Medtronic VP of U.S. Commercial for Acute Care & Monitoring Blake Tatum [Photo courtesy of Medtronic]
“Whether you’re staying with the same company or you’re changing companies — because obviously I’ve had a lot of people I’ve worked for and a lot of people that have worked for me that have moved on to other large players or taking over startups or even mid-cap companies — it’s really going to be staying curious and aggressive, becoming a specialist in whatever space you’re in and making sure that you’re adding value,” Tatum said on a recent DeviceTalks Weekly podcast.
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“If my exclusive experience was airway and I’m talking to a cardiac surgeon, I need to make sure that I’m networking and studying hard enough to add value to that conversation with that cardiac surgeon,” he continued. “So whether I jump to another large company that just does cardiac surgery, or I stay here and run a patient monitoring business, you’ve got to be able to understand a given space within medtech and execute strategically. So it’s really the same answer whether you stay or go because I’ve had multiple [Medtronic Executive Committee] leaders, we’ve had two CEO changes, so you’re sort of re-proving yourself whether you stay or go, to be honest.”
Tatum didn’t initially set out to become a medtech executive. His career began in finance but felt he wasn’t making a big enough difference.
In his late 20s he shadowed a neighbor who was a trauma surgeon during residency, and decided to transition into medical device sales. Tatum now leads commercial strategy for Medtronic’s U.S. acute care and patient monitoring business segment.
He spent the first three years of his medtech career as an airway management specialist with Tyco Healthcare (which later became Covidien before being acquired by Medtronic in 2015). As a sales representative, Tatum gained experience in critical care working with physicians inside the operating room.
“It was a great start,” Tatum said. “It gave me exposure to almost every high pressure area of medicine and [I] went from there.”
As Tyco Healthcare spun off from its parent company and rebranded as Covidien, Tatum moved into a management role within Covidien’s respiratory interventions segment.
“At one point I was running a team of 25 that included service technicians and engineers,” Tatum said. “[That] was very new for me.”
When Medtronic acquired Covidien, Tatum became VP of sales for the medtech giant’s respiratory and monitoring solutions division, where he oversaw sales operations throughout the central and western U.S.
In a full circle moment, Tatum was eventually promoted to his current position, overseeing the same technology he began his career with.
“A lot of where I started is back under my leadership,” Tatum said. “… We’re a little higher tech [now] than we were when I started.”
DeviceTalks Editorial Director Tom Salemi contributed to this report.
