Helping Others, Dow Wilson, CEO of Varian Medical Systems

 

About Dow Wilson

Dow R. Wilson varian has been the Chief Executive Officer and President of Varian Medical Systems, Inc. since September 29, 2012. Mr. Wilson served as the Chief Operating Officer and served as Corporate Executive Vice President of Varian Medical Systems Inc., from October 2011 to September 2012.

He served as a Corporate Executive Vice president of Varian Medical Systems Inc., from August 2005 to October 2011. Mr. Wilson served as the President of Oncology Systems and Corporate Vice President of varian medical systems ceo Inc. from January 10, 2005 to August 2005.

Mr. Wilson joined Varian in 2005, following a 19-year career with General Electric, a diversified industrial corporation, in a variety of senior management positions in both the United States and Europe. While at GE, Mr. Wilson also managed several large, global enterprises, including the CT (Cat Scanner), Xray, and Functional Imaging Businesses.

Prior to joining the Varian Medical Systems, he served as Chief Executive Officer of the Healthcare-Information Technologies business in General Electric Company, or GEC, from 2003 to 2005. He served as Chief Executive Officer of Patient Monitoring Technologies.

Previously, he served as General Manager, Surgical, X-ray and Interventional Businesses and General Manager, Functional Imaging of the Healthcare-Information Technologies business from 2002 to 2003, and was General Manager, Computed Tomography of the Healthcare-Information Technologies business from 2000 to 2002. During the previous 15 years, Mr. Wilson held various management positions within GEC.

He has been a Director of varian ceo Medical Systems, Inc since September 29, 2012. He has been a Director of Saba Software, Inc. since August 28, 2006 and as its Lead Director from September 21, 2011 to March 1, 2013.

Mr. Wilson holds a B.A. degree in English and business from Brigham Young University and an M.B.A. degree from Dartmouth”s Amos Tuck School of Business.

 

Interview Transcript:

Alan
Welcome back. I’m here today with Dow Wilson. Dow is the Chief Executive Officer of Varian Corporation. Corporation is headquartered here in the Silicon Valley. Dow welcome to today’s show.

Dow
Thank you.

Alan
So take me through the background. How did you get to where you are today, you know, from from school and?

Dow
Well, I, you know, like everybody a lot of serendipity and hard work, I guess would be from the highest level. I was born in Pocatello, Idaho, moved to Oregon when I was in high school, went to Brigham Young University for my undergraduate degree work. There, I took a little bit of everything, I thought I wanted to go to medical school. So I took a lot of science classes. But I was also convinced that the opportunity in college was the opportunity to learn how to think so I actually ended up majoring in English literature. It served a mission for my church. And while I was on my mission, I decided I wanted to go to business school. And so still took a lot of science classes to, to kind of keep that medical school option open. In case I wanted to do that. But after we graduated from BYU, and must have been 1982 or so we actually moved to the Bay Area. And I worked for a small consulting firm here in the Bay Area for a year and a half doing healthcare consulting, which was a lot of fun and had a great time. And, and in particular, I noticed my boss had some skills that I didn’t have. And in that accentuated my desire to go back to school for an MBA. So I applied to school and we, we ended up going to the Tuck School at Dartmouth and got an MBA at Dartmouth and graduated in 1985. In 1985, was kind of interesting, I had a number of jobs with investment banks, and I was really leaning towards going into an investment banking career. It’s what I had done during my summer in business school. And I had two neighbors, both of whom were GE alums. And the GE recruiter, came to campus and said that he was a Dartmouth graduate, nobody signed up, they were late in the season, nobody signed up and he said, If you can get anybody to sign up for the GE recruitment, I’ll take them all out to dinner. So of course, we wanted a free dinner, and went, went to went to interview with GE. These were the early days of Jack Welch at GE. The short version is I was incredibly impressed. And the values the people, the performance, culture, the global opportunity, just a whole set of a whole set of things that leveraged what I knew the little I knew about healthcare. And so I went to work in ge, ge medical systems business in Milwaukee in 1985. We were with GE for 20 years, managed a number of businesses, for them through the years, we also had the opportunity to, to live in Europe, we we lived in Europe for six or seven years, with GE and spent 18 years with GE medical systems and two years with with GE plastics. It was a lot of fun, a lot of a lot of growing opportunities. And then in 2004 I was running GE I was CEO of GE health care’s information technology business about had about 10,000 employees and two and a half $3 billion worth of sales. And you know, and I was feeling a little bit itchy. And it was kind of funny that day our oldest daughter was accepted to Stanford, I was playing the car in the driveway and I just heard this little voice say you’re supposed to go to California to and you know, you don’t laugh at these things. They happen to you and you’re pretty happy in your life and why why would such a voice whisper that? But anyway, a short version is the next week I got a set of phone calls. And by the end of that year, I was working for Varian medical systems in in Palo Alto running their oncology business in 2005. And then I was made CEO two years ago, not quite two years ago.

