Dr. Bob Corona on leadership: People are your biggest assets

Dr. Bob Corona has several leadership roles at SUNY Upstate Medical University. His main job is chair of pathology and laboratory medicine. He advises residents, teaches pathology and lab medicine, and directs the hospital's pathology lab, employing about 250 people.

"You're operating not just patient care, you're operating a business," he said. "It has about 250 employees, a big information-system infrastructure, logistics, couriers.

"I earned an MBA which was helpful to understand business and balance sheets and all that stuff. The real skills come from the ability to deal with people. You can't forget people are your biggest asset."

His other leadership roles include vice president of innovation and business development. And, he oversees the CNY Biotech Accelerator.

Corona went to work in 1992 at Albany Medical Center after a fellowship at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, D.C. Before long, he arrived at Upstate and after a couple years was recruited to Welch Allyn. In 2012, after 16 years at Welch Allyn, he returned to Upstate.

Tell me about influences that led you to a leadership role in innovation.

I never formally trained as an engineer, but I always had a curiosity about science and technology. When I got into medicine, I gravitated toward pathology because there was a lot of technology involved with lab instruments and microscopes.

We started to use some primitive Internet technology in the mid-90s. I'm a brain and spinal cord pathologist - a neuropathologist. In Binghamton, they had neurosurgeons, but they did not have neuropathologists. So we rigged up a microscope with a robotic camera and hooked it to a television. Imagery was sent to us.

About 1995, a 15-year-old kid had a diagnosis of a high-grade brain malignancy. On the television screen, we said: Oh no, that's not a high-grade tumor. It's easy to confuse with a high-grade tumor, but it's a benign brain tumor, which changed the entire direction of the operation.

The next thing I knew I was getting calls from Apple Computer and Fujitsu and Sprint and Nynex. We started working with the Air Force Research Lab and doctors in Canada and in the Middle East. We decided to have a conference here about the technology.

I called Dr. Michael Baden, who was the forensic pathologist for the state of New York. I did several consults for the brains when he would do an autopsy. I asked him to be the keynote speaker for our conference.

He said: Yeah, but I'm working on the O.J. Simpson trial. Can I bring the team with me?

They came to Syracuse, and our attendance went from 300 to off the charts. We had to move the venue to the Oncenter.

Bill Allyn from Welch Allyn sat next to me at the conference dinner and asked: Are you responsible for all this technology?

I said: Yeah.

He said: We're trying to move our company to less optical mechanical technology and more processer-based stuff. Would you come work for me?

I was scared because I'd only been in practice two years, and I didn't want to give up my medical career. But it was one of the best decisions I ever made. I got to learn from him and all the legends at Welch Allyn. I spent 16 years there working in product development, testing for FDA clearance, and really enjoyed the run.

I continued to do consultations for brain pathology and teach at Upstate. The head of the search committee for the department chair said: We're looking for a chairman of the department.

I thought: It might be a nice time to come back to apply business and innovation principles. A new world of pathology was developing in digital imaging - moving away from the microscope to reading pathology on computers.

I got the opportunity to take over direction of the Biotech Center, got the opportunity to build a new cord-blood center, which we just launched. Now we're building a new laboratory, the first time since 1964. We're applying all these new technologies and automation to the lab.

Were you in leadership roles growing up?

I was president of my class in my freshman, sophomore and junior year at Oneida High School. I was the class marshal at graduation (1978).

One of the most fun things I did was Oneida city youth court. In lieu of Family Court, you could be defended, prosecuted and judged by your peers. I was a judge in city youth court. Some of the sentences we would issue were if you pulled a fire alarm, you had to work four Saturdays washing firetrucks at the fire department.

In college, I was an R.A. I went to Ithaca College. My major was biology.

Tell me about qualities of good leadership. What advice would you give a new leader?

Be flexible and adaptable. It's hard to predict what opportunities are going to come your way. Had I not been adaptable, I could have never made the transition from academic medicine to industry. When I was about to leave industry to come back to academia, I was told: Nobody's ever done that.

Flexibility and adaptability are key.

So is humility. When things happen good, take less of the credit. When bad things happen, take a disproportionate amount of the credit. Really take the responsibility. Don't just say I'm responsible and not change anything.

Have imagination. I'm a huge Disney fan. I love the idea of not accepting that there's only one solution.

Sometimes, when you have to be really focused on a problem, military-style leadership works. You focus. You have to make decisions that may irritate people, but you have to get that problem solved. When the tension isn't so bad, you have to be softer and use emotional intelligence and get people to buy in and build them a bridge so they have a pathway to the side that you're hoping to get them to.

I tell residents that two-thirds to maybe four-fifths of being successful as a leader comes from emotional intelligence, the soft skills. They're all smart here. They're all going to pick up the technical skills, but sometimes that's all they worry about.

Two thirds or more of leadership depends on the soft skills?

