LEADERSHIP AND THE ACADEMY

“Leadership” is a word that may conjure up a number of definitions, if we think about it. Leadership can be a collective noun, as in the leadership of an organization, such as your Academy, or it can be a verb, used to describe an action taken by an individual or group. It can be good leadership or perhaps bad leadership, all depending on your point of view, of course. Regardless of how you define leadership or what you may think of it, one encounters leadership almost every hour of every day. Leadership is necessary if you are to be successful in your clinical practice or academic endeavors. Leadership is something we all need to learn about if we want to further our careers. There are those who think leadership is an innate skill, and that studying the science of leadership will have little effect if you aren’t a “born” leader. There are others who have studied and taught leadership and know from their own and others’ experience that leadership principles, processes, and abilities can be taught and learned, and that if a culture of leadership is developed in an organization, it will thrive. The Academy is fortunate to have a “thought leader” in leadership! I’m speaking of Dr. Mert Flom, a past president of the Academy, and founder of the Leadership InSight Program that has been offered for many years now at the Annual Meeting of the Academy. The Academy is proud to present these courses to you again when we meet in Orlando November 11-14. I invite you to sign up for this great learning opportunity. Drs. Linda Casser and Steven Eyler are putting together an outstanding leadership program that will be presented by many recognized leaders of the Academy, and I know that you will take away new skills to help you further enhance your concepts and abilities in leadership. I am pleased to announce that I have spoken recently with Dr. Flom and have asked him to provide us with some snippets of his knowledge on the subject of leadership in this and future issues of President’s Calling. Enjoy, and thank you Mert. The first installment follows. [To Top] LEADERSHIP SNIPPET #1: MEANINGS OF “LEADERSHIP” Merton C. Flom, O.D., Ph.D., F.A.A.O.   [President Eger is facilitating the development of a leadership “culture” in our Academy. I am pleased to work with him in this important endeavor — and grateful for the opportunity to share with my Academy colleagues some of what I learned these past 21 years as a student in the discipline of leadership studies.] _____ So, you’re on the way to your optometric office and you run into a friend who tells you about his boss who is “narrow minded and lacking in foresight — indeed, myopic.” You understand exactly what he is saying and offer kind words of understanding. Arriving at your office a few minutes later, your partner advises you that, “the highly myopic patient for whom you dispensed contact lenses yesterday called and will be coming back today.” In quick succession, you heard the word “myopic” used in two different ways — one in an everyday context, the other in the context of the discipline of optometry. You had no trouble coping with different meanings of the same word. The context made it clear. The word “leadership” similarly has a different meaning in common everyday usage and in the discipline of leadership studies. In one common usage, leadership means persons in high positions in a company or organization. Another common usage refers to the actions of a person who leads a group to accomplish a specific task. In the discipline of leadership studies, taught at many universities and colleges in the U.S., an additional meaning of “leadership” is used. In the discipline, “leadership” is studied as “a process that brings about change, without coercion, that is effective and adaptive, and improves the common good.” We are now reminded that the two common everyday uses of “leadership” connote two different ideas: position and leading. Further, we see that the discipline of leadership studies emphasizes a third idea: change. In our discourse with each other, the word “leadership” is frequently not understood, sometimes misunderstood. To help clarify what we mean, we might start by using helpful modifiers: “positional leadership,” “leading leadership,” and “change leadership.” [To Top]

New Board of Directors

At Academy 2008 Anaheim, you elected a new Board of Directors for 2009-2010. These individuals are among the leaders of the profession. Please allow me to introduce your Board!

MARK W. EGER, PRESIDENT

Mark has been a Fellow of the Academy for 38 years. He is a private practitioner in Coraopolis, PA with his son Noah who is also an Academy Fellow. He and his wife Susan have been married for 41 years, and she also works in the office as office manager of the Eger Eye Group. His other son, Jason, and daughter-in-law, Janelle, have a daughter, Jarah, and on January 26th this year delivered identical twin boys, Jonas and Jude. In his free time, Mark enjoys golf.


