In October 2015, Chris Simon had a familiar assignment: help a company work out what to do next. He was the McKinsey partner leading a strategy review for Haemonetics. By the following May, he had accepted a rather consequential change to the engagement. He would become the company’s president and chief executive officer.
There is a pleasing inconvenience in this sequence. The person who helped devise the plan would be there when it encountered budgets, hiring decisions and the calendar. Advice has an elegant life on paper. Running a company introduces it to people who have other things to do on a Monday morning.
Simon started on May 16, 2016, succeeding interim chief executive Ronald Gelbman. He had worked with management and the board on the strategy he was now expected to advance. Ten years later, that change of seats remains the most revealing turn in his career: the adviser stayed for the consequences.
A different sort of training ground
Before the consulting partnership came military service. Simon served as a U.S. Army infantry officer in Korea and with the 1st Ranger Battalion. He subsequently worked in commercial and operating roles at Baxter. His education includes an economics degree from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
The sequence matters because Simon has himself connected his military experience to his subsequent work. In 2024, he described discipline, structure and leadership training as foundations for his professional life. That is his account of the connection. It gives the early military chapter a place in the story without turning every later business decision into a battlefield metaphor.
His move into consulting came in 1993. Over the ensuing years at McKinsey, he rose to senior partner and led its Global Medical Products Practice. By the time Haemonetics approached its change of leadership, he brought both a long industry apprenticeship and direct familiarity with the particular company. The appointment combined an outsider’s career with an unusually close view of the assignment.
May was for the job. September was for the board.
Simon’s arrival involved two separate appointments. He became chief executive in May 2016. On September 12, the Haemonetics board elected him a director, with a term extending to the following annual meeting. The distinction is small enough to disappear in a shortened biography and useful enough to preserve.
The board appointment carried no additional compensation. He would serve on no board committees because of his employment relationship with the company. These are dry details, but they locate him precisely: he was the executive running the business, now also taking a seat among the directors responsible for its oversight.
The original appointment announcement had already made the continuity explicit. Simon was taking forward a strategic plan developed with the existing leadership and board. There was no need to invent a grand entrance. His unusual advantage was that he had already spent time examining the company before being asked to lead it.
The first hire tells a story
A chief executive’s first hire is a useful place to look for priorities. Simon’s was William P. Burke, who became CFO in August 2016. Burke brought more than two decades of finance and business leadership experience, including roles at Medtronic, Covidien and Tyco.
When Burke’s retirement was announced in November 2021, Simon called him the “co-architect of our turnaround.” The choice of word is worth keeping. Simon had helped design the original strategy; he was now giving another executive a share of the architectural credit for what followed.
The succession arrangements were equally practical. Burke would remain while the company searched for a replacement, then work with the next finance chief through June 2022. A departure became an overlapping handover. Business profiles tend to prefer arrivals, but this exit offers its own view of Simon’s working relationships: credit for the outgoing colleague, time for the incoming one, and continuity for the organization between them.
“Co-architect of our turnaround.”
Chris Simon on William Burke, 2021
Making room in the budget
By fiscal 2019, Haemonetics had reached a $40 million run-rate savings target under its Complexity Reduction Initiative. The company described the savings as freeing resources for investment in growth. It had also expanded manufacturing capacity for several components by 50 percent.
These were company results during Simon’s tenure, with work distributed across the organization. They supply some financial substance to the turnaround language. Reducing complexity had a stated purpose beyond producing a smaller expense line: it was intended to create room for investment.
The same year brought a new five-year credit facility and the completion of a $260 million share repurchase program. That combination puts several executive responsibilities on the table at once: capacity, borrowing flexibility, investment and capital returned through repurchases. A strategy has to accommodate all of them.
An address becomes an operating decision
In December 2019, Haemonetics opened its downtown Boston headquarters. The move from Braintree brought corporate and commercial employees together with research and development teams. It occupied more than 62,000 square feet across four floors, near South Station.
Simon described the relocation as a step in the company’s transformation. The practical details make that claim more interesting than the usual ribbon-cutting language. The office combined dedicated laboratory space with personal workstations and different places to collaborate. Public transport was nearby. The building held LEED Gold and Energy Star certifications.
There was also cold brew on tap. Even a corporate transformation must occasionally concern itself with what happens before the first meeting.
The larger point was proximity: to colleagues, to Boston’s technology and higher education communities, and to a city where the company wanted to recruit and retain talent. The move gave a physical address to an organizational ambition. A floor plan is one way a management team reveals who it thinks should spend more time talking to whom.
Rearranging the people who do the work
By March 2025, Simon was changing the executive structure again. Haemonetics announced that Frank Chan would join as executive vice president and chief operating officer on April 7. Roy Galvin became executive vice president and chief commercial officer immediately.
Chan’s remit joined research and development, regulatory affairs, global manufacturing and supply chain operations. Galvin’s expanded role put commercialization across the company’s portfolio under one executive. Both appointments made the lines of responsibility easier to describe: one leader for the operating system, another for the commercial effort.
An organization chart can seem a strangely modest instrument for a chief executive with a strategy background. Yet it determines who can resolve a disagreement, where competing demands meet and whose budget must support a decision. The 2025 changes placed several connected activities under shared leadership.
That is a concrete expression of the task Simon accepted in 2016. A strategic plan has to acquire reporting lines and decision rights. Otherwise, its most enthusiastic reader may remain the person who commissioned it.
The company beyond his own company
Simon’s work also extends into other boardrooms. Sotera Health appointed him an independent director on August 1, 2024, assigning him to its Leadership Development and Compensation Committee. The appointment added an oversight role elsewhere to his executive responsibilities at Haemonetics.
There is a useful change of perspective built into that arrangement. At his own company, Simon is accountable for operating decisions. As an independent director at another, he helps oversee leadership rather than running its daily work. The same person occupies different positions in the chain of responsibility.
He has also served on AdvaMed’s board and chaired its CEO Roundtable from 2022 before handing the chair to Devdatt Kurdikar. In his public message about the handover, Simon emphasized the group’s collegial character and thanked the people involved. The language was warmer than the standard committee biography.
These connections put him in continuing conversation with other executives facing their own questions about investment, organization and growth. A chief executive’s calendar has room for both competition and cooperation; an industry roundtable is where the latter gets a meeting invitation.
The next quarter still arrives
Tenure does not excuse a chief executive from the next set of results. On August 6, 2026, Haemonetics reported first-quarter fiscal 2027 revenue of $339.4 million, an increase of 5.6 percent from a year earlier. It also raised its full-year guidance.
The quarter’s operating income was $57.5 million, compared with $53.9 million a year earlier. Net income moved the other way, to $33.0 million from $34.0 million. Those figures belong together. They show why a company’s progress resists being reduced to a single celebratory number.
For Simon, the reporting cycle supplies a recurring test of the original proposition: that the executive who understood the strategy could build an organization capable of delivering it. Each quarter introduces a new set of comparisons. A decade in the job makes the record longer; it leaves the next question intact.
Staying with the answer
Simon’s career connects several kinds of responsibility: military leadership, commercial work, consulting, executive management and independent board service. The common thread is easiest to see in that 2015 review. He entered Haemonetics through a question about its future and accepted a job that made the answer his responsibility.
The years since have furnished the answer with names and dates: Burke’s arrival and eventual handover, the Boston move, Chan’s operating remit, Galvin’s commercial responsibilities. These are the decisions through which a strategy becomes visible to the people expected to carry it out.
A good plan can make a satisfying ending to a consulting engagement. For Chris Simon, it became the beginning of a much longer working relationship. The next hire, the next handover and the next quarter keep giving it something to do.