Ivan Tornos and the education of an operator

The job Ivan Tornos remembers with particular affection involved cleaning tanning beds. In his telling, it was the best job he ever had. For a chairman and chief executive, this is an unusually modest entry in the catalogue of formative experiences. It is also a useful place to begin. Executive biographies tend to preserve the promotions and quietly mislay the cleaning supplies.

Tornos grew up in Madrid and came to the United States in 1989 as a foreign exchange student. He recalls landing near Brevard, North Carolina, a considerable change of scene for a teenager from the Spanish capital. His account of those years includes paid work and an appreciation for the people around him. Later titles would become international; the early lessons were local.

Decades later, he can still make a joke about learning English. The humour matters to the telling. He does not present his younger self as a fully assembled corporate leader waiting to be discovered. There was work to do, a language to learn and, eventually, a succession of jobs whose demands grew larger.

A career with several sets of coordinates

His professional route passed through Johnson & Johnson, Baxter, Covidien, C.R. Bard and Becton, Dickinson and Company before Zimmer Biomet. The geography expanded with the responsibilities. At Bard, he led Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Earlier assignments included business development and strategy at Baxter and leadership of businesses across the Americas at Covidien. This was a career in which the map belonged beside the organisation chart.

That background explains the particular job Zimmer Biomet offered him in 2018. The company announced his arrival on October 31, with a November 1 start date, as group president, Orthopedics. His brief included its Americas region and responsibility for innovation and execution across several businesses. Bryan Hanson, then chief executive, pointed to his experience managing complex businesses across continents.

There is a revealing difference between possessing international experience and being hired to use it. In this appointment, the latter was explicit. Tornos was entering a role that combined commercial responsibility with the practical work of getting a large organisation to deliver. The announcement made execution part of the assignment from the beginning.

Four appointments, one widening brief

The next steps came inside the same company. In 2019, Tornos became group president, Global Businesses and the Americas. In March 2021, Zimmer Biomet announced his appointment to a newly created chief operating officer position. His remit encompassed its global businesses and operations, together with research and new product development. Oversight of Europe, the Middle East and Africa joined his continuing responsibilities in the Americas.

A newly created post tells its own small organisational story. The company was gathering a broad collection of responsibilities under one executive. For Tornos, the job put more of the machinery within reach: regions, functions and the coordination between them. A plan can look quite tidy until it has to travel through all three.

On August 22, 2023, he became president and chief executive and joined the board, succeeding Hanson. The transition announcement also expanded chief financial officer Suketu Upadhyay’s responsibilities to include global operations and supply chain. Read together, those appointments show a redistribution of work as Tornos moved into the top job. In May 2025, he added the chairmanship. His rise at Zimmer Biomet had taken him from group president to chairman in less than seven years.

The business school graduate who keeps studying

His academic record is extensive. He holds a BBA in finance and international marketing and management from the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business and an MBA from the University of Miami. He completed post-MBA work at Wharton, the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School, and leadership and management programmes at Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business.

These are different kinds of qualifications, and the distinctions are useful. Harvard’s Advanced Management Program is an executive programme; the MBA on his record comes from Miami. His education spans finance, marketing and management, a combination that fits the range of commercial and operating positions that followed.

Learning also remained a subject of his public conversations after he became CEO. In a 2024 CEO Talks interview with Javier Cuesta, the discussion ranged from international experience to mentors, sponsors and succession planning. Family time and the demands of frequent travel were on the agenda too. The questions are familiar to anyone with an overfilled calendar, even if relatively few people have a global company attached to theirs.

The interesting thread is the continued attention to becoming better at the job after obtaining it. Succession planning, in particular, asks an executive to think beyond the present occupant of the office. It makes leadership a problem of continuity. The organisation will need another capable person when the current one leaves.

