Today the Wall Street Journal profiled Harvard Medical School’s Jeffrey Flier and his views on Twitter. It’s worth a read and it’s brief. Most importantly, it can and should be shared with medical educators as an emerging standard.

If you can overlook a degree of naiveté (you have no control over who your followers will be), the piece reflects the basic value proposition of public thinking for leadership. As important, he raises the danger of neutralizing public dialog in order to avoid conflict.

In medical education, we must begin to see public thinking as the rule rather than the exception. If you’re not part of the broader discourse, you are in absentia. Capacity for leadership and promotion should involve careful consideration of digital footprint and capacity to shape public dialog.

The next generation of medical leaders will think and trade in the currency of ideas. If medical educators aren’t involved, how are we to shape the next generation?

For how you or your physicians can begin to leverage their public voices, download and read The Public Physician available for free on iTunes.