What’s Love Got To Do With It?
Tina Turner, Virgil, and George Vaillant walk into a bar.
(Stop us if you’ve heard this one before.)
She looks at the two of them and asks, “What’s love got to do with it?”
Virgil and Vaillant look at each other, then turn to her in unison.
“Everything.”
Virgil, the immortal first-century BCE Roman poet and author of The Aeneid and The Eclogues, left us with one of history’s most enduring affirmations:
Omnia vincit amor.
Love conquers all.
Omnia vincit amor.
Virgil wrote those words during a period of profound upheaval in Rome. Julius Caesar had been assassinated. Civil war raged. Octavian was struggling to unify a fractured Republic.
Against this backdrop, “Love conquers all” was not the language of romance. It was a declaration that political power and physical force, however formidable, cannot by themselves bring about lasting human change; cannot make the world better.
Only love can do that.
Two thousand years later, in 1938, Harvard launched what would become the longest-running study of human development ever conducted. The Harvard Grant Study followed 268 men for decades through surveys, interviews, medical exams, and psychological assessments, all in pursuit of a deceptively simple question:
What makes a life happy and fulfilling?
For more than thirty years, the study was led by Harvard psychiatrist George Vaillant, who chronicled its findings in Triumphs of Experience. After decades of analysis, Vaillant concluded that the central lesson was deceptively simple:
“Happiness is love. Full stop.”
What’s love got to do with it?
Well, everything.
You know this in your bones. We know this.
And yet.
Pick up a Fortune 500 annual report. Alongside the financials you’ll find discussions of competitive threats, growth opportunities, geopolitical risk and, increasingly, artificial intelligence. Roughly half will step into the tepid waters of employee “engagement” or customer “satisfaction.”
Yet among all those pages, charts and carefully crafted narratives, you will struggle to find a company that uses the word love in any meaningful way.
Which brings us to healthcare.
Few industries are more fundamentally rooted in love than healthcare. We do not mean the soft sentiments of Hallmark cards and warm puppy adoration.
We mean the muscular love that builds hospitals on the frontier; that cares for communities in need, that strives to alleviate suffering. The kind that can conquer despair.
People do not go into healthcare because they are passionate about administrivia, market share, or reimbursement policy. They go into healthcare, we all went into healthcare, because of, in one form or another… love.
Love remains in healthcare, of course. But it’s been papered over, weighted down by layers of regulation, finance, operations, and complexity. Yet the embers burn there… unharnessed and waiting.
Why is love such a taboo concept in professional life? How did it come to signal softness or weakness when, in nearly every other realm of human experience, it is recognized as the ultimate source of strength?
Perhaps because love isn’t linear. It cannot be captured in a spreadsheet cell.
Perhaps because love isn’t transactional. Love gives when the calculation says withhold.
Perhaps because love plays the long game. It resists quarterly reporting
But boy is it powerful.
We contend that love is a powerful management principle.
Take a beat. Engage in a thought experiment with us. What if love was a core value and management principle of yours? For your strategy? Your operating model? Your organizational constructs? For your why, your what, and your how?
What would be different? How would your enterprise be different? How would your results be different? How would you be different?
Love conquers all, but it also requires all.
A strategy where love is the central tenet is one where true value creation, client centrism, and caregiver engagement are both the price of admission and the byproduct. Because—to paraphrase the Beatles—the more love you give the more you get.
In our next several Healthcare Remixes we will discuss how leaders may consider channeling love as a management principle that focuses, energizes, and powers their work and their organizations.
In the meantime, a final thought: when Virgil wrote of love, he also wrote about the consequences of accumulating power without it. That doing so risks losing the very thing that matters most—the chance to know the experience of love and to ultimately be powered by it.
That to act without love may be the riskiest strategy of all.
We think Virgil’s right… and after all that, so does Tina.
About the authors
Ken Graboys, CEO of Chartis, began his journey not in an office, but in rural Africa, working in communities facing famine and limited access to care. It was there he saw how the foundations of health—food, medicine, compassion—could shape the trajectory of entire communities. In 2001, he co-founded Chartis with the mission to improve the delivery of healthcare in the world. His career path—from fieldwork in Mauritania to healthcare transformation—illustrates a commitment to cultivating healthier communities through thoughtful, sustainable action.
David Jarrard, Chairman of Jarrard, grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee—a town shaped by science and innovation. His early career as a journalist covering human stories gave him firsthand insight into how storytelling can influence public perception and drive change, which naturally connects to healthcare, a field where clear communication can impact patient outcomes and organizational success. This foundation led him to build one of the nation’s leading healthcare communications firms.