May June 2012

Meanwhile, Bronfein is on to the next project—a software product for nurses called Connexit that Remedi launched in January. It is an electronic, data-interchange system that enables nurses to manage medical records and order medication electronically, cutting down on administrative processes and paperwork. Remedi, which charges facilities per patient bed for the service, estimates the system can save a 100-bed facility approximately 80 nursing hours a month. “We calculate that after paying us the $6 fee per bed the average facility will save $36,000 a year in nursing-related costs,” says Bronfein.

“And we eliminate one technician in our pharmacy for every client we connect to our tool, so it’s a win-win.”

Leading a Cultural Revolution

The Lessons

From his tumultuous startup ride, Bronfein offers the following takeaways: Don’t Bank on a Repeat Experience. Bronfein went into Remedi confident of repeating the success of his first venture, a pharmaceutical network called NeighborCare that was ultimately sold to a rival for $1.8 billion. “I thought I knew what I was doing, but I was a babe in the woods,” he says. “It was a great lesson in humility.” One of the biggest stumbling points was something called “failure modes and effects analysis”—a method of predicting the likelihood that a piece of equipment will fail in use. “In a well-built machine, you might have two or three points of failure. The one we initially built had 222,” says Bronfein, who advises CEOs spearheading new technology to “prototype everything.” The company went back to the drawing board and Bronfein came away with this wisdom: “Just because you’ve built one great company doesn’t mean you can build another, even if it’s in the same industry.”

Bulletproof Your Vision. To create a disruptive technology, you need a clear vision of the problem you intend to solve and hard data on the feasibility of that vision. “Make sure you’re not trying to make that data fit your assumption—that the data is empirically supportive of what you want to do and that the market opportunity you are driving toward is real,” says Bronfein, who notes that it’s all too easy to become too enamored with technology to view it objectively. “I remind people that vision without execution is a dream, but vision with execution is a market.”

Plan to be Surprised. “The path to real innovation is very circuitous,” adds Bronfein. “As sophisticated as you may feel your engineers to be, you are in uncharted waters. You will need to be able to adjust to a changing environment very quickly—and that usually takes both time and money. Double or triple your expectation of what it will cost or how long it will take.” —Jennifer Pellet

Z

Underwriters Laboratories’ Keith Williams

When Keith Williams took the helm of Northbrook, Illinois-based Underwriters Laboratories in 2005 the 118-year-old company was floundering. The company’s UL Mark—the symbol it places on products that pass the rigorous tests it has developed to ensure consumer and employee safety—still commanded respect, but UL was carrying considerable debt, losing market share to competitors and grappling with low employee morale. “It was a real fixer-upper,” recounts Williams, 60, who spent 23 years at GE and served as senior vice president and chief quality officer as well as a divisional president at Medtronic before joining UL. “For me, those are the really fun jobs. I like to fix things.”

Williams began his repair effort with UL’s corporate culture. As the largest, independent, testing laboratory in the U.S. and one of only a handful approved for such testing by the U.S. federal agency Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), UL had become bureaucratic and siloed. Regional divisions within the company were actually undercutting one another to vie for business, says Williams, who quickly made five moves to address the issue.

Global Incentives. “First, we created a global head of engineering and a global head of field services, leadership roles for people whose sole mission was to harmonize and “uniformize” the work we do around the world,” he explains. “Second, we took away the local measurements driving management incentive plans and we said, ‘Everyone is going to get paid on the same metrics; so if you

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