TIPPING point

Having both the idea for a monthly “younger”-made & served dinner for our local retirement community AND the idea for a monthly “dessert & Martinelli's” shot down - - by the retiremeng community!!  - - has proved a personal tipping point. 

The reasons given were financial (having that one free night might eat into the people making reservations for either or both of the $ catered weekly dinners) & practical (no one would care about having dessert after their dinner;  clean up was too much hassle). And I am sure that those really & truly are their objections.  Still....

They couldn’t manage one (1) home-cooked, lovingly served meal, a monthly visible “thank you” from younger generations to olders who are role models, mentors & beloved relatives?  No one would like a lovely bit of dessert with a champagne flute filled with chilled sparkling cider? 

My guess is that what we have here is a communication problem, between different cultures.  

Up until this past Sunday, I would have valiantly tried to find ways to make both events work for everyone, from finding underwriting against any potential losses to having volunteers at the ready to leave the place spic & span. 

But this situation was my tipping point, my AH HA! realization that when the core problem could involve conflicting cultures, butting heads is a waste of time & energy.  That battle is lost before it’s begun.

Learned that during my years in Public Relations at Prudential Healthcare. 

It was interesting, coming to work at the traditional employee health benefits provider after several highly successful years at PruCare HMO PA/NJ (US Healthcare/USHC).  Strange, the people I worked with struggled to get their minds around the concept of managed care – it was foreign to them.  A totally different culture from the point-of-service benefits that had been the gold standard for fifty years. 

How ironic that it was PRUDENTIAL that gave USHC the space & time to grow into a competitor.  Due to the considerable savings they offered, their managed health care plans were offered to Prudential business unit employees in  PA & NJ.  

In gaining short-term benefits, Prudential sowed the seeds of its long-term employee benefits doom.  But there was no telling them that.  By the time it finally decided to go head-to-head with USHC, it was too late. 

The story was that Leonard Abramson approached a Prudential Healthcare/Central (my region) vp relatively early in USHC’s success with the offer to sell his company to PHCS, to everyone’s benefit.  The story is the vp rebuffed him with, “Buy you?  We will bury you.” 

I don’t know how much the vp made after Prudential Healthcare was sold to AETNA, but when the same company bought USHC, Len Abramson made about $1 billion on the deal. 

It stuns me, how blessed I was to have worked at USHC when I did, when it was a great success but still relatively small, all in one building.  What a blessing it was to work closely with his two oldest daughters (his youngest was still in school) and to know Len, if only as someone who’d heard about my work & wanted to meet me.  What a blessing to work so closely with both the PA & the NJ Medical Director VPs (capital Vice President is light years from lower case), to see the ins & outs & round abouts of managed care.  To have provider offices begging me not to hightail it to be part of PHCS/Central's fledgling Public Relations team, frantic because “you’re the only one who can explain how things work.”

And I was able to do THAT because of my five years teaching at Bryn Athyn Elementary & because of my classes at what is now Bryn Athyn College.  My background was in breaking down challenging information into portions that a middle schooler could understand & - ideally – connect to personally. 

Sheez – that’s my LONG way of saying that while I understood how managed health care worked, what its advantages were to both employers & covered employees, and its potential pitfalls, the folks at Prudential Healthcare were not only clueless, they were happy to be so.  After all, they were Prudential, and that was everything. 

Until  it  wasn’t.

The reason Prudential Healthcare could never come up with a competitive product is that the company was shackled to a culture that had become outdated.  Oh, they brought in new people, people with experience at managed health care companies, people who had started health maintenance organizations from the ground floor up.  New blood, fresh ideas which we were promised would strip down the old culture & rebuild a fresher, more vibrant, successful one. 

And that was – over a quarter century ago – when I learned a great truth that has stayed with me ever since:  when you bring in someone with a fresh perspective to transform an entrenched culture, the culture will change her, not vice versa.

My local retirement community.  My local elementary school. Each of the Academy schools.  The Academy, as an organization.  The church, as in the local parish.  The Church as an organization, located in my hometown.  The cathedral.   All of them as employers & as employees.  Individual families.  Family groups.  Circles of friends.  Every single one of them has one or more attached cultures. 

It astonishes me to realize how deeply interested I’ve been in the power of culture over my life, even when I didn’t put a name on it.  When the vp dismissed Len Abramson’s savvy offer, I knew – peep squeak that I was – it revealed PHCS as a dinosaur, a doomed culture headed to extinction.  It means something to me now realizing that it meant something to me then. 

What flipped the switch after all these years of interest & quietly noticing connections is how much I see the power of culture affecting families – beginning with my own – in dealing with aging parents. 

Yes, this was a long rambly introduction to simply saying that everything that came before had tipped over into one great HUGE interest in learning more about how the challenges of aging affect & are affected by the power of family culture.