This J&J exec sold Tylenol and Listerine. Now she runs its $27 billion medtech business

– Powerful pivot. Ashley McEvoy has worked for Johnson & Johnson for 27 years. In the grand scheme of J&J’s 135-year existence, that’s not that long. But for an executive, an almost three-decade commitment to the same company says something.

McEvoy spent the first half of her J&J career in consumer health, overseeing products and brands like Tylenol, Zyrtec, and Listerine. Eventually, though, she felt like she’d learned everything she could about over-the-counter products. “I was bored,” she says.

When J&J bought Pfizer’s consumer health business for $16.6 billion in 2006, its largest-ever purchase at the time, she was the only J&Jer to get promoted into the new business alongside several execs from Pfizer. That experience was formative. “It teaches you to listen to your inner voice to stand up to people who maybe don’t have the same perspective of the future of the business,” she says.

Courtesy of Johnson & Johnson

So when her next major opportunity came along, with even more of a learning curve, she felt prepared. In 2009, she became president of Ethicon, J&J’s medical device business. Today, McEvoy is EVP and worldwide chairman for medtech, a $27 billion business with 60,000 staffers, about half of J&J’s employee base. J&J medtech equipment is used in operating rooms for 75 million procedures each year, including for robotics and digital surgeries. “I had to go and learn the science,” she says.

Pulling off that kind of pivot—and earning the respect of doctors and longtime medtech experts after coming in from the consumer side—required a great degree of humility, McEvoy says. Her degree wasn’t even in health; she had been a communications and business major. “Surgeons are amazing—they just want to teach,” she says.

While it was an intimidating to make that kind of transition, McEvoy advises other people to take the leap when presented with similar opportunities. “I’m so grateful I said yes, because I didn’t grow up carrying a bag. I don’t have letters after my name with all these PhDs and MDs. I really had to learn from our people,” she says.

Five years into her worldwide chairman role, McEvoy has taken the business from 1.5% growth to 8% growth. “I’ve tended to go to areas that are not working well, breathing new life into businesses that might be older businesses and have lost their way a little bit and need to be reoriented,” she says. So is she feeling antsy again? McEvoy says she would “absolutely” be interested in a CEO job.

Emma Hinchliffe
[email protected]
@_emmahinchliffe

The Broadsheet is Coins2Day’s newsletter for and about the world’s most powerful women. Today’s edition was curated by Joseph Abrams. Subscribe here.

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PARTING WORDS

"You know yourself already a lot, and don’t ever forget who you are."

—Melinda French Gates' advice to her daughter, Phoebe Gates, on her 21st birthday