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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 medica-tion 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 calcu-late 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 cli-ent we connect to our tool, so it’s a win-win.”

The LessonsFrom his tumultuous startup ride, Bronfein offers the fol-

lowing 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 ulti-mately 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 enam-ored with technology to view it objectively. “I remind people that vision without execution is a dream, but vision with exe-cution 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

When Keith Williams took the helm of Northbrook, Illinois-based Underwriters Lab-oratories 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 car-rying considerable debt, losing market share to competitors and grappling with low employee morale. “It was a real fixer-upper,” recounts Wil-liams, 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 cor-porate culture. As the largest, independent, testing laboratory in the U.S. and one of only a hand-ful approved for such testing by the U.S. federal agency Occupational Safety and Health Admin-istration (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 ser-vices, leadership roles for people whose sole mis-sion was to harmonize and “uniformize” the work we do around the world,” he explains. “Second, we took away the local measurements driving man-agement incentive plans and we said, ‘Everyone is going to get paid on the same metrics; so if you

Leading a Cultural Revolution

Underwriters Laboratories’ Keith WilliamsZ