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KARLA ZADNIK, PRESIDENT-ELECT

Karla has been a Fellow of the Academy for 25 years. She is a Professor and an Associate Dean at The Ohio State University College of Optometry. She has been married to her husband, Kurt, for 30 years; he is the Managing Editor for Optometry and Vision Science. They have two daughters, Andrea, who is a graduate student in Film Studies at Boston University and Nina, a freshman at Ohio State University. She enjoys quilting and bicycling in her free time.


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BERNARD J. DOLAN, SECRETARY-TREASURER

Bernie has been a Fellow of the Academy for 25 years. He is staff optometrist at the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center, San Francisco, CA, and clinical professor in the School of Optometry at the University of California, Berkeley. He lives with his wife, Jane, a retired VA physical therapist, in San Mateo, CA. Their daughter, Christina, is a graduate of Arizona State University and clinical interventionist with autistic children for Southwest Autism Research and Resource Center in Phoenix, AZ and their son, Greg, is completing his bachelor of science in biochemistry at University of California, Santa Barbara and will be enrolling in a PhD program this fall. Bernie enjoys genealogy in his free time.


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RICHARD E. WEISBARTH, IMMEDIATE PAST PRESIDENT

Rick has been a Fellow of the Academy for 26 years and a Diplomate in the Section on Cornea, Contact Lenses and Refractive Technologies for 13 years. He is the Vice-President, Global Head Professional Development & Partnerships, for CIBA Vision in Duluth, GA. He is responsible for coordinating Professional Affairs for CIBA Vision around the globe. He has a wife, Pamela, and two children; Kristen, a Market Analyst for Tiber Laboratories, and Tyler, a senior at Rutgers University. He enjoys gardening in his free time.



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BRETT G. BENCE, BOARD MEMBER

Brett has been a Fellow of the Academy for 27 years. He lives in Mukilteo, Washington, with his wife, Robin, and his two children, Jared, a senior in high school and Teryn, a sophomore in high school. He is a partner on the Board of Directors and Director of Optometry at Northwest Eye Surgeons and Whatcom Eye Surgeons since 1988 where his responsibilities include patient care, management of continuing education, professional relations with the Optometry community, and coordinating their distinguished OD clinic directors. His family owns three farms in Nebraska that he enjoys returning to a few times each year.


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BARBARA CAFFERY, BOARD MEMBER

Barbara has been a Fellow of the Academy for 28 years. She is the owner of a group practice with four optometrists and two ophthalmologists. She is also defending her thesis for her doctorate this spring. She lives with her husband, Art, who is a psychoanalyst in Toronto, Canada. She has two daughters. She is a huge fan of the Toronto Maple Leafs, a Canadian hockey team.


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TIMOTHY T. MCMAHON, BOARD MEMBER

Tim is the newest member of the Board. He has been a Fellow for 25 years and a Diplomate in the Section on Cornea, Contact Lenses and Refractive Technologies for 13 years. He has been at University of Illinois at Chicago in the Department of Ophthalmology & Visual Sciences for 28 years and is currently the Director of the Contact Lens Service and a Professor of Ophthalmology. He has been married to his wife, Kay, for 30 years and they live in the Chicago area. They have two grown sons, Ryan and Kyle. In the minimal free time he has, Tim likes to play golf.

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JOSEPH P. SHOVLIN, BOARD MEMBER

Joe has been a Fellow for 26 years and Diplomate for 12 years. He is a senior optometrist at Northeastern Eye Institute. His areas of interest are contact lens related pathology and other cornea and anterior segment conditions. He lives in Scranton, PA, with his wife, Lisa. He has two adult children, Erin, a teacher in Phoenix, AZ, for Teach for America and Ryan, a junior at Bucknell University. He enjoys watching athletic events and playing golf.

COLLABORATION OF OPTOMETRIC ORGANIZATIONS ON COMMERCIAL SUPPORT OF CONTINUING EDUCATION

It is wonderful to see the stakeholders of the optometric profession voluntarily come together to work towards a common cause. The latest endeavor involves the issue of corporate support for continuing education. Your Academy has for many years had conflict of interest policies that endeavor to flush out corporate bias from presentations.

