 |
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
So, I took one job proffered me and then, Sunday night, I was asked to become what is essentially the COO role for an Internet startup in Sydney. I won't be moving any time soon and may do our initial development work from Chicago. I'm getting the same starting salary as the University job (more or less) and I won't have to deal with academics.
I am an awful fit for the job at the U. &emdash; despite what you think, Yule, I'm not academic material. It's amazing how little actually gets done. One of my first assignments was to write up a two-page (front and back) handout about what I thought was a product to simplify the lives of scientists who are trying to do large scale computation using the grid sites. So I took the information that I was given, plus some additional information from a published paper on the project and put together a handout.
It was all wrong.
It turns out that the "product" really doesn't exist, so the handout isn't there to try and get people to use it. It's just to pass out saying that they are spending money on a project that is intended to provide some sort of value at some point in the future. It's just a project: it's all vaporware.
You know, getting these "academics" to tell me what they actually want to say takes an edict from the Pope. (Well, no, since most of them are ardent atheists...)
Kinston, Warren. 1987. Stronger Nursing Organization: A Working Paper for General Managers & Nursing Managers. Brunel University / The SIGMA Centre: London.
Warren Kinston discussed the issue of expecting the people who report to you to take see the Big Picture or to take into account the other departments or groups within your organization.
The frequent complaint of top nursing managers that their line-subordinates will not take 'the wider view' is a mistaken one. In fact, line-subordinates, who are often line-managers themselves, should not be taking the wider view but should be fighting for their own patch. This is the inherent tension in the manager-subordinate relation, based on accountability for different levels of work; and it cannot be avoided. Line subordinates should not be treated or expected to act simply as assistants to their managers. [p. 14]
It's something that is obvious once I read it, but I have to admit that I hadn't thought of this before. I think I unreflectively assumed what I had been told, that we should all be looking to the bigger picture, that we should all be thinking of the shareholders. That's wrong: there aren't that many people who actually think of the shareholders at work (based on surveys) which works, since only the very top should be thinking of them at all.
He later talks about some of the ways that poor management of nursing creates many of the problems that we so often see in hospitals.
Kinston's dealing with a lot here, and he unpacks some of it in later works which will hopefully be posted to the GO Society website soon.
As a footnote, it's interesting to hear how the complaint that there was too much work and too few nurses twenty years ago. I wonder if the amount of nursing that we require expands to always be more than the amount of nurses that we have.
Perhaps it's good to keep track of today. Last year, on a Sunday, I was leading a youth group meeting at our old church's offices when my wife rang my mobile. She never called during youth group, so I figured it was important. My sister-in-law had called: my father was in the hospital and it looked serious. We needed to get to West Virginia immediately.
I had these kids and their parents didn't come back for awhile. So I asked them to pray for me and my family, which they did. Then we played Apples to Apples (I think) outside on the lawn.
It wouldn't have mattered. It was at least 10 hours, even speeding egregiously, to their river house. He died in six while in surgery. My brother called me while I was driving in Kentucky. He had me pull over first, but I already knew what he would tell me. I drove on for awhile. I didn't know what to do.