Jeffrey Wadsworth does not fear change. He relishes the opportunity to tackle a new challenge and veer from the status quo. It’s a trait that serves him well as president and CEO of Battelle Memorial Institute, where his job seems to be in a constant state of evolution.
“If it’s the sort of thing you’d do anyway and you’re passionate about it, then learning becomes easy,” he says. “You absorb the information because it’s something that is intrinsically interesting to you. I find everything we do very interesting so I don’t think of it as a burden. I think of it as just exciting.”
Battelle is the world’s largest nonprofit research and development organization and has come up with a number of innovations in medical technology, telecommunications, environmental waste treatment, homeland security and transportation.
The complexity of the 20,400-employee company is something that invigorates Wadsworth. But it does create a challenge when he has to explain what the company does to inquisitive outsiders.
“One of the surprises for me was the degree to which the community is interested in Battelle,” Wadsworth says. “When I went around and met with the other CEOs, the message I got was everyone likes Battelle, but they don’t know why. They have very good feelings about Battelle, but they don’t actually know what we do or quite how we do it.”
The good news for Wadsworth is that he loves talking about Battelle almost as much as he enjoys being the company’s CEO. It’s a lot easier to fulfill that responsibility as the face of your organization when you love what you do.
“A lot of our people talk about what Battelle does,” Wadsworth says. “But at the end of the day, the CEO is the one. You can open doors as a CEO and president that other people can’t open, just by the nature of the job. It’s not the person; it’s the nature of the job.
“People have expectations of meeting with leaders of an organization. So over time, I gather more clues and signals about where the world is going because I’m able to have those opportunities. In a sense, it’s my job to gather all of that and articulate it into a vision for Battelle and describe what it is that we do.”
Wadsworth is constantly doing presentations at universities and conferences on such key world issues as energy, national security, health and life science. Every little bit helps in getting the word out.
“I’m constantly communicating to various groups about what we do,” he says. “It goes all the way from the sound bite to the detailed PowerPoint presentation. I try to explain what principles we operate by at all of the above venues.”
So you might ask the question, if Wadsworth is spending so much time talking to outsiders, how does he find time to keep his own employees in touch with what’s happening at Battelle? Here are some of the ways Wadsworth stays tuned in with his own people to help keep Battelle on top of its game.