Alan
So What do you enjoy most about running a multinational corporation?

Dow
You know, it’s it’s a lot of fun. We’re a we’re a company that makes a huge difference in public health. Our vision is to save 100,000 lives a year, a global cancer burden is about 12 million 12 million deaths 12 to 14 million deaths a year. It’s a huge public health problem. So you know, one of the things that motivates many of us at Varian is the chance to make a huge difference. And in public health. So we’ve we fight cancer with, with with our, our products, we also diagnose a lot of disease, we have a division that makes x ray detectors and tubes. And we we sort of both diagnose and treat cancer.

Alan
I’ve been sitting here today with Dow Wilson Dallas, a chief executive officer, a Varian Corporation now we need to take a quick break, and we’ll be right back after these messages.

Alan
Welcome back and busier today with Dow Wilson. He’s the Chief Executive Officer at Varian Corporation, headquartered here in Silicon Valley. Dow in the in the positions that you’ve held you at GE running a division with 10,000 employees and varying as some 7000 employees at some point in your career, you were moving into positions that required you to work with large organizational teams and, and strategy and putting things together and how did you approach the leadership of, of getting so many people to work together and getting everyone on the same page?

Dow
Well, I think first of all, the opportunity to lead is fun, you know, you have to you have to enjoy it. It’s not always stress free. But it is, it is a lot of fun. And you know, I view it as a trust, you know, it’s, for me invariant, it’s a trust that shareholders place in me, it’s a trust that customers place in me, it’s a trust that our employees place in me, and it’s a trust in the community also places in you. So, you know, I think CEOs and leaders of any organization have to be careful that these things don’t go to their head. You know, that’s obviously a big temptation. And clearly, there’s a lot in the business press today about some of the problems of, of greed and, and things that, you know, kind of Shakespearean tragedy, so to speak, that happens to leaders as they take over. So I have always felt maybe a little bit instilled by my dad was a pretty good business leader in his own right, that, you know, it’s, you’ve got to, you’ve got to earn that trust every day and return it to those stakeholders who are part of it. And humility is, is a is a is a huge part of that. I think it also has to be fun, you know, has to be fun for you, as a leader has to be fun for you as the as the team, you’ve got to enjoy what you’re doing. And your your team does, too. So at least for me, that’s always kind of been the perspective that that I’ve had about it, and it’s made it it’s made it a lot of fun.

Alan
How do you get teams to work together?

Dow
You know, teams. You know, I think as a leader, one of the things a leader has to do is you got to make sure the goals are clear. And that everybody’s on board with with those goals. Second of all, you’ve got to make sure that the team is as focused as it can be, preferably if they’re co located more and more in this world of global product development. That’s, that’s hard. But you know, do can you achieve virtual colocation in in the way that the goals are? The goals are oriented, I think, you know, very regular. It was funny, I had a boss who said to me a long time ago, very early in my career, he said down touch 50 people a day. And you know, and in this virtual world, you know, anymore, I’m probably touching in some way. 500 people a day but, but just the idea of a physical touch of 50 people a day, you know, to let them know that you care that that you’re you’re on their side that you’re listening to them. They’re issues, that you’re monitoring the progress of their programs, we’re we’re very much an organic growth driven company. You know, we have, we’ve put up almost 20% earnings growth now for 15 years in a row. And we, you know, so we have a track record that we’re very proud of. But it hasn’t been an acquisition driven track record. It’s an organic growth driven kept track record. So product development is very important to us. And, you know, making sure we understand what customers obstacles are so that we can design products that, that fix those obstacles, you know, being aware of what the challenges are in cancer, what some of the other threats are, to our business. You know, we spend a lot of time in front of customers anyway. I mean, these are some of the key things that we do to try to make sure our teams are empowered and moving along.

