Leadership and Development
Jo Ann Simons
President/CEO
Northeast Arc
We currently operate in silos and in isolation resulting in redundancies, higher cost and lower quality services. If we are not prepared to fundamentally changes everything about the way we operate we will be externally disrupted by private equity, mergers and acquisitions and the changing role of philanthropy among other threats. Broad coalitions, mergers and acquisitions are part of the solution, but so is cultural changes and perhaps even, the dismantling the way we operate. We have been talking for decades about our workforce challenges with no real success. We need to fearlessly challenge "insider mentality" and see the potential of outsider innovations. What if consumers and families could schedule their own services using an app, when it was convenient to them and staff was available? How do we maintain quality with less "touch"?
What if we spent less time with those in our own industry and instead spent it with leaders outside our industry. What can you learn form the head of a radiology department for example? What do we learn from the community survey in our cities and towns? This is a period of rapid technological growth in every part of our lives, but little change has made it into our industry.