Dear editor.

Dear Editor:

I just wanted to send a note of appreciation. I have read several of Joe Flower's Next! columns in The Physician Executive and have found them to be useful and provocative. I especially appreciate the larger (i.e., beyond the latest business speak) perspective he brings to his--and consequently, our--thinking. Thank you for Joe's thoughtful and provoking articles.

Amy Osterholm

Kensington, California 

As one of the original contributors to ACPE's curriculum for physician executives (way back when it was AAMD), I must say I was disturbed by Roger Dawson's article in the December 1996 issue of The Physician Executive. If, as Dawson claims, "negotiation requires that you have hidden agendas and concealed interests..." and that power negotiators need to learn how to manipulatively use "emotional displays to influence the other side...." it explains, to this reader, why the very dangerous "gulf war" between physicians and administrators continues to widen.

I, for one, would caution ACPE's members to think carefully whether or not their interactions every day with family members, co-workers, and employees are, in fact, well served by following "negotiating gambits," whose roots are steeped in the experiences of international hostage dynamics. Game-playing of the kind implied and suggested directly by Dawson as the keys to becoming a successful power negotiator will only serve to reinforce win-lose attitudes and behaviors. They cannot help to heal a badly diseased profession.

Sincerely,

Irv Rubin, PhD

Temenos 

Honolulu, Hawaii