Taking a Start-up’s Approach to an Industry Giant

You’ve gone from well-established industry giants, to venture capital-funded start-ups such as AcuFocus, to Carl Zeiss Meditec (CZM). Why did you move back to a bigger company, and how will this change your approach?

I’ve always admired Zeiss, and I always want to stay in this industry – I know it, I love it, it's in my blood, and it’s always been very good to me and my family. It’s not the size of the company that’s important to me; it’s the opportunities it presents.

When I was with Allergan, and then we created AMO, that was an opportunity to create a giant in our space, which I believe we got pretty close to doing – we did some pretty great things. And then of course, I went on to Abbott, and then on to AcuFocus and Neurotech. I took those challenges on, and had some fun too. And I’ll continue with Neurotech, RPS, OCTANe and Iantech; it’s just AcuFocus I’m leaving.

Someone asked me recently, “Does size matter when taking over a company?” I would say the fundamentals are pretty much the same – do you have great people, do you have great products, and do the customers understand what you want to accomplish? Those are the key questions. It doesn’t matter if your company is worth 100 dollars, 100 million or even 100 billion.

Your role is global – you’re Global President Ophthalmic Devices, but you also have oversight of US sales and operations – what will your approach be?

We want to make sure that across the globe, we take full advantage of our broad product portfolio. We need to take our great products from overseas and bring them to the US. In ophthalmology, will include our broad IOL portfolio and our SMILE procedure. Our goal is to have them approved here, and to expand our presence in the US with ophthalmologists, as well as with optometrists.

Ophthalmology is a global business, and with everyone communicating more than ever, the lines between countries have become more blurred, so we need to make sure we grow our US market at the same rate as we do elsewhere. I’m looking forward to helping with that challenge.

What about customer service?

I think it’s important to remember that the practitioners do not care how your company is organized. We sometimes take over companies and become insular, and start thinking too much about our own organization. The customer just wants to ensure he or she is getting the highest quality products with the best service, and that we don’t take up too much of their time. That’s the best approach.

When you have multiple product lines, that is an advantage, but it can also be a disadvantage if your customers have too many points of contact with the company, and become overwhelmed, which is something else to be aware of.

You’ve said that the big areas of unmet need are retina, glaucoma, dry eye disease, and presbyopia. How will Zeiss cover these bases, and what will the balance look like?

These are unmet needs for patients, which means doctors need technologies and services to address them. We will continue to work in traditional areas like cataract, but also touch on these other areas – primarily in our retina and glaucoma diagnostic product lines.

I think this gives us a real competitive advantage. Today, if you talk to doctors, they’ll tell you they need a better understanding of disease mechanisms – and that means better diagnostics. And as a leader in diagnostics, we want to expand our products, so we’re looking at our R&D portfolio and at how we might fill in the potential gaps. I also believe that you should avoid the “not invented here” syndrome. There are great minds and great technologies out there that we will look to acquire to supplement the great technologies we have.

One of the biggest challenges for ophthalmology is that the baby boomer generation is aging, and not enough doctors are being trained. You’ve spoken before about improving efficiency in workflow to help combat this – what are the next steps?

We are seeing the consolidation of practices on a global basis, but we are not seeing it at the same rate of graduating ophthalmologists and optometrists, and this is a critical issue. As a company, it requires us to develop technology that will help ophthalmologists and optometrists to be more efficient. If we can help create a diagnostic instrument that not only the doctor, but perhaps the technician or physician’s assistant can use, that means that when the practitioner walks in, the situation is already identified, and they can use their expertise and experience to treat it. Utilizing the whole office in this way could allow the practitioner to move from seeing 30 people to perhaps 40 people in a day, without costing any more time.

There is a lot of disconnect between community healthcare and hospital systems – for example, things can get lost and you can end up with patients taking smartphone photos of their OCT scans to show to their consultants. Is there a bigger picture of healthcare integration, and is this something Zeiss is getting involved in?

We will, and we are. Most ophthalmology practices today have opticians, technicians, and they either employ or work with an optometrist. And we have optometry and ophthalmology lines, so we can work with the team in a broader way. Another thing we’re looking at is ensuring all of our equipment “talks” to each other. So the phaco instrument can talk to the diagnostic system, and the diagnostic can talk to the laser. We also have a great (but currently underutilized) system called FORUM; an eye care data management system that will let the doctor know, when using our instruments, the previous information they have on the patient.

What are the best and worst things about working with Zeiss?

Well, before I joined the company, they were the competition – and I always make sure I know the competition as well as I know my own company. If you don’t, they might surprise you. So I’ve spent time getting to know (and admire) Zeiss as a competitor. I’ve only been here two weeks, but I’ve found that the company is much more international than its image may suggest. It should, of course, be proud of its 170-year history, and its German heritage – it’s good to be proud of where we came from. But right now I’m sitting in an office in California, and looking at this office, you wouldn’t be able to guess where the company is based. In a couple of weeks I’ll be in Germany, and there the facilities are quite different, so this really is a multicultural company.

Being candid, an area we need to focus on is speed. We have to get faster at meeting customer needs without jeopardizing quality. We need to take this large entity and be as nimble as smaller companies. I think the “fail fast” syndrome I’ve become used to at smaller companies could be a benefit in my new position – when you fail fast, you learn, you move on, and you don’t keep labouring over something that doesn’t work. I want to create that mentality here, so we can move to market with more speed.