Look on any expense sheet. Labor costs the most, but people are your biggest assets. You need to take the time to get good people in your organization. In tough times, if you don't maintain the investment in people, you're not going to get any better. If you persist and focus and are resilient about keeping your people strong and happy and the morale high, you'll make it through the tough times.

What attributes do you see in poor leadership?

Lack of humility, which is key. Poor leaders fear change, so they protect the status quo. They are revengeful. They're angry.

I tell residents: Get angry and then let it go. Get it out of your system. You won't be productive when you're mad.

When you get angry, you don't make good decisions. Postponing making a decision, usually allows something bad to continue to fester.

Indecisiveness is one of the worst qualities a leader can have.

People generally like the status quo, so how does a leader spark innovation?

If you're really going to innovate, you have to solve somebody's problem.

I often say that you study the problem hard and then look for emotion. When you see emotion attached to the problem, there's an opportunity to innovate.

When people were standing in line, frustrated at a bank, waiting for a teller to do a simple transaction, somebody thought of an ATM machine. I try to really look at people, see where their pain point is, see where they start to get emotional about it. When it comes time to make a product, a device, a software app or whatever, people will pay for it if there is a little emotional component associated with it.

So stretch your imagination. Study problems, and look for that hook.

When I was at Welch Allyn, we got thousands of ideas brought to us during my run. We had a fast feasibility team. Does it make sense financially? Does it make sense technologically? Does it meet a need in the market? Can we protect the intellectual property?

I try to do the same thing here and bring in companies that are really going to make a difference.

What do you mean by bring in companies? Recruit them to the Upstate campus or grow new companies from the bottom up?

The Biotech Center is a regional resource. We take companies from an idea, usually in early phase. We teach them how to protect their intellectual property, write business plans, how to innovate, how to get grants. We try to both incubate and then accelerate them and not encourage them to just squat and stay in our facility. We want them to grow out of our facility, so we can bring in new people.

The biggest reason that a lot of incubators fail is that people come in, don't succeed and then squat there. They don't let new innovations come in.

We get them out. (Snaps fingers)

Our Biotech Center is full. I just met with a company out of California that wants to come and take the last pod. Kathi Durdon runs it, and she's a go-getter.

How does this tie to better medicine?

The backbone of precision medicine is precision diagnostics. If you get the diagnosis right, you're not going to do a lot of therapies that don't work.

Molecular pathology and genomics are the fundamentals of precision medicine.

At the Biotech Center, we built a molecular genetics lab, which is the foundation of precision diagnostics. And a digital imaging laboratory. Did you see the recent news about the big table that can display a digital image of a whole body?

To personalize someone's therapy, knowing the genetics of the tumor and the genetics of the individual will help to know what drugs work and what drugs don't work. We built a state-of-the art molecular genetics laboratory with the ability to target specific abnormalities in the genome and eventually we will sequence the patient's genome, the genome of his/her tumor or the genome of an inherited disorder.

When you have the ability to determine a person's entire genome, it's like throwing all the pieces of the puzzle on the table. What does it mean? OK, we know what your genetic makeup is. It's the bioinformatics or the computational pathology that puts the puzzles together. We juxtaposed the two laboratories. I hired the chief software architect of one of the divisions at Welch Allyn to run that.

That will be the fundamental piece to precision medicine.

A lot of times, drugs are approved specific to an organ - for instance, this is a lung-cancer drug. But now the molecular pathology and genomics testing are allowing us to characterize the tumor based on its molecular and genetic features.

When we isolate a brain tumor, we now talk about: What are the molecular genetics? Does it have certain protein features we can see via the microscope? Does it have a certain translocation of chromosomes?

That helps us personalize the therapy we provide.

You might have seen news at Duke. They're injecting brain tumors with polio virus. They stripped the ability of the polio virus to cause polio, but it still likes to attack the brain-tumor cells. They tag it with a cold virus, so it creates this huge inflammatory response in the brain. That ramps up the immune system to kill the brain tumor as well as the cold virus.

This is what the future of medicine looks like.

We have a stem-cell facility at our Community Campus run by our department.

I was talking to this company from California that wants to take stem cells to do regeneration medicine. Where there's a defect in certain tissue, they'll take the stem cells, hit it with a certain drug that will turn it on and then the stem cell will make replacement tissue.

I'm biased as a pathologist, but molecular pathology and genomics are the foundation of precision medicine: Get the diagnosis right. Or you could be all over the place trying therapies that may not work.

If you're missing a certain enzyme, you're not going to be able to use certain pain medicine.

Organ-specific therapies become gene-specific therapies.

You get your genome checked in the future, and you'll know this.

I'm trying to get some industry rally around it.

"CNY Conversations" feature Q&A interviews about leadership, success, and innovation. The conversations are condensed and edited. Last week, Dave Schneckenburger describes the value of being around other leaders