The article makes a big deal of "without cause"--in theory, most employees in CA are 'at will', and can be fired without cause. Most, however, don't get an 18 month golden parachute. Tough to feel sorry for him. (And I think he was grossly overpaid at $650K/year, but had the gall to lay off nurses to 'save money').

Rock St. Native here:

It is often the forward vision of a man that is sacrificed at the altar of those whose self-interest and petty bickering comes first... It is obvious that this man had a vision; Took the risk, carried it out and basically saved the hospital from bankruptcy - petty, back-backbiting from Union Thugs notwithstanding.

What overpaid nurses are going to soon find out - in the midst of this economic 'recovery', is that wage competitiveness will be the driving force of staying employed - or not. I.e., a nurse will no longer look forward to the salary of a PhD software engineer, but rather a pay scale dictated by the market, not Union Thuggery.

Be happy you still even have a job.

Without knowing anything about it, it sounds to me like this is the nurses union getting the guy fired because he had to threaten to cut some of their positions to make the hospital profitable again. What I took away from this is that the hospital started the year poorly, looks like it will end well, and the nurses union is pissed about it. Something doesn't add up with the nurses.

Agent P from Rock St. Native:

I would suggest you remove your head from your arse, as had it not been for the union thugs as you say that stepped in for the employees, tons of workers would have been out on the streets and the rest would have been reduced to per-diem shifts, and that's the best case scenario. Maybe in your world, "vision" should be at the expense of hard workers whom many have served and worked hard for 5-10, even 15-20 years while Graham sits back in raking inordinate sums of money for making the decisions that put the hospital at such a deficit in the first place.

Like most overpaid CEO's, Graham wanted to punish the workers for his decisions to build and spend so much on such an elaborate new facility. Maybe to you that is fair, but to sensible people it is not.

CEO's like Kenneth Graham are what's wrong with this country. Overpaid and willing to screw over the hard working people that make the hospital what it is.

No it isn't because of the unions 'being pissy'. A majority of the union positions were saved and hospital-represented jobs were eliminated. That isn't to say that union issues were not always handled in the best interests for the hospital and for staff, but I believe that in reality the CEO was outsourcing his job more and more to consultants and 'interims' compared to the salary he was allegedly earning 'making decisions'.

Cohesive direction and leadership has been lacking under his tenure. Morale has been down for years and continuing to decline. Awards achieved by the organization were done so in spite of his leadership, not because of it, and under incredible amounts of stress to staff to boot.

The time has finally come where it was recognized that there was no lead dog steering the sleigh and the packs were branching off on their own, causing more chaos and uncertainty. Teamwork & communication broke down and soon everyone became isolated from each other; no one ever knew who was in charge, except maybe the outside consultants.

Picking consultants out of a hat to run the place for almost five years each time a problem came up, then writing checks for studies and recommendations, then hiring more outside upper level executives to deal with/oversee the recommendations rather than facing problems head on is hardly a strong trait in a CEO. I'm glad the Board finally has dealt with this ongoing problem. Although I would have preferred the Board to have had a unanimous vote, it was nice to see the newer board members picking up early on the illnesses of the organization and extricating it as quickly as possible.

There will be a lot of damage control required caused by the mishandled, painful, incompetent, layoff process of last fall; both for the people let go and those who remained behind. Someone with compassion for people and experience in dealing hands on with corporate issues, policies, turnovers, should be a must when locating a replacement. Regaining the trust of the employees will take awhile to rebuild, if ever. If satisfied/trusting employees are not high on the Board's list of goals, however, then that will be one less characteristic to search for in a CEO.

This one instance would be good time to promote from outside, as the current internal management structure is so dysfunctional after the last five years, I wouldn't trust any executive in house to pick up the reigns. Someone from the outside can come in and really clean house from the top down, and I bet morale would increase one hundred fold.