Behind the Night, the surgery podcast, relevant and engaging content designed to help you dominate the day.

So, Hi, all UBTK fans, Scott here, and we are continuing our series on leadership opportunities outside of clinical medicine.

And I'm absolutely pleased to have another repeat guest here on Behind the Night, and that's Dr. Tom Reed.

Tom, thanks for joining us so much on VTK.

Thanks for having me, Scott.

So, obviously, you're a very busy clinical surgeon, you're a leader within your own division at the University of Florida.

But tonight, we're going to talk a little bit about your other hat that you wear, and that's your role as the executive chairman for the American Borticole Arcto Surgery.

Can you talk a little bit about what that role is?

Sure.

So, for those who don't know, one of the main reasons our specialty exists as it does today is that our predecessors had foresight back in originally in 1899 with Joseph Mathews from Louisville started our society,

and also from the early 1930s, where folks convened the American Borticole Arctology, which eventually morphed into the American Borticole Arcto Surgery.

And that fact led to the incorporation of our board as one of the 24 member boards of the American Borticole specialties.

So, the way our board is constructed, we have a board of directors who do the lion's share of the work, as well as the staff who work in Taylor, Michigan, outside of Detroit.

And my role is the executive director.

And so, what I do is help manage day-to-day operations with the staff and provide some institutional memory for the board of directors and serve as our representative to the American Borticole specialties.

Now, that's a lot of time.

And it's something that, you know, you don't just step into, like, hey, I'm going to be the executive director for the ABCRS or the ABS or any other one of the member boards.

So, walk a little bit through your journey about, you know, maybe steps that you took along the way if you could kind of look back and say, you know, here's some of the kind of skill set that I think would be effective in this type of role, or maybe not the executive director of a board,

but along those lines, these opportunities.

Sure. So, the reason I got involved with boardwork is that I was somewhat frustrated with the written exam I took for the ABCRS a long, long time ago.

And not to throw shade at any of my predecessors who wrote those exams, but the managing sitting in a conference room at the Omni Hotel in Chicago with a pencil and a bubble sheet,

and taking an exam that was filled with K questions, multiple true false, and then taking a radiology exam from a radiologist that was brought in by the board to show some X-rays

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