5 minutes with  Jon E. Vice, President and CEO

The stats
Title: President and chief executive officer, Children's Hospital and Health System

Year hired: 1979

Family: Married to Teri, five children, four grandchildren

Tell me about your first year as CEO of Children's Hospital of Wisconsin. What was it like?

When I came here, I was a young man: 32. I don't know any good organization that would turn a 32-year-old loose with its future. That kind of tells you the shape the hospital was in.

We had trouble generating enough revenue to cover our expenses, for a lot of reasons.

We had a good core group of dedicated nursing personnel, but it was top-heavy. Individual units didn't have much say-so. The nursing turnover rate was 65 percent. There was a lot of unrest.

We worked the first few years to clean things up and create a better hierarchy for nursing management. It took us about two years to pull that off. We decentralized nursing leadership, where the VP of nursing and director of nursing became supportive of the nursing units instead of all decisions being made by nursing administration.

How did we get from Children's Hospital of Wisconsin then to Children's Hospital and Health System today? Has it exceeded your expectations?

For us to become known in the children's hospital world, we had to work harder than anybody else. Our whole focus was on improving quality, improving services, bringing on new programs.

Our growth was more rapid than I envisioned. We were so far down in the rankings, I would have been pleased to be ranked No. 4 or 5, so I could keep encouraging us to grow and get better. I'm more comfortable chasing somebody than trying to stay ahead of them, like being Avis chasing Hertz. Today, we are in the top ranking and now we have to figure out how to stay ahead.

How do you see your own role?

I play a supportive role. The people we've got leading the system are really talented and phenomenal. I encourage them or prod them to move us forward, but we're way too big for one person to lead. We've got a lot of people with good vision. How do we give them the resources they need to fulfill the mission? That's how I've got to see my job.

What's the best piece of advice you've ever received?

It's one that Davey Crockett said: Be sure you're right, then go ahead.

The health system would not have been here if we had listened to the powers that be in the 1980s. Children's Hospital would have been shut down. We weren't supposed to exist. We weren't supposed to be independent.

It would have been easy to roll over and play dead. In fact, I was asked to give up and just become a 75-bed wing of another hospital, but I told them no. It wouldn't be right for the kids, although it would have been the easy thing to do.

You took on an embattled children's hospital. More recently you took on an embattled foster care system. Why?

I think we have the wherewithal to make it better. Will there be cracks that we miss? Yeah, probably. It is a tough situation, trying to balance what the families' needs and the children's needs are. But I think we're making a lot of headway.

Kenneth Munson (president of Children's Service Society of Wisconsin) explains it best. He was out on a case, visiting a family. It was a 7-year-old boy  whose mother was out driving around drunk with this child in the car. If she drives drunk with the child, gets in a wreck and dies, two things happen: No. 1 her son comes to Children's Hospital when he's hurt; and No. 2, he becomes a foster child. He has to have a home. He needs adoption. Somebody has to take care of that child in the long run. It's not hard to go from A to B.  What we need to do is get the mother the help she needs to stop the rest from happening.