Page 147 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

THE LESSONS

Columbia/HCA for $1.3 billion. A week later, Patricelli started a new com-
pany with his own funds and named it Women’s Health USA, Inc., a firm
that provides management and administrative services to doctors and also
manages two in vitro fertilization clinics in Connecticut. In 2000 he
founded Evolution Benefits, a company that provides debit card payment
solutions and related services to health plans and other entities. He attrib-
utes it all to the day he decided to stick his neck out and risk everything
for the chance to make his entrepreneurial dream come true.
“As I think back on it, taking on a $4 million personal loan to make
an investment in a company before I even had a staff or anything else was
pretty heady,” Patricelli said. “But you have to have the courage to take
risks. You’ve got to be willing to be a ball carrier and take the lumps if you
want to lead a winning team.”

Bob Patricelli took a risk that would have wiped him out financially if
things had not gone his way, but great leaders assume all sorts of risks, not
just the monetary kind. Sometimes a leader has to make life-and-death
judgments, and it is then that his or her leadership skills are put to the ulti-
mate test. Such was the case for former White House Fellow Ron Quincy.
At the time he was selected for the White House Fellowship, Quincy
(WHF 85–86) was serving as executive director of Michigan’s Department
of Civil Rights, where he was, at that time, the youngest person in the
state’s history to serve as a cabinet-level department head. Day in and day
out, he and his staff conducted research into the most effective ways to
reduce the numbers of civil rights complaints in the state and also created
and implemented innovative community and industry-based programs
designed to protect people’s civil rights.
While Ron Quincy was working within Michigan’s government to elim-
inate acts of discrimination, across the Atlantic Ocean the South African
government was working to perpetuate more discrimination. Since the late
1940s, the white South African minority had set up and maintained a for-
mal system designed to keep blacks and other people of color subjugated by
any means necessary, an apartheid system of institutionalized racism that
undermined the basic human dignity of nonwhites. Blacks were segregated
and forced to live in slums, their movements restricted and their labor
exploited. They were denied the right to participate in the political system
and saw their leaders arrested, convicted of treason, and sentenced to life

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