Joe Flower

With over 30 years’ experience, Joe Flower has emerged as a premier observer and thought leader on the deep forces changing healthcare in the United States and around the world. As a healthcare speaker, writer, and consultant, 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 been a consultant on change and the future with the U.S. Department of Defense, Airbus and ArianeSpace, and a number of governments in China.

Flower is the author of hundreds of healthcare 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 the AHA’s Hospitals and Health Networks Daily. He is member of the AHA’s Health Forum’s speaking faculty, and serves on the board of the Center for Health Design.

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.

After an MA from San Francisco State University and postgraduate work at UC Berkeley, his further 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 healthcare 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)