The first article in this series (April 2004) portrayed the nursing shortage as a straw man and described a framework that the nursing profession might use to plan its future without getting sidetracked simply by numbers. This article delves more deeply into why this is important to do now; the third article will propose various paths forward and give examples of how idealized redesign has been used to reinvent an organization or process and change ways of thinking, which can be applied to the nursing profession.