Medical Device Link.

Originally Published MX May/June 2005

COVER STORY

Getting sound advice from experienced leaders was only part of the story during the CEO panel at AdvaMed's recent annual meeting. Other company leaders also had an opportunity to put forward questions, providing an interesting insight into the current concerns of medtech executives. Following are just a few of the questions and responses from the panel's Q&A session.

Ed Ludwig, chairman, president, and CEO, BD (Franklin Lakes, NJ): I'd like to hear from each of the leaders what they do within their organizations to make bad news travel as fast as good news.

Dollens: You don't have to do anything. Bad news travels on its own, quite quickly.

But honestly, Ed, I picked up an idea from you, which is another good example of how companies can make use of AdvaMed. Ed does quarterly calls with all his employees around the world. So every employee has a chance to go live with the CEO.

I started doing that after hearing Ed talk about it, probably about three years ago. It takes three or four nights before you can get the right time zones ready. But if you do this every quarter—in addition to special ones if you have really bad news to convey—you will have a fabulous opportunity for the kind of candid dialogue that needs to happen with employees around any issue that you've got in front of you. And I thank you for the suggestion.

Wareham: My experience is the same. People like to talk about bad news. The greater challenge is making them feel like they're successful, or communicating what's working—and particularly in global companies.

In country A you might be wildly successful with a product, while in country B the sales force can't find their way to sell the damn thing. So the challenge is to try to pass along country A's success, and to get everybody to participate in the good news. I see that as a bigger problem.

Dollens: And the leadership aspect of this is not to say that the bad news doesn't exist or not to be candid about it. The leadership piece is in conveying an understanding of what subpoints B, C, and D are in the background. Leaders have to reassure their organizations that the light they are seeing at the end of the tunnel is not an approaching train. And that's hard to do in a world that suffers from a huge amount of cynicism.

Leaders have to say clearly, ‘here's what the situation is, and here's what we're going to do about it.'

Peter Farrell, chairman and CEO, Resmed (Poway, CA): John, why did Stryker switch from NASDAQ to the NYSE? We did exactly the same thing. We went public on NASDAQ in 1995, and switched to NYSE in 1999. But did it meet your expectations, would you do it again, did it make sense?

Brown: Answering the second question first: would we do it again? Yes. Our view was at the time, and I think still so, that the New York Stock Exchange is the most prestigious exchange in the world. And despite all the criticism that exchange has suffered over the last two or three years, it's still a great exchange. So we felt that our reputation would be better served by being on the New York exchange than by being on NASDAQ.

Peter H. Soderberg, president and CEO, Welch Allyn Inc. (Skaneateles Falls, NY): I don't think you get to be the kind of overwhelmingly successful CEOs that you three have been without being great pickers of talent. I wonder if would transport yourself to an interview for a top manager. What would be the single most important question that you would ask a prospective leader in your respective organizations?

Brown: Two of my favorite questions are ‘What do want me to think of you when you leave the room?' and, ‘If I were to call your current boss, how would they describe you?' It's interesting to see how people react to them. I've never said, ‘I'd like to know what your wife or husband thinks,' but I've been tempted.

Dollens: For me it's really about getting candidates to describe how they are motivated to be successful. We'll work out a lot of the developmental things if the candidate is the type of person who would—I hate to put it in such a blunt formula—if the candidate would rather jump off a bridge than be associated with personal failure. That's a great starting point. And then, of course, I'd like to have examples of where the candidate has done that in the past.

Wareham: I like to explore failures. Because if you haven't had a failure, you're a rare person. We've all had failures. So I like to have candidates describe their failures and how they participate in accountability and responsibility. If someone can describe how they logically failed, and why that's good, and what they learned from it, I find that a great attribute.

Brown: One thing that we like to do is to have group interviews, where it's an all-day session. People come in and start in the morning, and by about three o'clock in the afternoon they're exhausted, but they've probably met eight or 10 people. And then, at the end of the day, you just sit down and go around the table to find out what each person thought of each candidate. It's interesting how you can build a mosaic, and it's usually pretty accurate. Any one of us might have a certain viewpoint or go off on a tangent, but if you put the whole group together it will usually have a pretty good assessment.

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