Many of you probably know that the drug company trade group, PhRMA, has a revised code of standards starting this month. Specifically, the code will prohibit drug companies from giving out free pens, free dinners, etc., and will put significant restrictions on sponsoring CE. Not every company, however, will be bound by the PhRMA standards. Corporate-sponsored education events will continue, and those companies that are bound by PhRMA can continue to sponsor education as long as the company does not control the content.

Five optometric organizations are joining forces to address this issue. Recently a news release stated the purpose of the collaboration, and I thought you should be aware of the Academy’s involvement. The first meeting of the steering committee will occur later this month in Chicago, and once the policy is developed you will receive the details with further explanation as to how these new standards will affect our meetings in the future. Please see below for the full text of the news release.
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Profession-Wide Optometric Organizations to Develop Guidelines for Commercial Support in Continuing Education
December 11, 2008 – To meet the rapidly changing needs of continuing education for practicing optometrists, five professional optometric organizations have initiated a steering committee to develop profession-wide guidelines for commercial support of continuing education. The American Academy of Optometry (AAO), the American Optometric Association (AOA), the Association of Regulatory Boards of Optometry (ARBO), the Association of Schools and Colleges of Optometry (ASCO) and the Southern Council of Optometrists (SECO) have issued a statement agreeing that they are “committed to ongoing excellence in optometric continuing education and ensuring high standards of accreditation. Therefore, we are dedicated to the development and adoption of guidelines for commercial support in optometric continuing education.”The pharmaceutical and medical device organizations have developed voluntary guidelines to ensure ethical interactions with health care professionals. Rather than one optometric organization developing similar guidelines for the optometric profession, the presidents of the five organizations formed a steering committee to oversee the development of optometric guidelines. Steering committee members will include representatives from the organizations and members of the ophthalmic industry. “Full input from the profession,” according to Dr. Christina Sorenson, President of ARBO, “will allow a collaborative effort that will benefit the profession greatly over the long term.”

VOLUNTEERS ARE THE HEART OF THE ACADEMY

 
The Academy is fortunate to have the devotion of so many volunteers. Orchestrating an annual meeting with the complexity of ours doesn’t just happen; it requires the guidance and energies of our wonderful staff, and the tireless efforts of all of our committees.

The volunteers make the Academy meetings successful. We see the fruits of the Admittance Committee’s labors when we welcome the new class of Fellows each year at the annual banquet. The Awards Program recognizes the outstanding contributions of the very best in optometry and reaffirms why our Academy exists. Many Chapters of the Academy work all year long to promote membership and attendance at the meeting to Fellows and non-Fellows. Our Communications Committee develops a fast paced press conference program each year that highlights for the press many of the outstanding discoveries unveiled at our meeting. Our Exhibits Committee assures that the exhibit hall gets bigger and better every year. The Lectures and Workshops Committee members you see at the education desk work tirelessly to make sure you have the best CE offerings and coordinate the hundreds of hours of lectures and workshops presented at each meeting. The Scientific Program Committee’s efforts bring us the latest and greatest new discoveries each year so we can all be on the leading edge of patient care. Our Research Committee develops one of the best symposia offered each year, and for those who attended the Hirsch Symposium this year, you know that the program on the bionic eye was intriguing.

My point to all of this is to let you know how many of your colleagues are involved with so much of what the Academy does. The activities I’ve listed above certainly are not the complete list of the Academy’s committees, and my apologies to those committees I haven’t named. All of us benefit from the combined efforts of all of our volunteers.

Yet the Academy faces a double-edged sword with respect to volunteers. We need many to make our programs successful, but making appointments to each committee every two years is difficult because we have many more individuals who would like to be involved than we have slots to fill. This is a nice problem to have, and I want to assure you that your Board is committed to involving as many people as we can. For that reason we only make appointments for two years at a time; so if you have served in the past and you were not reappointed for this term, it is because we face this dilemma. I wish to thank all who have agreed to serve during these next two years, and for all of those who have served in the past. You are the reason that the Academy is so unique, important, and special to us all.
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KNOWLEDGE IS THE ENEMY OF DISEASE

 

The 86th annual meeting of the Academy has come and gone. If you missed Anaheim, you missed our largest and arguably one of our best meetings. We had over 4800 attendees living the Academy’s motto, “All CE, All the Time.” Certainly Rick Weisbarth concluded his term as President of the Academy on the highest note, and that happened in no small part because of his terrific leadership during these past two years. Congratulations from all of us go to Rick who can now enjoy the best office in any organization, Immediate Past-President.

