Photo by Mark Alcarez

Mickey Herbert parleyed a stint as an administrative assistant to a pediatric neurologist into a successful career as the founder and CEO of a Connecticut HMO. Not bad for someone who confesses he had “no clue” what he wanted to do after leaving HBS —except play baseball. Herbert’s HMO was sold in 1998, and he decided to live his dream. He cofounded and then bought majority control of an independent minor league baseball team.

At Swarthmore, I was captain of the baseball team and wanted nothing more in life than to play baseball professionally. Not counting on that dream to come true, I took both the law boards and the business boards, and did way better on the business boards. That flat out surprised me. I barely knew the difference between a balance sheet and a profit-and-loss statement when I entered HBS.

It was my MBA class that broke the dress code. I thought wearing a tie to class was absurd, a notion not shared by Professor James Bright. He would look around the classroom for a guy not wearing a tie, and three days in a row he called on me first to start the discussion. At the end of the third day, he actually said to me, “You earned my respect the hard way.”

After graduating from HBS, I worked briefly as a management consultant in New York City before getting laid off. An opening at a nonprofit health-policy research firm lured me to Minneapolis, where I learned about health maintenance organizations. I moved to Connecticut when I was 32 to start Physicians Health Services Inc. — and play fast-pitch softball for the defending national champions, the Raybestos Cardinals. That team drew me to Connecticut as much as the fact that the state was a good place to start a health plan.

Those of us who set up those early HMOs were like missionaries. We truly felt that we were providing better health-care coverage for Americans. By the early 1990s, the industry had undergone an almost complete transformation to for-profit health care. I took my own HMO public in 1993. But by the mid-1990s, health plans began working much harder to control costs and even began cutting benefits. One of the reasons I got out of health care in 1998 was that it occurred to me that people loved baseball, and they hated managed care.

At the time, I felt like I should do something to invest the money I had made in the Greater Bridgeport area back into the community, so with two partners I started the Bridgeport Bluefish professional baseball team. A year later, I bought control of the team. Now I’m having the time of my life. While the club has never made money, fortunately it has provided a major economic stimulus for downtown Bridgeport. And for that, I’m proud. — LR

Post a Comment