News & Insights

Rick Randall led the CEO Only forum at Houston Oktoberfest in mid-September.  Our favorite quote: “CEO stands for Chief Entropy Officer – it’s our job to maintain a state of somewhat managed chaos.” 

This tenured medtech leader who just sold Scientia to Medtronic was describing a feeling that resonated with everyone in the room.  He preached the value of partnerships 

Osman Khawar mentioned the “many distractions of a CEO” – detailing all the various business elements competing for leadership attention.

Omid Akhavan raise the specter of the unknown – when utterly unexpected things unfold and how to be prepared for (or handle) the many surprises of navigating a med device company.

In short, all the panel members share the many balls in the air that they must maintain – how some of them drop, how some can be carried by others.  And how at the end of the day, this is a business focused on Purpose – Patients – Providers:  to ‘win’ any leader must understand and articulate

• WHY the business exists (the purpose)

• WHO it is meant to ultimately serve (patients)

• HOW it will serve them (through provider adoption)

  
  

Houston Oktoberfest is the brainchild of Lifeblood’s Giovanni Lauricella, and it serves as a gathering point for med device companies, service providers and funders.  Over two days attendees share wisdom and experience through panels, meetings and fireside chats with experts.

Ascend has supported Lifeblood events in the past.  Our hallmark is to show up in relevant and resonate ways.  For this event, we asked to have 5 min at the conclusion of the CEO only forum.

Borrowing from Samantha McKenna’s philosophy “Show Me You Know Me”, we opted for a visual (visceral?) demonstration….  Having worked with hundreds of CEOs over our tenure, certain commonalities surface.  The challenges are largely similar whether it is a start-up, scale- up or an established, commercialized product seeking a new indication.

These CEOs are always juggling – they MUST keep all the balls in the air to steer clear of Rick’s inevitable “entropy.” 

To illustrate that we “understand your pain”, we brought in an actual juggler, Bruce.  The presentation was brief but impactful.

Bruce served as the med device CEO.

Each ball was labelled: Clinical, Funding, Operations, Regulatory, etc.  (we maxed out at 5 though we know there are more balls to juggle!)

See how we engaged these folks here.

Two minutes.

A real-life illustration showing “we get you – we got you.”

Unexpected.  Unusual.  Apropos.

The result?  Rave reviews.  Rick himself called it the most engaging ‘pitch’ he’d ever seen.  

Ascend continues to elevate how med device companies look at CROs – that “partnership” Rick mentioned is about decreasing the burden of all those balls in the air.  Any partner should decrease your complexity and increase your speed and market momentum.

Relevance resonates.  This was our way to translate decades of experience into a brief, impactful demonstration that led to more outreach than anything we’ve done.

Contact us if you have too many balls in the air, maybe we can help!