May 12, 2020
As Beckman Coulter works to bring a new COVID-19 serology test to market, President Julie Sawyer Montgomery shares what it’s like to lead the company during a time of incredible exposure, the collaboration required for increasingly faster product launches, and how a risk-taking culture inspires learning, innovation, and motivated teams.
No day is typical, which is part of what I really appreciate about my role—it keeps things interesting. On any given day, I might be working with customers, or with R&D, Operations, Sales, or Marketing. Every part of the company shares a common language in Danaher Business System, which is a big advantage; I know I’ll always be focusing on the most important metrics or using problem-solving tools to understand the cause of any gaps in performance. We even use DBS with our customers to help make their labs more efficient, and we’ve seen some remarkable results in terms of productivity, cost reduction, and the satisfaction of their team members.
Usually, I do a lot of travel, meeting at our locations around the world. But of course, much of the team has been working from home since the COVID-19 outbreak hit—and I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how effectively we’ve transitioned to being more remote. Because we’re a complex, global team, it was never typical to have everyone in the same room for a meeting, anyway. If anything, I think the shift has made us feel closer. We’re having conversations we probably wouldn’t have before; we’re laughing together when people’s kids and pets interrupt; we’re dressing more casually than we did in the office. Everyone’s a little more willing to be vulnerable.
Priority number one is getting a new COVID-19 serology test to market. Everyone’s got a part to play in that—the Development and Operations teams are front-and-center right now, and they’ve had a number of breakthroughs, but as we launch, thousands of people on other teams will be getting involved. It’s critical that we maximize the sensitivity and specificity of these tests to avoid false results. Or serology test will be an important tool in the fight against COVID-19 and offer needed improvements over some of the inferior technologies currently on the market. And because Beckman Coulter is such a large player in this space, we’re in a unique position in terms of scale, as well. We have a very large base of installed instruments in labs around the world, of all different sizes—and many of those instruments are connected to automation systems that make them even more productive. We’re planning to launch with more than 30 million tests per month, which is a production volume most organizations can’t match.
It’s not often in your career that what you’re working on is being discussed every day in the White House, and we feel a sense of urgency—we have teams going 24/7. But even beyond COVID-19, so much of what we do has a huge impact on patient health, and we see that as a great privilege. When we bring a high-sensitivity troponin test to market, for example, more women will be properly diagnosed for heart attacks. It’s inspiring to know that what we’re working on truly matters.
We have a very ambitious launch cadence for new products—it’s a radical step up from the Beckman Coulter of even five years ago in terms of not only development, but sales, marketing, service, and applications. One of the keys for us has been a DBS tool called Policy Deployment, which helps us focus on the areas where true breakthrough thinking is required; it’s our framework for problem solving, setting stretch goals, and solving underlying issues that will allow us to attain those goals. With our new procalcitonin marker, for example, which is used to diagnose sepsis, we were able to use Policy Deployment to cut the time to market in half. And with our COVID-19 serology test, we’ve already been able to dramatically reduce the time required to develop an APF file—the instructions that tell an instrument how to run a test—from 55 days down to 5.
I think at its heart, Danaher is a learning culture. We talk about how to “try-storm” new ideas, how to fail fast. When people feel comfortable taking those kinds of measured risks, it’s very conducive to innovation. We try to set the example as a leadership team—every month, we discuss our top initiatives with the teams leading them to review their results and brainstorm how we can remove roadblocks. Anyone who’s been in the room for those discussions knows we don’t have all the answers! We’ll never accomplish our goals if we limit ourselves to what leadership knows.
Instead, we try to keep things flat, apolitical, and transparent, and we encourage people at all levels and in all areas to share their views. The APF file innovation is a good example—that didn’t come from the top; it happened because the team shared about every opportunity they saw, all along the timeline—and because they thought beyond the limits of our current processes. That level of efficiency never would have been possible if we’d simply refined what we’d always done.
As a leader, it’s my job to challenge the organization to achieve stretch goals, and then to remove barriers. Setting goals is a collaborative process, because we want them to be accomplishable, but still ambitious enough to spark innovation and creativity. To strike that balance, we need to understand what teams are facing at the ground level. We’ve seen a double-digit increase in U.S. customer retention over the past few years, for example—and that started with a model in one small area that gave us a sense of what was possible.
As a mentor, I have the privilege of building more personal relationships—and it’s very much a two-way conversation. My mentees and I talk about their challenges and barriers to progress, and sometimes, I’ll reflect on similar experiences I’ve had in my career, to help us think through their options together.
I love feeling the energy of collaboration—where people can trust each other and pass the ball seamlessly—and we’re seeing so much of that right now. Certainly, COVID-19 means we’ll have a different year than we’d thought, and we’re closely watching factors like diagnostic testing volumes. But many of our key initiatives and strategies are moving forward just as they were before. We haven’t slowed down our innovation or product development efforts at all. And above all, I’m immensely proud of our people—their dedication, their expertise. They are leading an incredibly fast, incredibly high-quality effort right now, and their passion has been amazing to see.