Our Academy was founded in 1922, by insightful leaders who were not only dissatisfied with the commercial state of the profession at that time, but recognized that there was a need for a learned body to develop the science of optometry and to upgrade education. It was the extraordinary vision of the Academy forefathers who wanted to provide the profession with a scientific base. From those very beginnings, the Academy has been fortunate to be filled with talented individuals who have all been committed to the betterment of our profession and whose efforts have resulted in preservation of sight and protection of the visual welfare of the public. We are truly the only organization in optometry that has the unique ability to bring together the scientist and educators to present their outstanding discoveries, so they can be blended into the clinical care we provide our patients. It has been said by others that “knowledge is the enemy of disease,” and I am proud to be part of an organization that has provided the ammunition of knowledge in such abundant quantities to our profession. While we are all proud of our accomplishments, we cannot be content with what the Academy has done in the past. We must continue to raise the bar for the profession. Fortunately we have many wonderful individuals who share this vision as well.

It has also been stated that organizations like the Academy are generally easier to create than they are to sustain. That we have sustained didn’t happen by accident, it happened because of the skill and dedicated leadership of those volunteers, Executive Councils, and Presidents over the past 86 years. I am humbled by the realization that the future of the Academy will be influenced by the decisions that my fellow Board members and I make going forward, and that it won’t be long before our actions become a part of the Academy’s history as well. My personal challenge is to try to make the right decisions as we continue the Academy’s journey toward our new history. My promise to you is that I will do everything within my power to sustain the great tradition of this organization. I am surrounded by an extremely talented Board, passionate volunteers, and dedicated Academy staff, and I thank them and you for the support and confidence I have received.

For a complete version of this address, please see Dr. Mark Eger’s guest editorial in the November OVS issue.

Today's Research, Tomorrow's Practice®:How Does the Future Affect Today?

Plans are well underway for Academy 2008 Anaheim! This year's meeting will take place Wednesday through Saturday, October 22-25, and promises to be another great meeting.

Our Plenary session will be held on Wednesday, October 22 and will feature Ed Barlow, a well known futurist. As you may know, Mr. Barlow helped shepherd the AOA through a multi-year project culminating in the report, Optometry 2020: the Future of the Profession. Opening this year's session, Mr. Barlow will look into his crystal ball to predict possible outcomes in the future of health and eye care. Many themes emerged from his work with the AOA, including generational changes, the importance of nanotechnology and other advances in science, and health care delivery.

For optometrists and other vision scientists, it is essential that work be done collaboratively in a context of evidence-based medicine. Kay Dickersin, PhD, will join us at the Plenary to share the results of the Cochrane Project (an international, not-for-profit organization that produces and disseminates systematic reviews of healthcare information and promotes the search for evidence in the form of clinical trials and other studies) and how practitioners can not only reap the benefits of research results, but also contribute to its data collection.

Next, Don Mutti, OD, PhD, FAAO, will use the myopia control literature as a specific example of how the Cochrane Project can help bring today's research to tomorrow's practice.

We hope that you will be able to attend for this year's Plenary for a glimpse into how the future affects our profession today!

As we look to the future - do you know a practitioner, vision scientist or colleague who would benefit from our community? Is there someone in your practice or on your faculty who would be a great Fellow? If so, let them know about the distinction that Academy membership will bring not only on a personal level, but also the tremendous network of support they will gain!
For more specific information about Academy Fellowship, interested colleagues can visit http://www.aaopt.org/becoming/efellowship/index.asp at the Academy's website. Included is more specific information on the point system, application process, and timetable for gaining Fellowship.

