Executive leadership, community action, and the habits of health care politics.

Health care executives must lead the way to the comeback of "voluntarism" in their field. This will require having four key political habits: (1) acting out of a sense of civic responsibility, (2) avoiding the dangers of faction and "magic bullets", (3) building alliances by a process of conferring with other relevant leaders and groups, and (4) participating in community activism, i.e., acting on, not reacting to, local problems and pressures.