At Work, on Court, CEO’s Got Game

It’s a battle of wills and bodies when Bill Corley and his son, Matt, head out to the driveway for a game of one-on-one basketball.

Bill Corley, CEO of Community Health Network in Indianapolis, is overseeing the expansion of Community Hospital North. The 840,000-square-foot addition will more than double the hospital’s size and add 540 jobs.

During the many years of contests outside the family’s Carmel home, the advantage has gradually shifted from the father, now 64, to the son, now 31. But Bill Corley, at 6 feet 5 inches, still has a few inches on Matt and a nifty sky hook.

"There are times where I can beat him," said the elder Corley, the enthusiasm in his voice rising slightly. Each hates to lose. "My wife gets upset: We will both come in, and she can tell right away who won."

Corley’s intensity isn’t confined to the family basketball court. In many ways, today’s opening of the massive $170 million expansion of Community Hospital North is a symbol of Corley’s drive and leadership.

During Corley’s 23-year tenure, Community has expanded far beyond its Eastside roots, growing from a single hospital and $117 million a year in revenue to five hospitals, 70 facilities and more than $1 billion today.

His work ethic and determination were forged by sports, Vietnam and the softening effects of a loving family.

When Corley recounts a trip in the early 1990s with several other Indianapolis business leaders to attend a Los Angeles Dodgers baseball fantasy camp, he points out that he led the group with a .611 batting average.

"Averages did tend to inflate down there," Gov. Mitch Daniels, who accompanied Corley on the trip, recalls with a slight laugh.

But he quickly adds: "Bill’s a jock, and a good one."

Daniels, who has known Corley for about two decades, also says, however: "It was his intellectual curiosity that caught my attention."

Corley, chief executive of Community Health Network, is always studying how hospitals or companies succeed, looking for ways to apply those lessons to Community, Daniels said.

In more than 20 years since Corley arrived to lead the Indianapolis hospital group, he has left his mark on Community and the Indianapolis area.

Community North opened in 1985 on the Northeastside — amid some of the region’s fastest-growing areas — with no labor and delivery rooms. Corley, who joined Community after plans for the hospital were in place, ordered a never-used surgical unit to be renovated into maternity units.

It’s no surprise that the new North expansion includes 60 private maternity suites.

Corley came to Indianapolis ready to make big changes. Just as on the driveway basketball court, he has won some and lost some of his tussles in the workplace.

When he came to Indianapolis in 1984, he recommended changing the very name of the hospital, which was founded in 1956, because he considered "Community" too "vanilla." The board quickly rebuffed him.

In the 1990s, Corley helped orchestrate a joint operating agreement between Community and rival St. Vincent that was soon dropped.

However, he refused to call the short-lived agreement a failure.

For much of its existence, he said, Community had suffered from a bit of an inferiority complex when comparing itself with some of the city’s other hospitals.

"We learned that we do a lot of things as well and some things better," he said.

Even rivals don’t argue that Corley has made things better at Community.

"He is someone who encouraged dynamic change," said Daniel Evans, chief executive of Indianapolis-based hospital system Clarian Health Partners. "He is a hospital leader in the United States focused on the patient and health-care quality."

It’s an effort that stretches back more than three decades. In 1975, Corley was hired to turn around the then-financially struggling Hershey Medical Center in Hershey, Pa.

J. Knox Singleton, then in his 20s, remembers going to Hershey to interview with Corley for an administrative job.

"I was expecting someone older with the obligatory plaid sport coat and white shoes," Singleton recalled. "This was the era of leisure suits and other clothing atrocities."

Instead of a middle-aged manager, though, Singleton met a clean-cut executive — barely older than he was — who was all business.

"Everything about him oozed enthusiasm and dynamism," said Singleton, who got the Hershey job and now runs a hospital system in Virginia.

Such drive is something Corley started to develop while growing up in a strict household just outside Pittsburgh.

His father, whose job was to negotiate with labor unions for Pittsburgh Plate Glass, pushed his three sons into sports to keep them out of trouble and to try to earn college scholarships.

Corley took up football after his father told him it would toughen him up for basketball. He went on to play three sports — football, under scholarship, basketball and track — at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va.

Lou Holtz, then a William and Mary assistant coach, made a lasting impression on the young receiver.

"Holtz always said, ‘pleased but never satisfied. You can be pleased with your performance but never satisfied,’ " Corley said. "I say that a lot here."

Corley also said he was forever changed by his time in Vietnam running an Army aid station, where he helped apply pressure bandages to wounded soldiers to stop the bleeding and decided which men had the greatest chance for survival so they could be evacuated first.

"There were bullets whizzing by my head… I was scared to death," he said. "That was a defining moment for me because nothing will ever be as hard as that."

Corley’s two children long ago picked up on their father’s seriousness and love of competition. They once gave him a Mickey Mouse watch, which he still wears, to remind him to "lighten up, Dad," Corley said.

Matt Corley remembers a father who worked hard at Community Health Network but who also made it a priority to be at the dinner table by 6:30 almost every night and who attended most of his children’s games and extracurricular events.

"The health network is kind of like a third kid; I’ve always thought of it like that. But we were always number one," said Matt, now controller for Lauth Property Group. "It’s definitely something to learn from."

Despite his focus on Community, Corley found time for other pursuits, too. He has worked as a high school basketball referee and even as a substitute teacher in Indianapolis Public Schools.

Corley has arranged for Arlington High School students to do summer internships at Community, said Jackie Greenwood, principal of Arlington on the Northeastside. He also has sent a human-resources professional from the hospital system to talk with school officials about helping students prepare for careers in health care.

"If we had more Bill Corleys in this world, I’ll tell you, what a better place we’d have for our children," Greenwood said. "He walks the talk."

WILLIAM E. CORLEY

–Title: Chief executive, Community Health Network, a five-hospital system with $1.1 billion in revenue.

–Age: 64.

–Residence: Carmel.

–Personal: Married 38 years to wife, Angela; adult son and daughter.

–Education: Bachelor’s from College of William and Mary, where he competed in football, basketball and track; master’s in hospital administration from Duke University.

–Career highlights: 1966-67, administrative director, Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington; director of plans and operations for 3rd Field Hospital for U.S. Army in Saigon, South Vietnam; 1971, named associate hospital director at Albert B. Chandler Medical Center, University of Kentucky; 1975, named hospital director of Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, Hershey, Pa.; 1978, hired as CEO of Akron General Medical Center in Akron, Ohio.

–Staying fit: Basketball; cycling, including rides on the Monon Trail.

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