Advantage-makers are those rare leaders who win more often because they know how to consistently transform challenging situations into the best possible outcomes. They see opportunities where others see problems, and influence outcomes where others are stuck. If you are not an advantagemaker, you will probably lose to someone who is.
— Steven Feinberg, PhD, author, The Advantage-Makers: How Exceptional Leaders Win by Creating Opportunities Others Don't (FT Press, 2007)

Much has been written this year about threats to the clinical lab industry. Most cannot be denied: imaging giants taking over lab testing, urologists and gastroenterologists creating their own in-house AP labs, and physicians demanding that labs have EMR connectivity ("Informatics Junkies," June 2007 and "Save the Data," September 2007, in this publication.

But amid the threats, opportunities abound for pathologists and lab executives who can see the possibilities and avoid the pitfalls of failure. In his new book, Feinberg describes laws of defeat that clinical labs should heed:

• Leaders see opportunity knocking but put out the "do not disturb" sign because they are ruled by narrow thinking.
• Leaders confuse perception with reality; they don't see what they don't want to see.
• Leaders shoot themselves in the foot by competing against themselves—for example, pushing for growth while pushing for cost savings; promoting innovation but punishing mistakes; and giving mandates to people, but not giving them adequate decision-making authority to carry them out.
• Leaders are stuck in their persistence, making sticky problems stickier. They repeat "solutions" that don't work.

I see parallels in Feinberg's advice to leaders, and comments made by Jared N. Schwartz, MD, keynote speaker at Pathology Visions 2007 in San Diego, according to Robert Michel of Dark Daily.

Narrow thinking can plague pathologists and others who run clinical labs. For example, Schwartz discussed new methodologies such as tissue-specific in vivo biomarkers and virtual colonoscopies, which have the potential to reduce the number of tissue specimens submitted to pathologists. However, enterprising pathologists can find ways to add value in the diagnostic and therapeutic areas of medicine.

Opportunities exist in new technologies, which are resisted by many lab executives and pathologists. According to Schwartz, this opens the door for others to seize the opportunity. Pathologists need to proactively master new technologies and provide them to clinicians.

Lab executives and pathologists are confusing perception with reality when they ignore changes in the marketplace. Pathologists can merely generate test results, Schwartz says, or they can find ways to provide answers that support diagnoses and choices of therapies.

Cheryl Woodruff