Pros
Talented and smart front line employees.
Cons
KLAS sells a single product: the uncomfortable truth. Thirty years of telling healthcare IT vendors that their roadmap is fiction, their leadership team is in denial, their employees are burned out, their strategy is reactive, and their house is not in order — so that providers can make informed decisions about who to trust. Fate, as it turns out, loves irony. Because the company that built an empire on diagnosing vendor dysfunction is now a textbook case of it. Every red flag KLAS has ever raised about a vendor is currently waving from the flagpole in Pleasant Grove. Reactive strategy. Three layoffs in three years at a company that used to brag, in recruiting pitches, that it had never done one. A President who stood at an all-hands and announced, with a straight face, that there is no burnout problem here — the kind of quote that, if a vendor CEO said it on a KLAS briefing call, would end up as a bullet point in the next performance report under “leadership disconnect.” The hypocrisy isn’t subtle. We tell vendors that culture is a leading indicator of delivery. Ours is in freefall. We tell vendors that talent flight predicts product failure. A quarter of the staff is gone and the survivors are interviewing on their lunch breaks. We tell vendors that fear-based cultures produce bad outcomes for their customers. Anyone who pushed back on the new strategy here was walked out, and the rest have been told to keep their heads down and publicly perform confidence in a plan leadership cannot articulate in a complete sentence. And here’s the part that should embarrass anyone still reciting the values in the recruiting deck: across three rounds of layoffs in three years, not a single executive lost their job. The strategy that produced the cuts was set by leadership. The forecasts that missed were owned by leadership. The culture that’s now in freefall was built by leadership. And the people who paid for all of it were the analysts, the CSMs, the research directors, the operations folks — the ones who had no hand in any of the decisions that got us here. Whatever happened to accountability? KLAS sells it by the report. KLAS apparently doesn’t keep any in the building. Good to Great is required reading around here, and leadership loves quoting the “right people on the bus” line — but somehow the only people ever asked to get off the bus are the ones in the back. The driver, who’s been steering us into the median for three years running, has not once been asked to give up the wheel. Apparently the bus metaphor only works in one direction. But the richest hypocrisy is the oldest one. For three decades, KLAS has positioned itself as mission over money — the company that does the right thing for healthcare even when it’s not the most profitable thing, the place that hires “high character people” who want to make an impact. It’s in the recruiting deck. It’s in the all-hands. It’s on the wall. And then, when the numbers got tight, leadership cut a quarter of the workforce to protect margin. Not to save the company. Not to keep the lights on. Margin. Which, stripped of the MBA vocabulary, is simply money — money that, in a privately held company, ends up in exactly one place: the owners’ pockets. You can drive a Toyota 4Runner instead of a Range Rover and still be the person who chose your margin over twenty-five percent of the workforce that built it. Humble cars don’t launder the math. The mission didn’t fire those people. The mission didn’t ask anyone to do more with less. A choice did, and the choice was made by people whose paychecks went up the same week other people’s went to zero. The remaining employees fall into three categories: 1. Actively looking. Resume updated, references warmed up, “dentist appointment” on the calendar twice a week. 2. Stockholm syndrome. Too mentally beaten down to leave. Convinced, somewhere along the way, that this is as good as it gets — and maybe even that they’re lucky to still be here. 3. Dwight Schrutes. Sending strategy decks and unsolicited fixes no one asked for. Believing that being a mid level manager at a small, dying company, is somehow an accomplishment. The richest part of all of this is the thing KLAS itself produces: reports that get sent to providers specifically so they can spot vendors whose leadership has lost the plot before the contract gets signed. KLAS is literally the early-warning system for the kind of slow-motion collapse currently unfolding inside the company that produces them. The instrument has detected itself. The smoke alarm is on fire.