The link between building model airplanes as a child and building technology in the life science industry may be tenuous, but it is the route Allen Pierce has taken.
What’s your story?
All my life I’ve loved building things. As a child I built flying model airplanes. I studied electrical engineering at MIT as a teenager / young adult. My love of flying led me to solo in a small airplane at age 18. I learned about leadership in the US Navy nuclear submarine force after college. I eventually learned that building businesses, especially those that make physical products or software, is just as fulfilling. There is nothing as satisfying as seeing the truck leave the back dock filled with instruments your team produced, destined to do great things for human health.
What excites you most about your industry?
The Life Science industry is focused on understanding and improving health. To do this, researchers study proteins and DNA in the body, as they are the key to unlock the secrets of the causes and effects of diseases. Using advanced scientific instruments, scientists can detect subtle differences in proteins and DNA between sick and healthy patients, and these differences give the researcher insights as to what is going wrong in the body that is either the cause of or the result of the disease. With this understanding, researchers can then develop drugs that work on these disease pathways.
What drives you in your career to push beyond what other people consider normal?
Throughout my life I’ve always enjoyed winning and really hated losing. As a child I was an intense competitor in baseball, ice hockey, and in the classroom. I worked hard to finish in the top 5% of my electrical engineering class at MIT. In business I’m most happy when tasked with solving tough problems, including turning around businesses that found themself “in the ditch”, turning slow growth businesses into high growth businesses, and building rapidly growing businesses that are resource constrained.
What have been the most useful skills you have learnt and applied in your journey?
All of the positions I’ve held throughout my career have taught me the importance of good leadership in setting and achieving business objectives. Early in my career I took on far too many important tasks personally. I learned that this severely limited what I could accomplish, and it was a contributor to my own “burnout.” I eventually learned that I needed to do less myself and instead focus on putting the right leaders in place throughout my organization, give them the right goals, objectives, and resources, and get out of their way.
What’s the best piece of advice you ever received?
One of the best pieces of advice I ever received is that, when given a new leadership position, I shouldn’t take a long time to start creating changes for the better in my new organization. Most of the promotions I received throughout my career came as a result of the significant improvement in KPIs my teams delivered in a one-to-two-year period of time after I took on responsibility for the area. Three times in my career this resulted in me being promoted from a manufacturing and supply chain leader to President of an important business.
Who inspires you?
All my life I’ve been an avid reader of history. I’m a big believer of the expression that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. My favorite historical topics relate to military history. I’ve been most inspired by military leaders, especially those of great historical battles, who conceived of daring strategies and who lead from the front of their troops. Those leaders have shown time and time again that a great strategy and inspired leadership can often defeat overwhelming manpower and physical resources.
What have you learnt recently that blew you away?
One of the things I’ve learned recently that has blown me away is the huge productive impact that AI can have on areas of the business we used to do through either trial and error, laborious, time consuming production of business content, or through extensive experimentation and manual data analytics. In many of the jobs I held, especially early in my career, I could have been much more productive if I had access to the AI tools that have become more widely adopted just in the last few years.
If you had your time again, what would you do differently?
If I had my career to do over, I would have found a way to work in the Life Science and Medical Device industries much sooner than I did. I’ve found those industries to be much more personally rewarding and recession-proof than some of the more basic industries I worked in earlier in my career.
How do you unwind?
I long ago learned that having leisure activities that are challenging are just as important to me as having difficult business challenges. I’ve loved music since I was young, and during COVID I started to learn how to play electric guitar and am a huge fan of 80s rock music. I enjoy cardio exercise and recently started working out on a Peloton bike at my local gym. When I’m in the mood for something more relaxing, I also enjoy reading a good detective or spy novel.
What is a major mindset change, belief shift or ‘ah ha’ moment that you’ve experienced in relation to your career?
Early in my career when I started to notice the role politics played in corporate decision-making, I was frequently of the opinion that it was better to remain silent than to risk expressing an opinion that ran counter to what I perceived as the beliefs of those in power. As I gained experience, and I learned that facts “on the ground” are sometimes very different than how they are perceived by those in power, I learned to become confident speaking truth to power, even when my opinion was clearly in the minority.
Everyone in business should read this book:
The book Good to Great by Jim Collins is one of a handful of business books I’ve found that are worth reading. One of the teachings I took from this book is that leaders of companies that make the change from Good to Great don’t start by answering “What” the company should do differently. They start out by getting the Right people on the bus, the Right people in the right seats, and the Wrong people off the bus. Once you have good leaders throughout your organization, you should then turn to the question of what to do differently.
Shameless plug for your business or career:
I was once given P&L responsibility for a very slow growing, old product line within an electronic components business. In its best year this business had experienced growth in the low single digits. I formed a high-performing team of sales, marketing, and R&D leaders which was as motivated to succeed as I was. In our first full year leading this business, competing differently than it had in the past, we grew the top line by sixteen percent, and I was rewarded with the Chairman’s Award at the company leadership conference the next year.
How can people connect with you?
I most enjoy speaking directly with people and can be reached on my mobile at +1 (510) 501-6675. I also will respond to emails at allen_pierce@comcast.net.
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This interview is part of the CallumConnects series.