What do a dedicated math teacher, an honest college prof and a lousy jump shot have in common? The Intuitive Surgical CEO followed each to find success.
How? Gary Guthart, Intuitive Surgical (ISRG) CEO since January 2010, pulls together seemingly random events from his past, lessons from mentors and disappointments to extract the best outcome from opportunities he gets.
Much of Guthart’s experience traces back to growing up in Sunnyvale, Calif. It’s the heart of Silicon Valley. It was also, he told Investor’s Business Daily, a great place to grow up in the 1960s and ’70s “if you were a math and science kid.”
“Both my parents worked, which was unusual at the time,” Guthart, 54, said. Some kids might have seen busy parents as a negative. But opportunity arose. Guthart’s calculus teacher saw a student with potential and both parents at work. He signed Guthart up for an internship at NASA.
“(My teacher) told me, ‘I want you to go check this out,'” Guthart said. “So I got on my bike (and) went to the research center.” There, he met a second professional mentor, Sandra Hart, “then the only female director of a NASA lab,” he said. She put him to work writing software code that examined how pilots learn.
The job sparked Guthart’s interest in science. He saw the intersection “of how people and technology interact. Not technology for its own sake, but how the two go together,” he said.
The mindset of a future Intuitive Surgical CEO was born.
Bringing A Winning Mindset To Intuitive Surgical
This link between man and machine is the core of Intuitive Surgical. The company is a game changer in the field of robotic surgery. Its da Vinci surgical systems help surgeons perform successful and delicate procedures.
The company also enjoyed enviable success with Guthart at the helm. In the roughly ten years Guthart has been Intuitive Surgical CEO, the stock jumped nearly 500%. That easily outpaces the S&P 500’s 195% rise during that time. And the company’s revenue is on pace to hit $5.1 billion this year, up 380% from when his CEO tenure began. The company is seen earning $1.4 billion in 2020, says S&P Global Market Intelligence. That’s up more than 350% from 2010.
Guthart, who joined Intuitive Surgical in 1996, also served as its president from July 2007 through 2019.
Intuitive Surgical CEO: Focus On Your True Strengths
Guthart earned a Ph.D. in engineering from the California Institute of Technology. His plan? To teach. His thesis advisor urged him to contact a Massachusetts Institute Technology professor about opportunities. He did not get the help he thought.
Guthart recalls the MIT professor telling him: “Gary, I’m not going to (help) because I don’t think you’re going to be a good enough professor. You like to talk to people. That’s not what professors do. You have to write. It’s really a solitary profession.”
Guthart didn’t like what the honest professor told him. “I told myself, I’ll show him, and I kept looking for (teaching opportunities). I got a couple of offers, but finally realized that he was right,” Guthart said. “He did a hard thing (by being honest), and he did me a huge favor.”
Jump At Opportunity No Matter Where They Come From
Guthart, instead, got a job at SRI (formerly the Stanford Research Institute). His jump shot languished, though. Good thing. He and a group of fellow researchers met regularly at lunch for a pickup basketball game. And Guthart sat on the sidelines — again — when Ajit Shah approached him. Shah ran SRI’s robotics lab. He wanted to add to his staff.
Shah took Guthart back to his lab. He asked Guthart to sew a dead rat’s blood vessel using a microscope.
“I was a model builder as a kid, so I was pretty good with my hands, but it was really hard,” Guthart recalled. “Then he sat me down with the SRI prototype. It was substantially easier.” Shah told Guthart his team’s research aimed to put robots in the hands of surgeons. And he asked if Guthart would help.
Guthart transferred to Guthart’s group. Intuitive Surgical’s founders noticed the SRI group’s work. And they licensed the technology when they formed the company. Guthart joined as employee number 11. It seems like a no-brainer now, but, at the time, it was a risk.
