Charles Strom
The Operator
Execution, delivery and performance, gets the hard thing done.
Charles Strom is The Operator because his career rests on the unglamorous infrastructure of scale: throughput, accuracy, cost, and quality control systems honed across hundreds of thousands of diagnostic tests at Quest. His candor about Liquid Diagnostics, acknowledging a game-changing technology that has not yet changed the game, is the tell. Operators keep an unsentimental grip on execution reality, choosing process discipline over promotional instinct even when the story would sell itself.
“I made it my business to try to find other ways of doing this testing that would be high throughput, extremely high accuracy, and cost efficient. Because Quest Diagnostics was a business.”
“I believe I have a game changing technology, but the chances of it actually changing the game are pretty small. I felt if I built a better mouse trap the world would come to my door. But that has not happened.”
“I learned about quality assurance, quality control, how to do hundreds of thousands of tests in an accurate way, and how you need to have methods in place to make sure that nothing has gone wrong.”
Masters in Business: “Charles Strom on the Diagnostics Industry”
LISTEN AT THE SOURCE ↗THE RECORD IS CHECKABLE