Joe Flower
With nearly 30 years’ experience, Joe Flower has emerged as the premier observer and thought leader on the deep forces changing healthcare in the United States and around the world. He has explored the future of healthcare with clients ranging from the World Health Organization, the Global Business Network, and the U.K. National Health Service, to the majority of state hospital associations in the U.S. as well as many of the provincial associations and ministries in Canada, and an extraordinary variety of other players across healthcare - professional associations, pharmaceutical companies, device manufacturers, health plans, physician groups, and numerous hospitals. He has worked on change and the future with the U.S. Department of Defense, Airbus and ArianeSpace, and a number of governments in China. (See a more extensive client list)
Flower is the author of hundreds of articles. For over 20 years he was a contributing editor and regular columnist at the Healthcare Forum Journal. When the Healthcare Forum became the Health Forum of the American Hospital Association, he went on to a regular column in Hospitals and Health Networks Online. For 12 years he has written a regular column for Physician Executive, the Journal of the American College of Physician Executives. He is the author, as well, of a number of seminal articles of the Healthy Cities/Healthy Communities movement.
Flower was a contributing writer for Wired Magazine in its explosive early years, and a columnist for the pioneering health websites DNA.com and HealthCentral.com.
His deep research into the nature of change in organizations and people led to interviews with the top thinkers on organizational change, from Peter Drucker to Peter Senge and Ari de Geus. He went deeper, into the study of chaos theory, Eastern thought, and martial arts, eventually earning a black belt in Ueshiba Aikido.
Flower was a founding member of the International Health Futures Network and the principal author of the landmark forecast, “Technological Advances and the Next 50 Years of Cardiology,” Journal of the American College of Cardiology (vol. 35, no. 4, 2000).
His other writings include:
• China’s Futures Global Business Network 2000 (co-author)
• The 21st Century Healthcare Leader Jossey-Bass 1999 (co-author)
• Japan’s Futures, Global Business Network 1998 (Executive Editor)
• Leading Change: A Key Challenge for Board-Management Teams, The Governance Institute, 1998
• The Encyclopedia of the Future MacMillan, 1996 (co-author)
• Best Practices in Collaboration to Improve Health: Creating Community Jazz, (principal co-author), The Healthcare Forum
and the California Wellness Foundation, 1996
• Prince of the Magic Kingdom: Michael Eisner and the Re-Making of Disney John Wiley 1991
• Age Wave Random House 1989 (co-author)
(See a more extensive list of Joe Flower’s publications)
