“When you are dancing with a bear, remember, you can’t sit down until the bear gets tired.”

“I stopped opposing, and started proposing.”

“From despair to hope to change … Despair must be transformed into hope, but hope must transform into change; and when change becomes difficult, we mustn’t retreat to despair, but rather continue the struggle for change.”

“Change must be top-down, bottom-up and inside-out.”

These are examples of the wisdom of one of the principal speakers from this year’s Union Delegates Conference, the theme of which was Transformational Leadership. Van Jones, the brilliant 42-year-old community organizer, human rights lawyer, author, former White House adviser and Princeton University fellow electrified the audience with his prescription for transformation.

Leading change through social dialogue

Jones, along with former U.S. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders; Kaiser Foundation Health Plan/Hospitals Chairman and CEO George Halvorson; Dave Regan, president of SEIU UHW; Jack Cochran, MD, executive director of the Permanente Federation; and I represented an alliance of community, government, labor, and management leaders working to transform health care through social dialogue.

Our conference challenged all of us to think very differently. Indeed, we discussed our Labor Management Partnership as a transformation, moving beyond limited collective bargaining between two parties, into a broader social dialogue that includes patients, the community, government and all of society. If we are to build an equitable, affordable, high quality health care system for everyone, it is going to take a complete transformation of the way health care is delivered in this country. This cannot be done without successful and fantastic team based care…from the bottom-up, with support from the top-down and driven from the inside-out.

Our 2011 Union Delegates Conference was the largest ever, with more than 700 in attendance. In addition to our featured speakers, the conference included a wide range of workshops on business literacy, performance improvement, partnership education and training, communication, patient safety, healthy eating and active living, and so much more.

Confronting the cost of care

Yes, our theme of transformational leadership was addressed head on by former Surgeon General Elders. She shared with us that for major change to occur, there must be a crisis, the grassroots must understand the crisis, and there must be leadership. She said that the most difficult word in the English language is change.

I described the crisis, as I have done many times before, as part of our “Case for Change.” We must recognize that as we work to rebuild our economy, we will not succeed if we act the same way we did 60 years ago, when we built the labor movement. Today, the U.S. has competition that reaches across the globe as people from every country aspire to a better life. In health care, costs must be driven down. Health care costs in the U.S. are unsustainable and are eating away at our nation’s competitiveness and our ability to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, both physical and social. Indeed, the cost of health care robs people of raises they would otherwise receive.

Our new health care reform law provides an opportunity to deliver care to 30 million people who currently have no coverage. The new law also provides hundreds of opportunities to support innovation to reduce cost and improve quality.

Kaiser Permanente is well positioned to show the nation how to succeed at the transformation of health care. However, we must transform our relationships from top-down, bottom-up, and inside-out if we are to succeed.

These were the themes of our conference…unlike any other gathering of union leaders anywhere. We will now carry forth, accountable to the patients and communities we serve.

Our LMP is a call to action, a call to transformation, requiring transformational leadership.