As a former G.M. and Company Prez, I can’t see him succeeding even if he has a stellar medical record. It’s critically important, the larger the organization (and this one is YUGE!). to have a long history of moving up over time to even larger personnel handling and policy making positions. The hardest part is keeping focus on personal goals while at the same time taking counsel from superiors (A Board or Owner) and subordinates,
Steering a large organization, especially one in need of major reforms, can be a daunting task even for highly experienced senior managers. I’d even venture the position would be better filled by a non-doctor type who does have the requisite large organization managerial success. Why? At the top of this pyramid, it’s all about management, direction setting, goal achievement and more. Less is the actual provision of medical assistance at the patient level. Less in that it’s the doctors, nurses, specialists who do this hard work, not the guy at the top!
I guess I don’t really understand what treating the blistered toe of a senior White House aide has to do with managing a bureaucracy of the magnitude of the VA system?
On top of that, anyone who willingly chooses to associate their career with the Trump rolling disaster is foolish at best, blindingly naive at worst. Their judgement, and/or their politics, needs to be questioned thoroughly.
If he is not on board with privatizing veterans’ care, he won’t last long; if it were me, I don’t think I would risk damaging my own career in order to become a convenient punching bag for the president.
I get that he thinks he can rise to the occasion, but I think the path is littered with the dead bodies and broken souls of many who believed the same thing. He should look around a bit before he tries to convince himself that having leadership training is a substitute for experience he’s never had.
Spanky opened door #3 and Jackson saw glory and riches, the likes of which he never dared dream. He got suckered.
I get what you’re saying, but the measure of success in providing good medical care to veterans will be evaluated at the patient level. There are many well-organized VA hospitals – and then there are the few that make the bad news, usually reported from the perspective of the patients themselves.
As with government in general, the approach should be service-oriented and at the individual level, performed by people who personally buy into the concept of what the country should be providing its citizenry. Competent management of individual hospitals (and not an overarching plan, like privatization) is the path to improve the actual service. The care of veterans and the opinions of their families about that care will drive public opinion on how effectively the VA is handling its mission.
How Jackson fits into this I don’t know and won’t predict. But trump could only appoint an effective director by accident, as in blind squirrel/nut.
That is true.
Good Gawd, Admiral!!! Your situation is the product of a whim! Run!!! For chrisesakes, run!!!
They want him for one of two reasons: either he is corrupt and willing to sign off on privatization of the VA, or he is weak and ineffectual and they believe they can privatize the VA without him noticing or effectively objecting. If he does not fall into at least one of these two categories, he will not last. He may not last anyway.
I absolutely agree that the approach should be service oriented at the individual level, but a great bedside manner working with one person at a time is no preparation for ensuring that the thousands of doctors, tens of thousands of nurses, and a hundred thousand administrators treating hundreds of thousands of veterans with everything from blistered toes to suicide ideation is going to get anywhere near the same level of care.
He may be a deep diving doc, but he’s out of his depth on this one.
ETA: While looking at the staffing numbers, I came across a link from the Cato Institution (used deliberately) complaining about the growth of their staff between 2000 and 2014. Gee, I wonder why that was.
The only way he will be able to succeed is if he gets some deputies under him who know the lay of the land and can help him manage. If he thinks he can mange such a large org with out any prior experience then he is going to likely do the VA harm.
It makes more sense if you don’t assume the nomination is being made in good faith. DT likes him for the sycophancy. Privatizers in the senate love the fact that he will probably fail as an administrator because chaos and poor leadership are always the excuses given for why any given institution needs to be privatized.
I’ve never sought a management role, deliberately staying hands-on and almost always responsible only for my own work. But I’ve watched managers good and bad, and it’s not a set of skills I’d want to start learning in an extremely high-level position facing lots of challenges. We all make decisions, Ronny, jeeze. And you’ve made a particularly bad one taking this job.
It will take a lot more than a good bedside manner to handle a corrupt Republican Congress, Half Wit president and millions of veterans with very serious medical conditions…with an increasingly lower budget each year.
Admiral Jackson may have gotten himself half way around the world without an single ship only to begin the fight of a lifetime. Does he help save the only source of healthcare available now that ObamaCare has been repealed for our wounded and disabled vets or does he go for the personal gold that lobbyists provide in bribes to privatize it to death?
You forget, he is a doctor with a uniform and he said nice things about Trump.
The fact that by all reports he is actually a pretty nice guy means he is doomed in this position. Making life and death decisions on an individual basis does not equate to wading your way through the triple minefields of politics, congressional corruption and the biggest bureaucracy in America. The simple fact is this is one of the hardest jobs in America and this guy is singularly unqualified for any aspect of it.
I’m not that surprised he wants to hook up with Drumpf. When he described the pResident as having “great genes” it seemed the white supremicist overtones were quite obvious. I was a little surprised the press ignored that part of his statement on Drumpf’s health…it was jarring
Count me as a wait-and-see on Jackson. Yes, the VA is a bureaucracy, but first and foremost it’s a patient-centered health system. Or at least it’s supposed to be. An emergency physician with forward-operating experience is well qualified to steer the ship back to a patient-centered focus, and make the case for it when others around him are saying “but we have to keep the lights on.”
Trump has made some really awful nominations. I’m not convinced yet that this is one of them. A physician like Jackson is entirely consistent with successful health systems in the private sector. Clinical leadership at the top is a key element of successful health systems, and frankly a management executive is more likely to see the “benefits” of privatization than a physician who is driven by service. And I think the fact that Jackson continued in his role (which is a leadership role, not just “private physician to the President”) when he had the experience to pull a Greitens and run for office suggests that he’s not in this for himself but rather is in it for the patients he is about to be serving.
Who can fathom the motives of this guy? Maybe he thinks he could make a difference, but he would be naĂŻve. These bureaucracies are like a multi-ton oil tanker under full throttle. Takes miles to stop one or turn one. Any one hoping to change or reform some federal bureaucracy will need full and unmitigated support of congress and the WH.
Like taking over the watch on the Titanic.
Few yrs back the post office paid some consultants to study their org. Conclusion: Top heavy with mgmt, bad mgmt with several thousand unresolved grievances. The report ended up in the trash.
Max Weber said it all in the 19th C. Nothing new under the sun.
I kinda ffel like I need a shower after reading this, no knock on Jackson, just AP.
As for Jackson, he may think he can help/fix/save the VA because of his unique perspective. Best of luck with that. Maybe if he gets a Democratically controlled Congress he might have a chance. And an impeached Trump et al, but in general, chances aren’t really very good for a person with no management experience or heading a very large and very diverse and very under pressure organization.
And his military experience seems more like in smaller and more tightly knit groups, which would make his leadership experience there even more useless for the VA.
You make some valid points, we’ll just have to wait and see, but expectations and chances are pretty low for Adm. Jackson.