Your organization is hitting its numbers. So why does it feel harder than it should?Performance can look fine right up until it doesn't. Healthcare organizations rarely fail overnight, they drift. Slowly, quietly, one reasonable decision at a time, until the systems that once made an organization successful no longer support it, and no one can quite say when things changed.After more than two decades leading ambulatory healthcare operations, Christopher George noticed the same pattern surfacing again and again, in different organizations, different teams, different points in his career. He calls it the Drift Effect: the gradual, often invisible way high-performing organizations lose alignment with the very conditions that made them successful in the first place.The Drift Effect is a practical, deeply human guide for healthcare leaders who sense that something isn't quite right, even when the dashboard says otherwise. Drawing on real experience from ambulatory operations, this book gives leaders the language, the framework, and the diagnostic tools to recognize drift before it becomes a crisis, and to reverse it once it has already taken hold.Inside, you'll discover:Why strong performance can quietly conceal growing instability, and how to tell the difference between a system that's working and one being held together by extraordinary effortThe five drivers of organizational drift, and why they rarely operate aloneA practical framework for diagnosing drift before it becomes deeply embeddedThe four-step Drift Reset Framework for restoring clarity, consistency, accountability, and long-term alignmentHow to build resilient teams and reliable operations that don't depend on heroics to succeedWhy sustaining alignment is not a one-time fix, but an ongoing leadership disciplineWritten in a candid, reflective voice shaped by real leadership experience, not theory, The Drift Effect is for healthcare executives, medical group administrators, clinic operations leaders, and anyone responsible for keeping an organization aligned with its own best intentions. Its principles extend beyond healthcare to any organization built on people, systems, and leadership.Drift is normal. Ignoring it is not.Christopher George is the author of Clinic Operations Rx: The Guidebook, and has spent his career leading ambulatory healthcare operations across organizations of every size.
