Tie Your Work to Improving People’s Lives - Omar Ishrak, Former CEO of Medtronic

A strong, sustained sense of purpose is the bedrock of a successful company, with everything else flowing from that. So says Omar Ishrak, one of the most influential figures in medical technology and healthcare in the U.S. and globally. He earned that role in part by being Chairman and CEO of Medtronic, the world's leading medical technology company, from 2011 to 2020, but he was also president and CEO of GE Healthcare Systems earlier in his career. When it comes to having a durable purpose, Medtronic is hard to beat. Founded in the late 1940’s, the company has kept the same mission for more than 60 years – to apply biomedical engineering to alleviate pain, restore health, and extend life. Ishrak considers a major part of his legacy at Medtronic to be successfully stewarding that mission and making it possible for his successors to carry it forward for decades to come. Of course, there were other accomplishments in his tenure including the acquisition of Covidien, a $10 billion global manufacturer of surgical products and supplies, marking the largest medical technology acquisition in the history of the industry. In this thoughtful discussion with host Shiv Gaglani, Ishrak talks about drawing encouragement from how quickly different parts of the healthcare industry came together in response to COVID, and what he hopes the lasting improvements will be from this crisis. He also makes the case for shifting the focus of healthcare at both the industry and individual worker level to successful patient outcomes. “No matter what you do in healthcare, having a line of sight to improving outcomes is important. Tie your work to how people's lives get better.”
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