New Book from AAPL Challenges the "Wait Your Turn" Culture in Medicine

WASHINGTON, DC – September 25, 2026 — The American Association for Physician Leadership (AAPL) announces the publication of Quiet Leadership in Medicine: An Early-Career Clinician’s Guide to Building Programs That Change Care, by Kardie Tobb, DO, MS, CPE, FACC, FASPC, FACOI. The book arrives at a pivotal moment in healthcare, when health systems are urgently seeking clinicians who can not only deliver exceptional care but also build the programs and structures that make better care possible for everyone.

Quiet Leadership in Medicine is the first guide of its kind: a practical, actionable framework written explicitly for clinicians at the beginning of their careers, not the middle. It bridges the longstanding gap between clinical training, which prepares physicians to treat patients, and organizational leadership, which requires a different and largely untaught set of skills.

“There is an entire generation of clinicians who see exactly what needs to change in their institutions and have no idea how to make it happen,” Tobb says. “This book is for them. You do not need a title or a decade of seniority to build something meaningful. You need a framework, the right relationships, and the willingness to start.”

Dr. Tobb writes with hard-won authority. Within the first five years of her attending career, she founded the Cone Health Cardio-Obstetrics Clinic — now a highly rated program providing preconception cardiovascular counseling, pregnancy cardiac care, and postpartum follow-up — and took on system-wide leadership of Cone Health’s Center for Health Equity. She leads teams that have secured competitive grants from the NC Department of Health and Human Services, the NC Chapter of the American College of Cardiology, and the CDC Paul Coverdell National Acute Stroke Program, and has published more than 20 peer-reviewed articles in leading journals, including the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

In Quiet Leadership in Medicine, Dr. Tobb distills those experiences into a framework any clinician can apply, regardless of specialty, title, or institution. The book covers the mechanics of building stakeholder coalitions, the art of framing clinical initiatives for administrative audiences, the discipline of sustaining programs after launch, and the often-overlooked power of everyday professional moments — a well-timed question on rounds, a follow-up email, a conversation in a hallway — as the raw material of organizational change.

The book is explicitly inclusive in its scope. While written from the perspective of a physician, its frameworks apply to nurses, advanced practice providers, pharmacists, and allied health professionals — any clinician who wants to move from delivering care to designing it.

From the manuscript reviews: “Dr. Tobb represents exactly the kind of physician leader our field needs — clinically excellent, deeply committed to equity, and determined to build systems worthy of the patients she serves. This book makes her approach teachable and transferable. That is an enormous gift to the next generation.”