President's Message

Remarks from the 2010 AAMSE Business Meeting by President Donald Wall:

No one achieves a position of leadership without a tremendous amount of help. So it is appropriate that I thank the many people who made this opportunity to serve you and our profession possible.

Strength begins at home. I want to thank my family members who are here today, my youngest son Brian and his wife Fiette and my wife Sandy. I want to especially thank my wife Sandy for standing by me these past so many years, supporting me, challenging me and kicking my butt the many times when I needed it to always strive to make a difference. I also want to send a special shout out to my wonderful children and grandchildren including my first granddaughter Acacia, who is here with me, who bring me joy and encouragement, and remind me every day of what is truly important.
I want to thank my good friend, Connie Minogue for her leadership during the past year. Connie was a wonderful mentor for me and set a high standard that I will strive to continue to meet to lead AAMSE to the next level of providing quality services and programs for our members.

I would also like to thank my colleagues on the AAMSE Board, past, present, and future, who constantly shape me as a better leader. And of course, our wonderful staff at AAMSE, for their support, skill, and wise advice. Let’s give them a well deserved applause.

When you serve, your employer always sacrifices and gives to your service as well. A special thanks to Bob Seligson for his leadership and support along the way. It was Bob that initially motivated me to get involved and to serve AAMSE. He consistently encourages me and the NCMS staff to be the best we can be, to always aim high and reach for what may seem to be impossible. A special thanks and appreciation to my fellow staff members at the North Carolina Medical Society, some of them here today for their support, encouragement and for all they do for the North Carolina Medical Society and organized medicine in North Carolina. You are all more special to me than you know.

There are so many others who encouraged me over the years and contributed greatly to my being here today. I owe many, and to those individuals, I humbly say thank you for your support and mentoring.

“Vision, Commitment, Action”
I am honored to stand before you today as the 66th president of the American Association of Medical Society Executives for the year 2010/2011.

This honor is not about me, it’s about you and our profession. It’s about what “we” must do together to lead and challenge our organizations and our physician members to excel.. And what a point in history this is for medicine and medical societies. We will need to bring every brain cell, resource, and effort to bear on supporting our members as they strive to provide the highest level of health care possible while navigating unprecedented change, a journey which will be turbulent, confusing and chaotic.
We must provide our members with the knowledge and skills to become creators of the future, rather than prisoners to it.

To say these times are challenging is an understatement. We are working with limited financial resources, limited staff, and unprecedented political pressures and challenges. Each of us personally must struggle to manage increasing demands and competing priorities that drain our energies, motivation and human resources. We are expected to be accessible and respond 24/7 to everything and we all feel like we live in a constant state of overload.

As a Chief Financial Officer I used to believe that if you can just organize well and put everything in its proper place, one could manage their way to success and to the future. “I was wrong”. We cannot manage our way to the future, we have to lead our way there. Change is occurring so rapidly, and with such speed, we have to create the future as we go, and keep reinventing it.

We must become creators and adaptors, or we face the threat of extinction.
Everyone in this room has the ability to lead and to make a difference. We must look at our challenges as opportunities and learn new skills. We must commit to leading through constant state of change in our lives, communities, organizations and our profession, to “Make the impossible, possible”.

What about AAMSE’s challenges for the future as your professional organization?

AAMSE’s Challenges

1. Professional Relevance: We need to strengthen AAMSE’s ability to be your go-to resource and delivery vehicle for e-learning, best practices, leadership training and information on issues of importance to medical society management and organized medicine, including health system and physician payment reform as key educational focuses
2. Financial Constraints & Sustainability: AAMSE must remain operationally & financially healthy, cost effective and identify new sustainable revenue sources.
3. Membership Focus and Volunteer Support: It is essential that we develop strategies for attainable membership growth and successful development of talented membership as volunteers that will step up and move into AAMSE leadership positions.

To meet these challenges, we will need three things:

First, we will need a VISION followed by a COMMITMENT TO ACTION

(VISION-COMMITMENT-ACTION).

Second, we will need each other. AAMSE must be our home port and “creative center” just as our organizations serve this function for our members. Any one of us can create, but together, the synergy of ideas and perspectives accelerates the creative process exponentially. The greatest thing you can do for your organization and members is to get involved, get connected, and begin to share in the creative process with colleagues. Take advantage of these opportunities in AAMSE.
The impact on my work and life of having had the opportunity to meet incredible people, share ideas and laughter, which AAMSE provided, is incalculable.

Third, and most importantly, we will need leadership heroes. What I am encouraging you to do here today is to become a leadership hero in our profession. We need leadership heroes and we need them now and more than ever, those who can unite us to step forward, to take a risk and make a difference.

“Be a Leadership Hero?"
Think about our childhood heroes, Superman, Spiderman who we thought were invincible and who we looked up to and admired and who we believed could do anything. Think about the many “everyday” heroes that we have heard about, read about, and possibly seen during our lives.

