Advisor Spotlight: Frank Clark
There is more to us than we know, and if we can only make it seen, perhaps for the rest of our life, we will be unwilling, to settle for less” – Kurt Hahn
These prophetic words of Outbound School founder Kurt Hahn play out in different aspects of our lives.
I very clearly remember training for my first marathon. Like most first time marathoners, I vastly over trained during the days leading up to the Atlanta Marathon and paid the price when I hit the “proverbial wall” at the 24-mile mark. My thigh and calf muscles were screaming out, so I began to focus only on positive things: all the training I had put in and the people who were expecting me to not only finish but finish under three hours.
With a minute to spare under the three-hour threshold, I crossed the 26.2-mile mark. How quickly, I forgot how hard it was and realized that there was more to me than I previously knew. This helped me to go on and complete a dozen or so more marathons and some 100+ mile bicycle races in the mountains.
During my time as a Chief Information Officer (CIO) with a large statewide multiple hospital healthcare system, I remember sitting on the floor with several of my Information Technology (IT) staff members, the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and some of his staff in the CFO’s office at about 2:00am on a Monday morning. This hospital was the last of five hospitals to implement a new financial/revenue cycle management system. The first four hospitals had very successful implementations with no issues.
For the fifth hospital, we had a narrow window to implement and test the new system so that it would be ready the next business day. As Murphy’s Law would have it, we started encountering problems and were reaching a point in having to make the decision on whether we should continue with the implementation or revert to the old system.
As we were reaching the point of no return, I could sense that the CFO and his staff wanted to pull the plug and stay on the old system. The easy – and perhaps safer – option for me would have been to agree with the CFO, but after conferring with my IT staff, I decided it was worth the risk and made the decision to push on with the implementation.
Perhaps we were lucky, but everything went well. With strong help from the IT staff, we were able to resolve the system issues, and the implementation was an on-time success.
In my life experiences, the wherewithal to overcome difficult physical challenges has given me the confidence to take on tough situations in my professional career.
There is more in us than we know. We just need to find a way to make it seen and commit to not settling for less going forward.