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A Tennessee Center for Performance Excellence award. Many Forbes lists: Best Employers, Best Employers by State, Best Midsize Employers. Best Hospitals recognition from Money magazine. The U.S. News and World Report rankings: first in Knoxville 10 years in a row, top three in Tennessee 10 years in a row and nationally ranked twice.

That’s his favorite milestone among them all, the day U.S. News and World Report named the University of Tennessee Medical Center one of the best hospitals in America. It was July 19, 2012. Joe Landsman’s birthday.

He’s had a lot of time to reflect as he prepares to leave UTMC (but not fully retire, no way). He knows he hasn’t always been the easiest person to work with or found the straightest path to success. He knows he made mistakes and he knows how much he owes to so many people whose names won’t make it into this piece because we’ve got word counts we’ve got to respect.

Landsman knows this, too, unshakably, as he prepares to walk out of his office for the last time: His relentless striving for excellence, he said as we stood up after our interview, “that’s part of my DNA, and now it’s part of the hospital’s DNA.”

This is Knox News’ conversation with Landsman, lightly edited for length and clarity.

Question: What was your initial reaction when you first saw Knoxville and considered it as a place you might settle?

Answer: So I was in Dallas, and I lived in big cities all my life, in Baltimore, Washington, Dallas. I spent some time in Norfolk, which is nice, but really mostly the big cities. And I was just I was looking for a smaller area, a more community-minded area to live.

I had a job offer I was about ready to accept in Chicago as CFO of RushPresbyterian-St. Luke’s. I was talking to one of the doctors and he said, ‘You’re gonna love it up here – the lake gets warm enough to swim in about one month out of the year,’ and I thought, ‘You’re not helping.’

So anyway, I was within a week of having to give them an answer and (UTMC’s) recruiter found me. They flew to Dallas to make the job offer, I mean it was like a week between my first interview and the time I got the offer, and this was exactly what I was looking for, someplace I felt like you’re going to have an impact. A good place to live with good people, community-minded folks.

If you look at any vibrant economic community, you’ve got a few underpinnings. Your key foundational items that are a good health care system, good educational system and a good workforce. And it’s going to have at least one academic medical center.

The campus looked good, but not great. I loved the doctors – I met with a bunch of doctors in the interviewing process and really liked their attitude. The board members were really, really good people. You’re talking about people like Bernie Bernstein and Bill Rukeyser and Jim Haslam and Bill Sansom. I mean, we had Joe Johnson.

At the time we were the smallest of four health systems and the thirdlargest hospital. So in a very challenging market. But I felt like we had a good opportunity separating from the university and establishing our dedicated governance structure. It really was a great opportunity to do something unique and something to really, really benefit the community. And so that’s why.

When you first started working in health care, did you have an idea what your career path was going to look like? If you were sitting there at 28 or 30 years old and saw where you are today, would you be surprised by that?

So I got into health care very deliberately, but I was also very fortunate. I spent a year working for a big brokerage firm in Maryland. And I was with Arthur Andersen for a very, very brief period of time. And they decided, as a corporation, that health care was going to be one of their big industries. And they were really going to focus on it and I got invited to join their health care group.

And so you know, it was a very deliberate decision on my part. I was very fortunate to have those opportunities offered to me and then second, I celebrate opportunity and that’s why I ended up in health care and then after leaving Anderson, a lot of work on my health care clients.

And then in Dallas, I ended up being the executive vice president (at Zale Lipshy University Hospital). They were preparing me to consider to take over as CEO, but I thought, “What else, though? It was a great place but I left there because I did not want to be a CEO. I don’t want these headaches, right? And then, five years later, here I am again.

There’s such a different skill set in running an organization that provides health care, right? There’s a mission to the work. And you’ve got to think strategically in a way that’s not other people’s job. How do you bridge those conversations and create a vision for people who are on the ground?

From my vantage point, leaders don’t live in the here and now they’ve got to live 10 to 15 years out and they’ve got to believe. If you don’t believe you can get there. And one of the things I tell my team all the time is that our future is only limited by our own vision of ourselves.

So, one of the things that I talk about is we can achieve anything we set out to achieve and we have, every time we set a goal, we’ve achieved it. But it takes discipline. It takes attention, effort, energy. And so you also have to break it down and turn it into steps people can understand and can personalize. This is my role in helping us achieve our goals as an organization.

I was really blessed with a very stable team. I think once I was six months into the CEO job, I didn’t lose those senior level executives other than retirements and we did have one person pass away due to illness. A 20-year run with the same team, it’s pretty meaningful. I lost my my last two senior executives to retirement last April. So it’s been a very stable team.

Describe some of the biggest challenges you and your leadership team took on.

(Before the 2008 presidential election) we were looking at the Affordable Care Act and how it would be crafted. And that was a time of incredible insecurity in our industry. You know, our executives were all insecure about it, not knowing what the future was. Or physicians were very insecure and concerned about their future based on what they were hearing and reading about.