“My first response was no. I’d just gotten a promotion. And John Freund (one of three Intuitive Surgical founders) … convinced me to come over. He said, ‘If you want to be a researcher, come and you’ll be a better researcher.’ I sat down with my wife — we had our first child — and she said do it now.”
Ask For Help So You Can Focus
Guthart started writing machine code that allows the elements of the robot to connect smoothly. But he hit the wall. “I just couldn’t work fast enough. There weren’t enough hours in the day,” he said. “I’d come in early, work all day, drive home to have dinner with my wife and drive back to the office.”
Guthart saw opportunity, again. He asked to hire help. The founders agreed, but added, “we have no revenue so hire someone good,” Guthart said. He asked around and colleagues pointed him to Gunter Niemeyer from MIT. Niemeyer was the right choice.
“He could do in a few hours what took me a full day. He was just that much faster and a humbling choice,” Guthart said. “It taught me that being a manager started with hiring really great people and letting them push you out of the way.”
Aim Higher Than You Think Possible
In the late 1960s, surgeons developed minimally invasive surgery (MIS) techniques. Instead of making large holes in the body, MIS required only small ports. The ports allowed surgeons to put in a long lens. They could use tools like scissors to snip and retrieve unwanted tissue.
Guthart and Intuitive Surgical saw an even better way. But they knew slight improvements wouldn’t sell. Advances needed to be radical.
“We made a few key decisions early on. If (a surgeon or hospital) was going to adopt something new, it had to be something much better,” he said.
The company went through a series of breakthrough robotic surgery prototypes. The first was Mona (as in Lisa). And the final was da Vinci. After much testing and success in Europe, the FDA approved da Vinci for laparoscopic surgery in the U.S.
Sign Up Allies
Sales took off when a Swiss urologist working in Frankfurt, Jochen Binder, saw da Vinci could help with prostate surgery. He showed it to peers. Mani Menon, a surgeon at Detroit’s Henry Ford Health System, became an enthusiastic user. Support grew.
Menon watched Guthart build the company. “(Guthart is) used a scientific method to collect data and took notes,” Menon said. These notes prompted Intuitive Surgical to modify instruments to help urologists.
The company still faced a big hurdle. High-ego surgeons resisted change. This was relatively easy to correct, though, because of the ease of robotic surgery and the better outcomes.
Intuitive showed its equipment at surgical gatherings. At one, a young resident exclaimed: “I’ve just spent seven years of my life learning to do (surgery) laparoscopically with sticks and now” — he points to a security guard — “he can do it.”
Be A Salesperson With Facts
Convincing hospitals to buy the equipment proved more difficult. Simply, da Vinci was expensive: $1.5 million at the time. Hospitals have a number of financing options now. But those choices didn’t exist early on.
So Guthart relied on stats. “Hospitals were fixated on the cost of capital equipment. But there are all kinds of costs beyond the equipment: the surgeon, the anesthesiologist and scrub nurse, the overhead of running the hospital,” he said. “What really matters is the total cost of treating the patient.”
Community hospitals signed on first. Smaller facilities were “looking for the efficiencies.” The robotics surgery also provided a marketing tool.
See A Bigger Opportunity
Alan Mendelson, who worked with Intuitive Surgical as legal counsel, credits Guthart for the company’s growth.
“Gary’s ability to transform (Intuitive Surgical) … from a small, single-product company to a large 7,000-plus person organization without losing the culture, soul, and focus on what enabled the company to initially succeed,” he said.
So it seems, in the end, Guthart’s choices were a slam dunk.
Intuitive Surgical CEO Guthart’s Keys
- Rose from a programmer at fledgling Intuitive Surgical to president and then CEO in 2010. Helped the company manage explosive growth the past decade.
- Overcame: Resistance by doctors and hospitals to trust, and pay for, robotic-aided surgery equipment.
- Lesson: Spot and take advantage of opportunity wherever it comes from. Your path to success may not be what you expected.
- “When I came out of school my thought process was to find a great technology.”
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.