Matthew Shaffer recently celebrated his 40th birthday on a polo field in Argentina. Shaffer, president of Wellmark Health Plan of Iowa Inc. and vice president of Wellmark Inc., says the opportunity to compete against some of the world’s finest up-and-coming polo players was the best gift he could have received. Polo takes the strategy of hockey, the finesse of golf, the speed of horseback riding and combines them with a heavy, bouncing wooden orb about the size of a baseball, Shaffer says.

“It puts the cerebral [aspects] of other sports in an adrenalized environment,” he said, describing turning on a dime at full gallop, or competitors trying to bump one’s horse and hook one’s mallet. He became involved in the sport five or six years ago while living in Nashville. Shaffer had thought only the richest people could afford to play the sport of kings. He was offered a $50 lesson and learned that it was more affordable that he thought. The game does require an investment, however, as a polo player often uses six well-trained horses per polo match. Shaffer compares the price of boarding and training the polo ponies to the cost of joining an elite country club or having several children in private school.

“Maybe that’s why I’m still single,” he said.

Shaffer grew up near Pittsburgh and attended Washington and Jefferson College in Washington, Pa. on an ROTC scholarship. After receiving a degree in English and history, he joined the Army to fulfill his ROTC obligation and flew Black Hawk helicopters. He stayed in the service for more than five years, attaining the rank of captain. He left to enter law school in the early 1990s, but took a temporary position in computer consulting and sales. That position became permanent.

Three years later, the computer company asked Shaffer to pursue what would become its largest client, U.S. Healthcare Inc., an insurance company that spent millions of dollars per year on computers to perform “medical quality algorithms,” he said. He made several sales pitches to the company, which in lieu of an order offered him a job managing its sales force in its largest market, Philadelphia. The company merged with Aetna Inc. in 1996.

Shaffer took over Aetna U.S. Healthcare’s Tennessee market and subsequently was transferred to Colorado, where he served as director of business development for seven states. Then as Aetna began reorganizing, Shaffer sensed the possibility that he could be downsized, so he began listening more closely to queries from headhunters. When the chairman and chief executive of Wellmark Inc., John Forsyth, contacted Shaffer with the opportunity to lead Wellmark Health Plan of Iowa, its managed care subsidiary, he was intrigued.

“It was much more toward what I had always wanted to do,” Shaffer said. Though he had expected to come to Des Moines and find a “sleepy little health plan,” he discovered that Forsyth and his crew were applying concepts that the nation’s biggest health plans were struggling with, and joined the company in February 2002. He said he liked the company’s social mission toward improving the health of Iowans and South Dakotans, and the partnerships it was forming with leading healthcare providers. He also liked Forsyth’s leadership style, serving as a mentor to the company’s up-and-coming executives.

“He is an amazingly talented and intellectual individual,” Shaffer said. “You don’t meet to many visionaries who will give you their valuable time.”

There are parallels between polo and work, Shaffer said. It’s a sport frequented by many top business people.

“A lot of type-A personalities, people who are competitive and successful, play polo,” he said. “But you have to be coachable or you’ll never progress to the next level or master the difficulty of the game.”

He says the same holds true for work: One must “know a fair amount and have a certain set of skills,” but must also be willing to learn from mistakes, or else “be doomed to go on playing at the same level forever.”