

But once I moved to Southern California, I didn’t want to live anywhere else. If you work for Medtronic, at some point along your career trajectory, you need to consider doing a stint in Minneapolis. People are very capable, and you don’t always need to have a centralized planning process, or the most senior people making decisions for the organization to be successful. Seeing the contrast between those two companies helped me realize that it’s not only possible, but important, to accelerate experiences and give opportunities to people much faster and much earlier in their careers. Pfizer, you had to really earn your stripes-you had to have so much more experience before you’d ever be considered for a senior role. While I was there, I saw general managers in their mid-thirties, running a $3 billion franchise. J&J was very different and decentralized environment, and a fantastic experience for me. Pfizer was a highly-centralized culture and I saw the benefits of it, as well as what could hold it back.
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At this stage in my career, I’ve formulated a view of how to grow positive cultures-I know that the right culture not only makes a significant difference in the performance of the people, it affects the business overall, which is an impact I love having. I’ve worked in big companies with a variety of environments. I love HR because you have an opportunity to look at organizations systemically and create the conditions necessary to help people be successful. It was an explosive period of growth for the company-we almost quadrupled revenue to about $2.3 billion when I left.
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Through the organizational development we did, and the recruiting that followed, I helped build talent capabilities that transformed them from a hardware-only organization into a software and services company.

The headquarters for their diabetes group was a 500,000 square foot facility in Northridge, and at the time, the group was doing $600 million/year in sales. I was there for two years building out their management team, and when we had them recruited, trained, and growing-which was an incredible experience-I was ready to come back home.Īfter J&J, I worked for Medtronic for 12 years, running human resources for their diabetes franchise. I was then recruited by Johnson & Johnson for an international position, helping to commercialize a research and development acquisition they had made in Israel. We had 12,000 people in sales at the peak, with 15 different drugs doing about $1 billion each at the time. I went to work for Pfizer when it was doing about $30 billion in US sales, and I had responsibility for growing the US sales force. Then I had a recruiter call me and say, “Why don’t you think about getting into healthcare?”…and that was all it took. My undergrad ended up being in HR management and organizational development, and after graduation, I spent about ten years in the automotive industry in the human resource department.

While I was a student, I interned with a group of engineers through the GM’s internship program, and I met a woman from Columbia’s organizational development program who told me, “I think you’re enrolled in the wrong school.” She gave me a development program form showing me how my key strengths could play into the field of human resources and management science. Not surprisingly, my high school counselors tried to steer me towards engineering school, which I thought I might like because of my interest in mechanics and cars. I look at cars as freedom, and I learned at an early age how to work on them, so I thought I’d end up in the auto industry. Where I grew up influenced what I thought I’d want to do and the industry I’d be in. I was born in South Carolina, but raised in Detroit. She shares the lessons she’s learned as a globe-trotting executive for large companies, and what lessons are applicable to a startup transitioning to a “real” company. She was hired to help position the company for scale, including ensuring that the culture could continue to be a differentiator for the organization. Celeste talks about her past experiences, her earlier career, and how she joined XO towards the end of 2017. This interview will introduce Crossover’s Chief People Officer Celeste Ortiz.
