Bill Hawkins CEO of Medtronic: How I Made the Toughest Call of My Career
13 October 2009:
Not many CEOs run companies whose products have saved the lives of family members; Bill Hawkins does, and his connection with Medtronic, the $14.6 billion Minneapolis-based medical device maker, runs deep. His father has had eight coronary stents implanted; his father-in-law has both a Medtronic heart valve and a pacemaker; and his uncle received Medtronic deep brain stimulation to control tremors caused by a World War II combat injury. "Medronic's mission — to alleviate pain and to extend life — is something I take very seriously," says Hawkins.
That sense of mission would be tested in October 2007, only two months into his tenure as CEO, when he learned that the company’s Sprint Fidelis lead might have been malfunctioning at an unacceptably high rate.
Leads are ultrathin insulated wires that connect an implanted defibrillator to heart muscles and signal the device to send a life-saving shock to the heart. "Sprint" was the brand name of Medtronic’s line of leads; "Fidelis" was the newest, thinnest model. Fractured leads could subject patients to random shocks, even when their heart was working fine. They could also fail to deliver shocks when they were really needed.
Medtronic had identified a number of deaths in which a lead malfunction might have played a role. That put the freshman CEO in a horrific bind. If he recalled the product, he'd sentence his company to a massive loss of revenue and market share. If he soldiered on, he’d be taking a risk that could one day be fatal to Medtronics' reputation — and possibly to other heart patients. Recalls Hawkins: "It was a rough way to start."
An MBA who got his degree in electrical and biomedical engineering from Duke, Hawkins began his career as a field representative for a small company in North Carolina in 1977, and then steadily made his way up the industry, with stints at Guidant, Johnson & Johnson, and Eli Lilly.
Prior to joining Medtronic, Hawkins was with a startup, Novoste, in which he led the company's development of new stents, devices that are inserted into coronary arteries to keep them open. The advent of what are known as drug-eluting stents, which are coated with pharmaceuticals, brought him to Medtronic in 2002, where he led the international development and launch of Endeavor, drug-eluting stent program. He was promoted to president and COO in 2004; CEO in August 2007; and chairman in 2008.
Hawkins' stewardship has coincided with a rough patch in Medtronic's history. The company's stock has lagged the market, and it has been embarrassed by conflicts-of-interest charges in regard to some of the physicians it pays for consultation. But the Sprint Fidelis gave Hawkins his greatest challenge.
Read more...
Source: BNet