Alliant Trustee Michael Blaszyk Named CFO of the Year by San Francisco Business Times magazine
 San Francisco, CA – June 20, 2006 -Michael D. Blaszyk, a member of the Board of Trustees of Alliant International University, was recently named Chief Financial Officer of the Year by the San Francisco Business Times magazine. Mr. Blaszyk, was given the award in recognition of the leadership he showed in the financial turnaround of Catholic Healthcare West, where he serves as CFO.
Dr. Geoffrey Cox, President of Alliant, said, "The entire Alliant community joins me in congratulating Michael Blaszyk. We are grateful for his expertise on the Board. He has been - and continues to be - a tremendous asset to the University." Mr. Blaszyk joined the Alliant Board of Trustees in August, 2004. He chairs the Audit Committee and also serves on the Executive and Compensation Committees of the Board. The San Francisco Business Times printed news of the naming of its CFO of the year in a special supplement distributed in early June, 2006; the text of that story is quoted below. Links to the San Francisco Business Times and related stories will be found at the bottom of this web page. CFO speeds Catholic Healthcare West recovery | Michael Blaszyk was running the financial operations at Cleveland's University Hospitals Health System in 2000 when he was approached by Lloyd Dean to take on a challenge. Dean is chief executive of Catholic Healthcare West, a 40-hospital system whose finances made news in those days alongside verbs like "hemorrhaging." He needed a turnaround man.
Then Dean got a call from the rating agencies, asking for a meeting. That type of call could only mean one of two things: The hospital's bond rating was about to rise, or it was about to fall the last notch from a triple B-, with a negative outlook, to junk-bond status. The first option didn't seem likely.  | | Name:
Michael D. Blaszyk
Current Title:
Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer
Company: Catholic Healthcare West, San Francisco
CFO since: 2000
Last Previous Position:
SVP, CFO University Hospitals Health System, Cleveland, OH
What the analysts say:
Crowning Achievement:
Financial turnaround of CHW | | Non-public Company CHW CEO: Lloyd H. Dean, President & CEO
Revenue (6/3-/05): $6,020 M
Operating Profit: $202M
Net Income: $348M | "I hadn't even officially started on my first day, and I went to New York with some others and said, 'We're going to turn this around,'" Blaszyk recalled. We were able to inject enough confidence to keep the step down from happening. Six years later, the San Francisco-based system has an operating profit of $202 million, on $6 billion in revenue, after five consecutive years of growth. By last year, all three major bond-rating agencies - Standard & Spoor's, Fitch Ratings and Moody's Investor Services - had upgraded CHW bonds to an A-, reflecting investors' confidence in both the turnaround and its sustainability.
"It's a marker, demonstrating our achievement," Blaszyk said. "To our knowledge, no one has ever risen up the ratings as fast as we have."
Blaszyk brought to the job 30 years of experience in both hospital financial and turnarounds, including teaching the subject at Boston University and Case Western Reserve. He said their chances of sustainably turning around a company with more than $5 billion in revenue was statistically very slim. They had to have a common goal, they had to work together and they had to do it right. "The plan we put in place was fairly simple," he said. "It was really back-to-basics. We called it the economic blueprint." That blueprint laid out a strategy based on accountability, rigor and economic discipline. It translated into laying off 350 people off the first year alone and outsourcing ailing departments. They also reduced 10 regional management teams and seven fiduciary boards to a cental operating committee.
"I learned a lot about teamwork during that process," said Blaszyk, who admits it took a long time to convince him to leave his name in the hat for this award. "No one can do this alone."
Then they set out to do what seemed unachievable: create a non-profit with the same level of accountability, transparency and governance as any of its peers on the Fortune 500, among which the not-for-profit CHW would rank 352, just below Googgle. Even its board was overhauled, with new members and a renewed commitment to oversight.
When Sarbanes-Oxley was passed CHW decided, voluntarily, to comply. "Early on, in the ratings, we saw issues coming up about reliability," "Blaszyk said "The only way we could dea1 with that was to be very transparent. We believed in transparency, we believed in disclosure, and we believed in being accountable for who we were and the decisions we made."
That included an accountability to the community, part of the Catholic health care tradition that some CHW hospitals had held for more than 100 years. In tuning around CHW, the system was also better able to fulfill that mission, contributing $623 million last year' in charitable donations and care.
It also meant taking care of its 50,000 employees, who voted the system onto the San Francisco Business Times' 2006 list of Best Places to Work.
In fact, when asked what he was proudest of, Blaszyk listed "the turnaround but also something else. One of the hardest things he's done, Blaszyk says, is establishing leadership development program to train health care leaders of the future.
"When you're going through the turmoil CHW was going through, you have a burning platform from which to advance an agenda," he said. Now, he sees the company as a McKinsey & Co. of the health care world, training leaders who will go on to run other organizations with both skill and compassion.
Blaszyk's background was itself an excellent training ground, spanning both consulting roles and hands-on leadership, usually for ailing organizations.
But what probably makes him first successful is that he understands how many people have done the hard work in this turnaround, and the sacrifices that have been made.
"It's an astounding story, and it would not be right for me to take the credit for that," he said. "There are a lot of people doing amazing things here."
Late last month, the hospital got another call, again from the rating agencies. At press time, it was still too early to make promises, but as Blaszyk put it, "We're very hopeful have a full A back here directly." Related Information
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