What he wants a manager to notice

Asked about his priorities in April 2024, Tornos described a company that should behave with some of a start-up’s urgency. His formulation was brisk: “time and money count; compliance counts; bureaucracy does not.” He also described a principle of protecting the company before growing it. The ambition came with an order of operations.

He spoke about decentralising decisions and expecting employees to act as owners and operators. Gratitude, he said, had been added to the company’s guiding principles. Together, those choices suggest a fairly demanding bargain: give people room to act, expect them to take responsibility, and remember to acknowledge the work.

These remain a leader’s stated intentions, rather than a guarantee of every employee’s experience. They do, however, tell us what he chooses to emphasise when explaining his approach. Decision-making, responsibility and recognition appear alongside the usual vocabulary of growth. A thank-you and a delegated decision are small things until an organisation becomes large enough to make both surprisingly difficult.

“time and money count; compliance counts; bureaucracy does not.”Ivan Tornos / April 2024

The calendar gets a vote

By February 2026, his discussion with Joe Hart on Take Command brought the management philosophy down to the level of the week. He described reviewing his calendar on Sundays, protecting personal commitments and cutting back on email. Even calling his mother had a place in the schedule. There is something endearingly literal about an executive making sure that a family call survives the machinery of executive life.

His framework connects purpose, a plan, people and processes. Its usefulness lies in the connections. A purpose needs a way to proceed; a plan needs people who can carry it out; those people need workable processes. Each term places an obligation on the next.

The calendar provides a test of that thinking. It records the commitments that actually receive time. An aspiration may be sincere and still disappear beneath a week’s invitations. Tornos’s habit of reviewing the week makes his approach unusually inspectable: the question becomes what deserves an appointment, what can be declined, and what must be protected before somebody else fills the space.

A boardroom in Japan, a stage in San Diego

His responsibilities extend beyond Zimmer Biomet. He serves on AdvaMed’s board and is an independent external director of Japan’s PHC Holdings. He also appears on the board of the Spain-U.S. Chamber of Commerce. These affiliations connect the operating executive with industry representation, corporate oversight and transatlantic business.

In PHC’s 2025 integrated report, he set out three areas in which he offers advice: practices from global markets, the efficiency of capital allocation across a portfolio, and measures for tracking initiatives. He also discussed governance and the value of employee feedback. The language is more restrained than a conference keynote. It concerns how resources are assigned and how progress is checked.

That is a useful second view of the same person. A CEO has to persuade an organisation to move. An independent director must also ask whether management is moving in a sensible direction and using resources well. His published PHC message brings the questions back to allocation, measurement and oversight.

There are livelier settings, too. At the 2025 MedTech Conference in San Diego, Tornos shared a stage with Arnold Schwarzenegger for a conversation about leadership, resilience and purpose. The photograph catches both men laughing, with AdvaMed’s Scott Whitaker alongside them. Corporate life occasionally supplies a better visual than another person pointing at a slide.

The public voice, and the return to Spain

Tornos maintains a public presence on LinkedIn and an Instagram account, @zimmerbiomet_ceo. In introducing the latter to his LinkedIn audience, he described a more relaxed version of similar interests, complete with more photo filters. It was a neatly self-aware invitation from someone whose job title is already in the account name.

This public voice makes room for professional ideas without requiring every appearance to resemble a formal announcement. The interviews, the photographs and the occasional joke provide different entrances into the same working life. Readers can encounter the executive explaining a management habit or laughing on a conference stage.

In November 2025, the Spain-U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Florida recognised him as Corporate Leader of the Year at its Ponce de León awards. The anniversary gala took place at Jungle Island in Miami. For a Spanish executive who had built a career across American and international businesses, the setting brought several strands together.

An award supplies a convenient stopping point for a biography. Tornos’s interest in execution suggests a less ceremonial ending. There is still a calendar to review, a decision to make and somebody whose work deserves acknowledgment. The early job cleaning tanning beds remains an apt detail to keep in view: a task close enough to see, and a result somebody could check.