A New Mountain

When Berry joined Mays Business School in 1982, his research agenda focused on marketing services and service quality improvement in the commercial sector. “Our research team at Mays enjoyed a lot of success in terms of publishing our work in good journals and stimulating other researchers to do work in those fields,” said Berry, who also served as the Founding Director of the Center for Retailing Studies for 17 years.

However, Berry eventually found himself ready for something new – studying service improvement in healthcare. He decided to devote his 2000 – 2001 faculty development leave to this exploration and, after an extensive interview process, was invited to study at the prestigious Mayo Clinic. “It was an incredibly powerful learning experience, and I got hooked on healthcare,” he said. “I was fascinated by this very personal and highly complex service that was quite different from the commercial services I had been studying for years. I was learning so much every day and loved it.”

That sabbatical led to Berry’s decision to become a health services researcher for the rest of his career. However, for the first nine months after the sabbatical, Berry found himself being unproductive by his usual standards. “Before I left for Mayo Clinic, I was at the top of my game and knew what I was doing,” he recounted. “But when I came back, I found that publishing in medical journals required a different approach than publishing in business, service, and marketing journals. I felt like such a novice. Many times during that first nine months, I wondered if I was on a fool’s errand competing for journal space with physicians and others who had devoted their careers to healthcare.”

Thanks to hard work, perseverance, and some soul searching, Berry’s passion for studying service quality in healthcare began to bear fruit, including being published in prestigious medical journals, co-authoring the best-selling book, Management Lessons from Mayo Clinic, and since 2015, as a Senior Fellow of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in Boston, immersing himself in studying and writing about service improvement in cancer care.

He credits the Mayo Clinic sabbatical for giving him a jolt of sustained energy. “I truly found a new mountain to climb, a very tough mountain that took me out of my comfort zone. But I eventually came to know that with my background, I could make a difference and that has been immensely rewarding,” he said. “I publish with some brilliant physicians and feel so fortunate to be able to work in health services research and help the people who deliver and receive this sacred service we call healthcare.”