January 1999
Table of Contents
Share your experiences - Offer your suggestions - Solutions must constantly be invented, adjusted, and revisited. What’s old for you, may be very new for someone else across the country.
Problem:
Occupational therapists in acute care hospitals continue to battle administration
over prescriptive lengths of stay. Patients are often discharged too early
with little time for coordination with occupational therapists and other
services in the community. The hospital saves money but the patient suffers
and the savings in the overall provincial health budget are questionable.
To get you started here are two brief quotes from recently published articles; one written by an occupational therapist another by a business writer for the Financial Post Magazine.
First, an excerpt from Ann Allart Wilcock’s paper entitled Reflections on Doing, Being and Becoming which appeared in the International Perspective column of the December Issue of the Canadian Journal of Occupational Therapy, Volume, 65, No. 5.
... I have reflected on the [occupational therapy’s] doing, being and becoming from its 20th century genesis and through my personal experience of it in the forty years since I commenced as a student. My reflections led to the belief that we are in a rut, a valuable rut, but a rut for all that. We are not alone. Every other profession is in a rut too. The ruts are made of professional habits. They are well worn and comfortable. They do not necessarily follow beliefs, for if ruts are followed long enough, beliefs become hidden in the dust, and are eventually lost except to rhetoric. Professions are kept in their ruts by social expectations, by the media, and today especially, by the dominance of managerial and fiscal policies. For long established professions this is, perhaps, acceptable but for one as young as ours still trying to explore its potential, the rut is inhibiting our becoming what we have the potential to become. In limiting our doing to what is expected and deemed as necessary by resource managers who have not undertaken a course of study towards the set of beliefs which we hold, is to accept that their beliefs are more important than ours, or that ours are not worth fighting for.
Second: Rethinking Executive Leadership for an age of uncertainty: The broken promise of a broken paradigm by John Dalla Costa in the Financial Post Magazine, CEO Annual 1998.
On the precipice of a new millennium, it seems ironic that the sage observation about leadership by Aristotle are completely relevant and still very hard to realize. He distilled the essence of leadership to be ethos, pathos and logos. "The ethos is moral character, the source of a leader’s ability to persuade. The pathos is the ability to touch feelings, to move people emotionally. The logos is the ability to give solid reasons for action, to move people intellectually."
The skills of strategy remain critically important, as do those of fiscal management and productivity-enhancement. CEO’s still need to cut costs. They still need to push hard for innovation. And they still face a slew of difficult but imperative decisions. The point, however, is that in today’s uncertain circumstances, a CEO must operate with both a highly developed clarity about business and a highly developed wisdom about human beings. In my view, this is not a devaluing of the priority for profit but a revaluing of the prioirty for people. Managing to achieve either one of these objectives is relatively easy. The true test of leadership is delivering both.
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