Alan
I’m visiting here today with Dow Wilson. He’s a chief executive officer of Varian and we’ve been talking about leadership in running multinational corporations. Now we need to take a quick break, and we’ll be right back after these messages.

Alan
Welcome back and visiting here today with Dow Wilson Dow is the Chief Executive Officer of burying corporation headquartered here in Silicon Valley. Dow, what can you tell our audience about your radius surgery suite offerings from Varian?

Dow
You know, radiation therapy has changed a lot. You know, clearly, radiation is one of the gold standards in many cancers and we’ve made huge improvement in in our fight against cancer. For example, in breast and prostate cancer five year survival rates over the last 25 years have gone from 50% to over 90%. So our mission at Varian is really to to make cancer a chronic disease that can be managed over a long period of time, not not a death sentence the way it was 2025 years ago, the radio surgery application is a very exciting one with the biggest killer cancer killer today is lung cancer. Obviously, it’s an environmental cancer. Tobacco use is a big problem in many parts of the world. And more and more air pollution is also a cause of lung cancer, there’s estimates that there will be more lung cancer burden in China in 15 years, and there is total cancer burden in the world today. So radiosurgery is an application of radiation therapy where we give a short and fast intense bursts of radiation to especially a lung tumor to try to eradicate it. And it one of the challenges of lung cancer as we breathe. And because we breathe, the body moves, and so this tumor is moving. So we’ve developed technology that helps ensure that we just deliver the radiation to the tumor while it’s moving and not not damaged the healthy tissue around the tumor. So it’s a very exciting development. And, you know, many leading institutions here in the US and around the world are using this, this technology and we think it’ll make a huge difference to public health.

Alan
Dow earlier you mentioned about variance, track record 20% growth, sustained growth over the last 15 years. That’s phenomenal. What would you attribute that to in your organization’s process to getting people to continue to work together? In unitedly? What’s the secret sauce here?

Dow
You know, I think it starts with a vision, you know, and for us, it’s a very mobilizing vision, that’s, you know, our goal is to save 100,000 new lives 100,000 Lives every year. And you know, that’s something everybody in your organization can rally behind. Everybody wakes up to in the organization, you know, for us, it literally is a matter of life and death. So, so to to talk about lung cancer with your team and you know, what is this motion management tool going to do as we bring it to market you know, it puts real sense of urgency in, in, in the product programs that we develop and his lot of fun. So, so it starts with vision. You know, that’s, that’s, that’s where it starts.

Alan
In the you mentioned also in the sustained growth, you’ve been able to eradicate a lot of the predictability of cancer to where you have like a 90% success rate and in treatment. And how do you how do you attribute that in? IT technology, you work with a lot of other organizations and r&d.

Dow
So we’re not a provider of healthcare, but we are, you know, we sell machines to customers throughout the world. We have very significant research partnerships, you know, from the, from the MD Anderson’s Memorial Sloan Kettering, the top cancer institutions in the US, to community hospitals, to accountable care organizations, to emerging market customers, you know, we really do everything we can to work with our customers to understand their problems, and, and design back from from the most difficult customer problems that are out there to make sure we’re solving their issues.

Alan
I’m going to change the page, turn it young graduate coming out of MBA school, looking at today’s world, what advice would you give them for their career?