Sully Sullenberger comes to mind, who crash-landed US Airways Flight #1549, with the plane’s tanks full of aviation fuel and with 150 passengers and full crew into the Hudson River. He took a risk that many of us would not have taken. He transformed values into actions, visions into realities, obstacles into innovations, and risks into rewards.

Leaders come with varying levels of expertise, experience, and different levels of education and positions within our organizational charts.

The position of leader is not limited to bosses and supervisors. The position of leader is reserved for those individuals who are willing and committed to step to the front of the line, and be different……..taking risks, challenging the process and doing what we have to do to make a difference.

For a few minutes today, let’s think about the importance of Leadership Heroes.
Our country is struggling, our financial and economic structure is frail and weak at the foundation, our profession is being attacked, our members are suffering and our medical societies are struggling to survive and maintain adequate resources to provide our members with the services they need and deserve. Never before has it been a better time for you and me to become a leadership hero and venture out from our comfort zones and our “take things for granted’, “let someone else do it” mentality and make efforts for change to occur in our personal and professional lives.

The Innovative Newsletter published an article in 2001 describing Heroes in a profound way:

The hero (and heroine) has always been a pivotal character in literature, largely because he or she personified those attributes we look for in real life. Heroes are compassionate, intuitive, giving, daring, courageous and true of heart. They are selfless, honest, hardworking and willing to take a stand. More importantly, heroes by their very existence bring out the best in us. If we all would be honest with ourselves today, we all aspire to be heroes in some way and at some time during our lives.

I can think of many leadership heroes in our own profession, but I would like to mention a couple that have been important to me:

Ken Slaw
Ken Slaw. We all know Ken from his dedication and work with AAMSE. He is a past President of AAMSE and most of you may know him as the driving force, creator and lead faculty, for our AAMSE Leadership Academy since its inception.

Two things make Ken a Leadership hero.

First, he approaches the “unknown” with joyful, reckless abandon. Second, with Ken, there really is no such thing as "impossible", there is just clutter in the way of what IS possible. He has applied this positive spirit and unstoppable Vision-Commitment-Action to fight a fatal illness that has afflicted his son Andrew.

Andrew
Andrew was born with a condition called familial dysautonomia (dys-auto-nomia) or FD, a condition he shares with only 300 people on the planet. Any challenge to Andrew's frail automomic nervous system, like a common infection throws him into a life threatening crisis, similar to a walking time bomb. Ken and his wife Ann were told to expect Andrew to not survive beyond early childhood, and that treatment and cure were simply "not possible" at any point in the near future. “Not Possible” was not acceptable to Ken and Ann.

Ken and Ann found and organized parents who had children with FD and formed a foundation and started to raise money. They bypassed all of the conventional research protocols, and focused on finding a small, research team willing to commit to finding a treatment and a cure. In just 10 years time, the gene and mutation and treatment was discovered. Andrew was spending an average 6 weeks per year in the hospital, and was referred to hospice and palliative care twice when he was near-death. Since the breakthroughs in the past 5-years, he has spent zero days in the hospital due to FD.

Andrew’s Cartoons
Andrew now is 18 and will start College in a couple of weeks, intent on becoming a famous illustrator, cartoonist, and dreams of being a TV or radio talk show host and standup comedian. The cartoon slides you see today were created for my presentation by Andrew. The work that Ken, Ann, and their foundation has done, is being shared and replicated for many other childhood genetic illnesses that could help thousands of children in the future.

How did this happen? This happened……..Because of Leadership, an uncompromising vision, commitment and a drive to action. Ken and Ann’s actions were those of a Leadership Hero.

Dr. Fernando Stein
Dr. Fernando Stein is a Pediatric Critical Care physician, boarded in pediatrics and in pediatric critical care and has served on the staff at Texas Children's Hospital for over 20 years. Dr. Stein noticed early in his tenure that there were gaps in the system for providing critical care services and where hundreds of kids that were "not sick enough" for critical care but " too sick" for the regular hospital unit and their families were falling through the cracks.

It was untenable to Dr. Stein to say to a family "when Jimmy gets a little sicker, call me and I can help you". Dr. Stein proposed the concept of building a Progressive Care Unit at Texas Children's hospital, a "bridge" between regular hospital care and critical care. This new model was untested, expensive and received major resistance both conceptually and financially.

Dr. Stein organized stakeholders and families together to communicate the need to hospital administration. Through Dr. Stein’s leadership vision, commitment and action, the hospital agreed to give Dr. Stein a 4 bed room, literally a "hole in the wall" to start his little experiment. An experiment that would teach parents and family members how to sustain care for chronically ill or medically complex children at home and give them a better chance for survival.

