generation is ready to take them on. They care about these things too. And so the screens and COVID and social media and all of those things have not stripped those values away. And it has been very encouraging and inspiring for me to see them prepare to take the helm.

Yeah. No, that's great. That's a great way to end. Phoebe, thank you so much for being our guest on Digital Voices. You're an amazing person.

Oh, you're amazing. And the people you have are amazing. So I'm humbled and grateful that you would have me. 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.