Are you pissed off about how the VA Hospitals are being run? Well, I am. The other problem that I have is how all this is being handled. All the talking heads are talking about the low level people who did this, but that is not the real problem. What you will notice about the Obama administration is that they never know about anything when it happens. I told this story before, but it needs repeating. I left the barn door open once when I was a kid and during the night, a neighbor called and said one of our cows was in his yard. I told my dad that I would go get the cow and he said, "No, he would go get the cow after he gave me a hard spanking." The job of a real manager is to prevent problems, not close the barn door after the cow or horse is out like the Obama administration does.
If I have heard this once, I have heard it a 100 times from MBA type managers, "I don't have to know what people who report to me have to know. All I have to do is to "know how to manage them". Nothing could be stupider. When people who report to Obama are screwing up, Obama does not know it until someone outside government reports it to him. His reaction is always the same. "I did not know anything about it, but I will close the barn door now."
Now, my experience with Philip Crosby and his "Zero Defect Program". I worked with Philip back in the 1970's when he was responsible for Quality Control world wide while I was responsible for Quality Control for a 50,000 employee division. "Zero Defects" means just that. Once you allow a small level of screw ups, the number of defects always grows. Philip used the example for doctors who deliver babies with the question. "How many babies should we allow the doctor to drop on their heads?" We all say "Zero", so why not with any other aspect of quality? "Zero Defects" is a mind set that demands that managers know what they are doing and that they "prevent" defects in the first place, not sort them out after the fact. In the case of the VA hospitals, finding the people who made the defects is not the problem. The problem is the managers who allowed the defects to happen in the first place and that starts with Obama and the people who report too him.
What we all have to ask is "Who allowed the problem with the VA to happen?"
