Paul Shank

Thanks for checking in! I think it's fashionable to write this in the third person, but that's not my style so i'll just tell you a little about myself.

I'm a retired healthcare administrator and I've had mostly bad managers in my career. That makes it hard to be a good manager, but I paid attention to the bad ones and figured out how to avoid that fate. Treat your staff like you want to be treated. It's a pretty revolutionary idea, but it actually works.

My career started in the emergency room of Heights Hospital in Houston, as the emergency room maid. Really. If it comes out of the human body, I've had it on me. And this was back when only docs wore gloves on a sterile field. That's why they had soap. I moved into the laboratory, which was a much better fit, but I did miss taking my lunch breaks in the service hall behind the ER.

I wondered off into sales, engineering, and manufacturing for the petrochemical and refining industry. It was fun but nothing like healthcare.

I retooled and returned to healthcare in the late 90's and had a great run. I loved my staff and our patients, but I got tired of reporting to people who didn't treat me like they wanted to be treated. So now I write books.

The next one will be about trust. It's a great topic, especially because when I came back into healthcare my mentor explained that rule number one was: Trust no one. It's a great attitude but not very helpful for patient care.