After two years, the demand, need, and success, was so great, the hospital agreed to build a new 20-bed Progressive Care Unit with Dr. Stein as the Medical Director.

Dr. Stein improved the care and saved the lives of, over 2,000 children with complex medical illnesses.

His vision and efforts to embrace and practice family-centered care for the sickest of our children against huge odds and major resistance were also those of a Leadership Hero.
“Third World Traveler” writes that:

Progress is measured in part by the courageous people who put their careers and often their lives at risk by challenging the parameters of what is acceptable in society. Heroes are created from ordinary people, like you and me who are willing to take risks to their personal security and safety for the benefit of the larger community.

Think about the world around us, and the health care environment we work in as it relates to the challenges and the problems that we face and the lost potential that we experience. Challenges will not be met, problems will not be solved or maximum potential ever reached if we wait for a colleague, a boss, the government or anyone else to take the a step toward challenging the process for meaningful change and progress.

Think about your own job and work environment. If you had the power to make one change that would make your job easier, your organization stronger or improve a service to your members, what would it be? You and I have the power, the power to become a leadership hero and make change happen.

I have a great respect for what each of you do for your physician members and medicine on a daily basis. But nothing will change or get better unless we take that important first step and decide that we can do something about it.
There is a Taoist Saying: “The journey is the reward”. That’s how leadership works; beginning with the end in mind, it’s the rewards along the journey toward the goal and those we touch along the way that creates the motivation for us and others to continue the journey toward the ultimate goal.

AAMSE presently has almost 1,000 members who provide leadership and support to more than 500,000 physicians and members across the country. Just think of the opportunities and possibilities if we accepted the responsibility to commit to champion one meaningful change to take place in our personal lives, in our communities and in our organizations over the next year.

The AAMSE Leadership Academy is an opportunity for all of you to begin or refresh this journey. The program is a unique and intensive immersion over a three-day period in strategies and techniques and teaching Kouzes & Posner’s 5 leadership behaviors that are proven to uncover and develop the leader within. To date AAMSE’s Leadership Academy has trained more than 230 Medical Society staff in leadership skills to help move our profession forward. If you haven’t had an opportunity to go through the program, I encourage you to do so.

“The price of greatness is responsibility.”
For our profession to change, we must first declare ourselves “responsible” to step up and lead as change agents to make things happen. Our efforts must be made with persistence and determination in meeting our members increasing and challenging needs in providing quality patient care.

Each time I go into Bob Seligson’s office, I see a quote on the wall directly behind Bob’s desk written by Calvin Coolidge.

Press On
Nothing in the World Can Take the Place of “Persistence”;
Talent will not;
Nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent
Genius will not;
Unrewarded genius is almost a proverb
Education will not;
The World is full of Educated Derelicts
Persistence and Determination, alone, are Omnipotent.

During this next year, Bob Seligson, and my organization will allocate the human and financial resources necessary for me to serve you and our profession.
Your AAMSE Board of Directors, your AAMSE staff and I will accept “responsibility” and dedicate our time and energies to provide you with the support and resources that you and your organizations need to help move your societies and AAMSE forward in making the impossible, possible.

However, we cannot represent you or AAMSE without your help.
I challenge each of you as you return home to think about how you will become a leadership hero to better lead your organizations and serve your members more effectively and guide them through the many changes that we now face and those we will face for years to come.

AAMSE also needs your talents and your service. Most importantly, AAMSE needs your vision, commitment and call to action to help AAMSE to advance the profession and professionalism of medicine by enhancing the talent and work of medical society executives. Without these steps being taken, our success with any effort will always be limited.

Many of you in this room have contributed in some major way to this day and I sincerely thank you for this opportunity and for personally enriching my personal and professional life.

As I close, I challenge you today:

“Your Challenge Today”
Dare to be different
Dare to be someone you’ve never been before
Dare to challenge the status Quo and not be satisfied until you succeed
Dare to do what is necessary to affect needed change whether it is in your own personal life, your community or your organization.
Dare to do something every day that will make a difference in someone’s life
Dare to conquer every obstacle that stands in your way to success and to become a leadership hero

Andrew’s Leadership Hero Cartoon
AAMSE is a great organization and provides a high level of representation to you and our colleagues. But AAMSE will never reach that pinnacle of success of meeting your needs and the needs of our profession without your involvement, your engagement and your Leadership. With Vision, Commitment & Action we can become the change leaders of tomorrow.

Listen to this old song by Kenny Rodgers. I hope it motivates you to accept the challenge of becoming Leadership Heroes.

Before the song plays, I want to again thank you for the trust and confidence you have placed in me, your Board of Directors and your AAMSE staff during this next year and for the honor of serving you as your President.

Thank You

Donald R. Wall
Deputy Executive Vice President
North Carolina Medical Society
AAMSE President 2010-11