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Chief Entrepreneurial Oracles Regina HeRzlingeR and elena avRamov Regina Herzlinger (left), the first woman to be tenured and chaired at the Harvard Business School, is one of the country's leading minds on healthcare (Money magazine called her "the godmother of consumer-driven healthcare"). She has predicted some of the most important medical trends of recent years, including the decline of managed care in the 1990s. Elena Avramov is a 2013 graduate of the Harvard Business School. As Herzlinger's student, she proposed a chain of yoga and wellness studios. She currently works at Optum's Consumer Solutions Group, which provides technology and services to support health management. Regina Herzlinger: The greatest obstacle to leadership in healthcare is that you need to know a lot to be successful in the field. You need to know medicine to understand the regulatory environment, which is very complicated. You also need to understand the public policy environ- ment and how medical providers get paid, which is very convoluted. In my class, I bring in CEOs. The purpose first of all is to enrich the students' contact lists, but also to show that CEOs come in all shapes, sizes, races, and colors. Unfortunately, there are very few women in that group, not because I hadn't invited them but because they don't exist. Yet the message is: You can do it; these guys all did it, so you can do it, too. Elena Avramov: One amazing experience working with Professor 108 bostoncommon-magazine.com