Dow
You know, a couple things. You know, one is take some risk. You know, it’s, it’s interesting, when I graduated from business school in 1985, I had a number of offers from investment banks, I thought, that’s what I would go do. And then kind of, as I mentioned, at the top, I got this offer from GE, it was from from probably a career standpoint, it was at the surface, it may seem less risky than an investment banking career. But in point of fact, that was probably the riskiest thing of of the lot. And, you know, it’s just been a terrific, terrific career opportunity. The other thing I’d say is, if you can, it’s not always the case, but if you can try to get have your first job or to be something where you can gain some perspective from the top of the organization and see the strategy overall, you know, there’s a lot of times that we get have to move down in the organization in a marketing or product development or sales role, or, or engineering or whatever. And you’re kind of working on your, your little piece of the business, but it’s great to have opportunities, maybe sometimes you have to volunteer for them. To get some perspective from the top of the organization. The other thing I’d say is, you know, it’s about the globe. And I’d really look for opportunities that are exciting global opportunities, and not be constrained by things that are too local, so to speak. You know, it’s interesting, I was I just made a tour of Northern Africa. The first time in my career I, Morocco, Tunisia, United Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and then in a separate trip, you know, South Africa, Tanzania. And Kenya, and, you know, Africa’s today just in healthcare, it’s 28% of the global health burden. It’s 11% of the global population and 3% of the global healthcare resources. You know, and that’s just our industry and sure that every other industry mirrors that and you know, we’ve been talking about the BRIC countries, but the MBA of today, you know, the future is going to be about these other emerging markets, Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, are the markets of the future. largest city in the world is Lagos, and in Nigeria? And how is how’s that gonna? How are these geographies going to play out over the next decade or two? These are the things I’d be thinking about if I were graduating from business school.

Alan
I’m visiting here today with Dow Wilson. He’s the Chief Executive Officer at Varian. Dow, we need to take a quick break and when we get back, I want to talk about how you balance your life. We’ll be right back after these messages.

Alan
Welcome back and visit here today with Dow Wilson. He’s the Chief Executive Officer at Varian Corporation, headquartered here in Silicon Valley. Dow event talking about the sustained growth record of Varian and you’ve done a tremendous job, you know, taking over the reins and continuing this growth and to tackle the problems and in this world with cancer and the treatment there at Burien. But in addition to this a leading the corporation you have another calling in the community serving as a stake president for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in the Menlo Park area. That’s is no small undertaking. I have to ask you, how do you find balance in life running such a large multinational corporation, and as serving in a heavy community responsibility?

Dow
You know, I heard once somebody say that work life balance is described as when you’re, you’re your wife, your children, your job, your church, and your hobbies are all equally unhappy with you. And sometimes it feels that way with the, with the pressures and stress of life. But but, you know, more seriously, I think, you know, clearly family is at the top of the list for for us. Success isn’t defined as, as, you know, money or position but but as kind of a long term contribution of our family and are we making a difference to our, to our children love each other and respect and sometimes love their parents, and are they making a contribution to the, to the world, we’ve got a daughter who runs a very exciting foundation that is working to call the reset foundation that is working to reform prison and the education environment in prisons, a very exciting educational opportunity where they’re trying to get especially 18 to 25 year old prisoners and education so that they can get their life going in a new way and not be subjected to the 80% recidivism rate that often besets prisoners as they come out. So for us that success is, you know, having our children seeing them happy, seeing them engaged and making a difference in their lives. You know, balance is is never easy. You know, one of the one of the commitments that we try to make, not always easy, but, you know, we try to reserve Sunday, for our for our family, sometimes work impedes on that. But, but it’s really, it’s really a commitment that we try to make as a as a family that that can be our family day. The I think you have to look for you know, anytime you’re in a in a big job, a big career, you have to look for opportunities to kind of create some synergy. And how can you involve your family in some of your work things meant to take them to a trade show or, or to take them to a customer occasionally, and, and to somehow involve your family in your activity, and generate some shared experience and have your family help understand, have your family understand what what you do. And then they have a little bit more empathy to some of the hours that you might have to put in from, from from time to time. So I actually think it’s, it’s, it is it is challenging, there is a lot going on, but it’s a lot of fun.

Alan
You mentioned that throughout that question of the success of a family. When everything’s said and done, you know, how do you want your life to look?

Dow
You know, I think you want to make a difference. You know, you want to have? I don’t know, I don’t know what I’ve never really thought about what would be on my tombstone. But you know, I think that he made a difference would be a pretty good start. Yeah, it’s just, for me, it’s public health, its contribution to my children. It’s a service you provide in a community. It’s, it’s the philanthropy that you’re involved in, whether it’s ours, or financial contribution. These are all significant parts of the difference that you make.

Alan
I’ve been visiting here today with Dow Wilson. He’s the Chief Executive Officer at Varian, thanks for joining us here on America dreams joining us right here on the station next week.

 

 

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This transcript was generated by software and may not accurately reflect exactly what was said.

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