Be sure to mark your calendar for Academy 2008 Anaheim, October 22-25, 2008! Join us in experiencing the most cutting-edge optometric continuing education as we enjoy the fellowship in sunny California!

Hotel and meeting registration is now open. For more information, visit www.aaopt.org.
Stay tuned for additional details.

Sincerely,
Richard E. Weisbarth, OD, FAAO
President

Gearing up for Tampa! (And Updates from the Board)

Sooner than we know it, Academy 2007 Tampa will be here! As you have probably heard, this year's meeting has new dates: Wednesday through Saturday, October 24-27, yet promises to be the same great meeting you've come to expect from the Academy.
Before I tell you more about this year’s meeting, I wanted to share with you some updates from the Board of Directors.

About ten years ago, the Academy engaged in conversations with the American Optometric Association (AOA) regarding the feasibility of joining our annual meetings together into one. For reasons that were germane at that time, the venture never came to fruition. More recently, we revisited that concept. There have been many discussions in the past two years, and your Board has spent many hours of due diligence in an attempt to make the best decision for the Academy and our members.

There are many compelling arguments for co-locating the meetings of the two organizations, and the Board considered those positives at length. But after polling our own membership, just one-third felt it was a good idea. In addition, the Board heard many specific concerns raised about the importance of maintaining the Academy’s meeting as the premiere educational event in optometry. Members made it clear that the strength of the educational program, based on the unique integration of optometric research and practice, should be maintained in order to continue to meet the needs of our members and attendees. Many felt that the only way to do that was to retain an independent annual meeting separate from that of the AOA.

As a result, the Academy Board of Directors has come to a decision that a combined meeting with AOA is not in our organization’s best interest at this time.

I would also like to tell you about a new initiative that is exciting and will impact the future of our profession.. As you may have heard, a joint project team has been formed to look at what a board certification process for Doctors of Optometry would look like – IF one were to exist.

The joint project team evaluating this issue is made up of representatives from the Academy, ARBO, AOA, AOSA, ASCO, and NBEO. The project team members were selected by their respective organizations. Representing the Academy will be: Drs. Mary Jo Stiegemeier and Tom Lewis. The group has been charged with addressing the issue of continued and advanced competence in optometry via a voluntary board certification process. The ultimate goal of this project is to create a program that would be endorsed by optometric organizations and made available to optometrists who have a need to demonstrate continued and advanced clinical competence to the public, third party payers and government agencies. Further, the team will not produce an abstract concept, but rather an actual “product" that we can all look at, evaluate and discuss. The Academy, AOA, ARBO, NBEO, ASCO and AOSA chose to address board certification now because the profession has demonstrated a readiness to consider the issue in a comprehensive, inclusive manner. This readiness is evidenced by 10 of the 57 "preferred futures" of the Optometry 2020 Summits relating to competence and certification. Additionally, one of the outcomes of the recently held National Optometric Continuing Education Conference states, “there be renewed dialogue involving all stakeholders to reassess continued competence and board certification.” Finally, some optometric organizations have already created elements of board certification including educational tracts and testing for advanced competence in specialty areas. The project team anticipates the process will take up to 24 months. I look forward to hearing from our Academy representatives, and will communicate with you as their work progresses.

And now back to the Annual Meeting. With over 230 hours of lectures and workshops, 13 section symposia, hundreds of scientific papers and posters, and an outstanding Plenary program on “The Impact of the Aging Population on Eye Care,” Academy 2007 Tampa offers an unparalleled educational opportunity for ALL optometrists, vision scientists, new graduates, residents and optometry students. In addition, you will have the opportunity to visit an expanded exhibit hall with nearly 300 booths featuring the latest products, technology and equipment.

Please make sure to visit the different areas on the Academy's web site about Academy 2007 Tampa. You can already find information on traveling to Tampa, the hotels, the Section Symposia, and the Lectures and Workshops program. In addition, our Program Preview mailer is currently being printed and will mail in early May. Hotel and meeting registration open May 23. Watch your mailbox!

I look forward to seeing you in Tampa!

Rick Weisbarth, OD, FAAO
President