From Surgeon to CEO, Mission-Driven Leadership in Healthcare (ft. Marlon Levy MD)

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Welcome to DGTL Voices, where health care and life science leaders explore the real work behind transformation. This podcast is about people, leadership, and the conversations that move health care forward. Now your host, Ed Marx.

**Edward Marx** (0:18)
Welcome to another edition of DGTL Voices. Thank you so much for listening and following us. We just hit our 1.6 million download, and it's because of great guests like Dr. Marlon Levy. Marlon, welcome to DGTL Voices.

**Marlon Levy** (0:35)
Thank you, Ed. It's absolute thrilled to be here with you.

**Edward Marx** (0:38)
Now, it's a fellow Texan. We'll get into your story a little bit. But you're the CEO of VCU Health System, and that is just amazing. I mean, we're going to talk about VCU. I've had an opportunity to visit. I was so impressed and so amazed. So I'm really looking forward to getting into this. And I think that's the first time we met in person, even though we both have these Texas roots, is when I was on the campus and with your board at your retreat and with your leadership team. So that was the first time. But Marlon, the most important question that we have in this entire together are what songs are on your playlist? What kind of music do you like to listen to?

**Marlon Levy** (1:17)
Oh, so that's the one question that's going to cause me the greatest anxiety, and I'll tell you why. And that's because people are immediately going to tune out and go, this dude is just too square. He's just not hip. So I kind of knew this question would be coming because I did a little homework on your podcast. So let me just lay it out there that, sadly, I'm probably as square as I seem to be. These days, I would say the last few weeks to months, I've kind of been tripping down memory lane and going back to songs that I listen to, and more artists I listen to in heavy rotation, maybe, I don't know, 15 to even 20 years ago. So who would that be? Well, for example, Casey Chambers, Lyle Lovett, John Prine, Joan Osborne, people like that. Songs that tell a story and that feel like they have a real human connection.

**Edward Marx** (2:07)
Yeah, no, I love it. Well, look at me, I'm wearing a Fleetwood Mac shirt.

**Marlon Levy** (2:10)
There you go. Yeah, so that's not on my playlist, no offense, but it is what it is.

**Edward Marx** (2:16)
But if it goes back, it harkens back to a different day. What about life message and mantra? Are there sort of words that you live by or quotes that sort of guide you?

**Marlon Levy** (2:25)
I don't know if I can pull a specific quote. I'd say more a frame of mind of what I would be guided by.
And that is a sense of optimism. I tend to be a guy that focuses on what's coming next, what's the future, what does the future hold? How can we shape it? I think I heard maybe somebody from Stanford say the best way to predict the future is to invent it. I wouldn't say that's my mantra, but I do get accused, I think, very fairly to have my brain always two or three years in the future and not enough in the past. And maybe people are telling me I need to absorb lessons a little bit better. But I would say a real sense of optimism and of what's possible, of entrepreneurial-ship, that sort of mentality.

**Edward Marx** (3:16)
No, I love that. So let's talk a little bit about you. We're going to get into VCU in a minute. But like, who are you? What is your story? We know a little bit already. You know, you have some Texan roots, but tell us about your life growing up.

**Marlon Levy** (3:28)
Yeah, so I guess I should start at the beginning, but I'll start at not so much at the beginning, but how I've landed here. So a career transplant surgeon, abdominal transplants, right? Liver, kidney, pancreas, multi-organ transplant. And now, more than 30 years into it, I sometimes think of myself as an accidental CEO because that never was on the map. And we can talk a little bit about the professional journey, but the roots go way back. I would say that a career in medicine was probably from the age of 15 onwards, was where I wanted to be. Not necessarily in surgery, that came a little bit later, but the idea of being in a helping profession and in medicine was definitely part of that. But a long career as a transplant surgeon, taking care of individual patients, but also leading and organizing teams and developing projects, that all led me to being recruited to VCU now 10 years ago to lead their transplant team, which was an incredible honor. And I thought that was really the top of the mountain. And it is for a transplant surgeon to be able to lead an academic medical center, particularly a transplant program like VCU that has such a rich history, 62 year history at the time. And then I ended up going to business school thinking I needed to shore up the business of running a transplant team. And one thing led to another. And so I landed in this office now three years ago.