Costs of Managing by Slash and Burn

“I’m Kevin Shrake and I’m the Executive Vice President, Chief Operating Officer of MDR. MDR is a resource capability company. We go out into the marketplace inside and outside of health care and we find best practices and we bring those best practices to solve business problems for our clients. What you traditionally see happening in the industry is a lot of what I call ‘slash and burn’ approach, which people come in,they see they’ve got to get 28 million dollars, they cut all kinds of programs that might be vital to the community, and they look at how many positions can they delete in order to get to a balanced budget. And that’s a very painful way of doing something and it’s quick, but what I see when you’re using that approach you see it just total cyclical behavior – is that you have that impact for a period of time, and two years later they’re right back in the same position again.”