Talking Heads: Dr Mark Matthews

Position: Chief executive

Company: Intrahealth Systems

Staff: 45


What makes your day at work?

When we achieve something that we've been working towards for some time. Every day you have little victories and little defeats and you work your way around the defeats and celebrate your victories. In the last month we released a new product that took three years to develop, so when we got it out there and people liked it, it was like Christmas. And now we're anticipating the next Christmas.

When did you first become a manager?

When I started Intrahealth. That was the first time I became responsible for managing the entirety of an organisation.

Before that I worked at the Boston Consulting Group for a long time and my role was manager. But I was part of a very large organisation, and in fact you find there are an awful lot of people supporting you, and even though you don't realise it, they're sharing the load. But when you come into a smaller company and have to do it all yourself, it's manager with a capital M.

What is the most important lesson you learned on your way up?

There are two. One is the importance of the people you work with, both from a professional point of view, and social dimension - are these people that I feel good working with? That's important, especially in a smaller company.

The second big lesson is a motto I have taken from a Robert Browning poem - "reach exceeding grasp." It means that you push yourself beyond what you can realistically achieve, because if you don't, you become idle. You have to be striving and ambitious.

What annoys you most?

Unethical, dishonest behaviour in the workplace. That's been one of my big disappointments because I pride myself and the company on being extremely ethical. But there have been a number of situations I've been confronted with where the reactions on the other side haven't been the same. It's hard to handle that. My view has always been that if you're ethical or honest, in the long run that will pay off.

The problems were something I hadn't anticipated, and I've only ever encountered them since I started this company.

If you were starting over again, what would you do?

My career has been a little unusual. I've done clinical medicine, then management consulting, and now I've got an IT/healthcare company. I like the way it brings together all of those things - and I'm not sure I'd do anything different. Perhaps I might start Intrahealth earlier, but I can't think of any other way of structuring my career that would make this better. Healthcare is a very uplifting industry.

What management wisdom is most overrated?

Pure academic credentials are critical, but they are only a starting point. Being given a good academic toolkit is important, but without practical experience you are very underdeveloped. That's why people who succeed with no academic credentials probably do better than those with lots of credentials but no experience.

What will be the big business issue of the next decade?

The internet is providing for the first time a realistic mechanism for businesses to connect from the company to the individual. In healthcare, creating tools that help this happen gives people more control and more access to themselves, their health information and their health capabilities.

I think in five years you will see individuals having much more control of what's happening to their healthcare, rather than being passengers in the healthcare vehicle as it goes along. That's a good thing.

How do you relax?

I have so much going on in my head that it's very hard to switch off.

I have to take my head to a different place, so I get a really good book, a packet of potato chips and a glass of Coke and I go to a completely different world. If I don't, my mind just goes straight back to work. I also ski and boat.

* Mark Matthews talked to Paula Oliver.