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Flying machines.


The phrase "think outside the box" should be familiar to most people. But it's probably safe to venture a guess and say that for most people, it's not an easy idea to embrace.

I first realized this a few years ago, during a problem-solving session at a leadership institute at Northwestern University Northwestern University, mainly at Evanston, Ill.; coeducational; chartered 1851, opened 1855 by Methodists. In 1873 it absorbed Evanston College for Ladies.  in Illinois. Our class of veteran publishers was split into teams. We were asked to build a paper plane that could fly across the room and land in a trash can In the Macintosh, a simulated garbage can used for deleting files and folders. The trash can keeps the files intact in case the user wants to restore them, but can be "emptied" from time to time to save disk space.  several hundred feet away.

My team spent hours folding and re-folding a piece of paper, trying to design the traditional type of plane that most of us played with in grade school. But none of our grown-up grown-up  
adj.
1. Of, characteristic of, or intended for adults: grown-up movies; a grown-up discussion.

2.
 prototypes made it to the other end of the room. As it turned out, none of the teams produced a paper plane that flew very far.

Our instructor stood before the class with his piece of paper in hand, He crumpled crum·ple  
v. crum·pled, crum·pling, crum·ples

v.tr.
1. To crush together or press into wrinkles; rumple.

2. To cause to collapse.

v.intr.
1.
 it into a tight ball and then neatly threw it several hundred feet across the room, where it landed quietly in the trash can.

None of us had considered a plane without wings. We couldn't equate a plane with a paper ball. It was outside the realm of our thinking and the spectrum of traditional solutions. But it worked far better than any of our fancy machines.

It took a pioneering, entrepreneurial mind to step outside of the traditional and define a plane as a paper ball.

One such pioneering entrepreneur recently appeared on the horizon of the long term care industry, where we have been battling with the problem of a tack of caregivers. The New England New England, name applied to the region comprising six states of the NE United States—Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. The region is thought to have been so named by Capt.  School of Whole Health Education in Wellesley, Mass., got together with several local and national healthcare and media organizations, including the Florence Nightingale nightingale, common name for a migratory Old World bird of the family Turdidae (thrush family), celebrated for its vocal powers. The common nightingale of England and Western Europe, Luscinia megarhynchos, is about 6 1-2 in. (16.  2010 Initiative for Global Public Health, Partners Home Care, and the Thomson Delmar Learning and Nursing Spectrum, to launch Nurseradio.org.

Nurseradio.org steps outside the traditional box. The nonprofit venture aims to create hope and inspiration, elements caregivers often cite as lacking.

The nonprofit radio station creates a community, a cathartic cathartic (kəthär`tĭk): see laxative.  experience and a supportive environment for burned-out and discouraged nurses. It's one innovative tool in the search for a solution to the complex and longstanding labor shortage A Labor shortage is an economic condition in which there are insufficient qualified candidates (employees) to fill the market-place demands for employment at any price. This condition is sometimes referred to by Economists as "an insufficiency in the labor force.  problem. For more information about the venture, visit www.nurseradio.org or call 888-354-4325.

To all the naysayers: Who says a plane has to have wings? It all depends on how you define a flying machine.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Non Profit Times Publishing Group
No portion of this article can be reproduced without the express written permission from the copyright holder.
Copyright 2004, Gale Group. All rights reserved. Gale Group is a Thomson Corporation Company.

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Article Details
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Title Annotation:Perspectives
Author:Lakdawalla, Pervin
Publication:Contemporary Long Term Care
Geographic Code:1U1MA
Date:Jul 1, 2004
Words:417
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