fundamentals stay the same. The
“ It’s not about
learning new
skills, it’s about
translating your
existing skill set
to new business
applications.”
ability to be a leader and work within
a team is a key skill that works just as
well in the office or hospital as it does
in the boardroom.
2. You’re an expert at defining
the problem. As physicians, we are
often presented with the chief
complaint that one of our patients
just doesn’t feel well. It’s our job to
get to the root of the problem. We
learn to ask open ended questions,
suspend our previous assumptions,
Sylvan Waller, MD
and build a working hypothesis based
on the data we collect. This process is
no different in the business world. As more every day about how the body advisors. We can assess whether a
a health care consultant, I work to works, but we will don’t have all the proposed solution would work in the
gather data, and use that information
to analyze market, financial, or answers. Because of that, we are very health care environment. Would
good at taking a lot of data, filtering physicians adopt this new
operational trends and recommend a out the noise and focusing on the technology? How does it impact their
course of action. Either way, you signal. Malcolm Gladwell calls workload and workflow? Does it
already know the fundamentals of this thin-slicing. Have a patient with create a better experience for their
root-cause analysis, and that’s hugely normal labs with the exception of a
specific abnormal finding? Almost patients? Does it improve safety or
quality? As physicians, we have the
instinctually, we can figure out if that expertise to quickly make these
3. You have finely tuned abnormality is a red herring or the assessments, and lots of companies
instincts. Medicine is in many ways key to the problem. That same skill are willing to pay for that knowledge.
still a black box. We know more and makes us extremely useful business
valuable in a business setting.
Physicians are ideal
candidates. The skills we have
developed in health care, both by our
training and the nature of the job,
make physicians ideal candidates for
many business applications. If you’re
looking to diversify your professional
experience, I want you to know:
you’re already coming to the table
with more than you think.
Read this and other articles at
www.PhysiciansOfficeNews.com
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