C OVE R STORY
GROWTH ENGINE Kevin Lobo nearly doubled Stryker’s revenue with a high-revving deal machine that shows no signs of slowing. He takes us under the hood.
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ince Kevin Lobo became CEO of medical device company Stryker in 2012, revenues have grown from $8 billion to over $15 billion—a phenomenal track record. Ask him how he’s done it—as we did at our recent Healthcare CEO Summit—and the answer is pretty simple: deals, each and every one made with an intense focus on customers. In the medtech industry in which Kalamazoo, Michigan-based Stryker plays, he says, innovation “can only be derived if you’re very, very closely collaborating with customers… We don’t want to invent anything without iteration with our clinical customers.” For Lobo, that translates to a decentralized structure that that pushes power and acquisition strategizing down through the organization and as close to the customer as possible. “We spend 6.5 percent of our revenue on R&D but don’t have any central R&D at all,” he says. “And even though we do a lot of deals, we only have two people in corporate business development. All the other business development people—28 people—sit in each of our divisions.” The result? Stryker excels at identifying emerging opportunities across a broad spectrum of medtech categories. And Lobo has built
22 / CHIEFEXECUTIVE.NET / MARCH/APRIL 2020
ANGELO MERENDINO
INTERVIEW BY DAN BIGMAN
