Joaquin Duato and the art of staying curious

Joaquin Duato once applied for a job at Johnson & Johnson and failed to reach the second interview. Decades later, he could tell the story from the chief executive’s chair. Asked in June 2026 what became of the person who turned him down, he supplied a comic footnote: the interviewer had worked in the consumer business, the division that had since been separated from the company. A rejected applicant rarely gets such an elaborate punchline.

The joke works because the rest of his career looks so settled. Duato joined in 1989, became chief executive in January 2022 and added the chairmanship in January 2023. Behind those few dates, however, sits a career spent moving between assignments. Staying at one company did not mean doing one thing. His particular education was conducted inside the organization he would eventually lead.

The long way to New Brunswick

Duato grew up in Valencia, Spain. He earned an MBA at Esade in Barcelona and a Master of International Management at Thunderbird in Arizona. Those two institutions place an international dimension in his story before the executive appointments begin. He is a dual citizen of Spain and the United States; New Brunswick, New Jersey, is his professional base.

He began his Johnson & Johnson career in Spain. For the first thirteen years, his executive assignments were in Europe. The move to the United States came in 2002. Put those dates together and the familiar shorthand of an American corporate career becomes rather inadequate. The future chief executive had already spent a substantial working life learning the company from across the Atlantic.

There is something useful about seeing that distance on a map rather than treating it as a line in a biography. Valencia, Barcelona, Arizona, New Brunswick: each place adds a different setting to the same story. His eventual authority would rest partly on familiarity with an institution, but that familiarity had been acquired from several vantage points. Headquarters was one of them.

Twelve jobs, one employer

By 2025, Duato counted twelve different jobs across thirty-six years at Johnson & Johnson. His assignments included different business divisions, supply chain responsibilities and a period as interim chief information officer. He describes those opportunities as the reason he became equipped to run the company. The recurring action in his account is accepting the next assignment.

In 2011 he became worldwide chairman of the pharmaceutical business. In 2018 he moved to vice chairman of the executive committee, with responsibilities spanning business strategy, technology and the global supply chain. The scope matters. A supply chain and an information system are less photogenic than a corner office, but both make their own demands on a manager’s attention. Neither can be run by a good speech.

That breadth helps explain his interest in people who know more than he does about a particular subject. He has described his role as helping the company’s experts succeed. There is a practical discipline in that position: identify who understands the problem, give that person room to work, and learn enough to ask a useful question. His career offers a reason to take that discipline seriously.

Inheriting the keys, changing the rooms

When the succession was announced in August 2021, Duato was already vice chairman. Alex Gorsky would remain executive chairman during the transition, while Duato would become CEO and a director on January 3, 2022. It was a carefully dated handover between two executives with long company histories. The appointment emerged from inside the institution.

Eleven months later, the board announced that Duato would also become chairman in January 2023. Lead independent director Anne Mulcahy pointed to his lengthy record and the board’s succession planning. The paired appointments gave him responsibility both for running the enterprise and leading its board. His apprenticeship had become stewardship, with all the accountability that the word ought to carry.

Continuity of personnel did not produce continuity of corporate shape. In August 2023, Johnson & Johnson finalized the separation of Kenvue. A company that generations of shoppers associated with familiar consumer brands was becoming a more concentrated business. An executive could spend thirty-three years learning an organization and still conclude that its boundaries needed to change.

The transaction makes an interesting companion to his own biography. Duato had built a career by moving across divisions. As chief executive, he helped complete a separation that drew a new boundary between businesses. Experience can become an argument for keeping everything together. Here, the institution’s accumulated experience accompanied a decision to divide it. Familiarity had to leave room for a different arrangement.

The second language is technology

In June 2022, Duato returned to the Esade alumni community and received that year’s Esade Award. Speaking with alumni president Belén Moreu before an audience of about a thousand, he argued for leadership that combined a global outlook with service to a team. He also offered a more demanding definition of professional fluency.

Employees, he said, should be bilingual in their own field and in technology. It is a particularly apt expression for an executive whose working life crosses countries. The second language here consists of understanding data and the tools that change how work gets done. He was asking experienced people to acquire another vocabulary while continuing to use the one they had spent years mastering.

There is a difference between approving a technology budget and being willing to become a student of it. His interim CIO assignment gave him a personal reason to keep learning. An executive’s unfamiliarity can be expensive when everyone else assumes the person at the top already understands. Duato’s public interest in digital skills makes that unfamiliarity a subject for study rather than something to conceal.

“Speak directly but kindly.”

Joaquin Duato, on giving feedback

An eight-hour invitation

In 2023, he sent colleagues an eight-hour calendar hold for the company’s first Global Learning Day. The invitation reserved a day free of calls and other work commitments for learning. Anyone who has watched a supposedly protected hour disappear into a meeting will appreciate the significance of putting the chief executive’s name on the calendar.

Duato signed up for the digital basecamp himself. Across the company, he reported 70,000 learning hours and 109,000 learning sessions. Those figures describe activity, not a final verdict on what everyone learned. Still, they give an otherwise airy promise an observable form: time was reserved, courses were taken, and the chief executive joined in.

The event returned in 2024, with live virtual sessions and gatherings in offices around the world. Employees were invited to consider their own development goals alongside the skills the company needed. Repetition is part of the story. A second edition asks whether an attractive gesture can become something people expect their employer to make time for.

At a large company, attention is a scarce resource with an impressive number of claimants. Duato’s learning day made a choice about who could claim some of it. The immediate work would always have advocates. A future skill needed an appointment. That is an unusually literal way to give an aspiration space to develop.

The chairman takes a class. Then teaches one.

His interest in learning also took him to a classroom at Johnson & Johnson’s George Street campus in New Brunswick. In 2024, he co-taught a session for first-time managers with Elizabeth Dye. The year-long Leading People at J&J program had more than 110 sessions planned in 23 countries that year. His chosen subject was giving and receiving feedback.

His advice starts with trust, continues with clear and considerate speech, and includes asking whether someone is ready to receive feedback. The last point deserves its place. A manager can prepare a perfectly sound observation and deliver it at a moment when the listener is in no condition to use it. Timing belongs to the job.

The classroom photograph offers a welcome change of scale. Here is the chairman beside a flip chart, talking to colleagues who are learning how to manage other people. His subject is ordinary enough to be recognizable in almost any workplace. The person with the broad remit is discussing one conversation between two people.

In another public reflection, Duato described mentors as people one can learn from simply by watching and listening to colleagues. That makes a long career a collection of available examples. A formal meeting can help, but so can paying attention to how someone handles a difficult exchange. For an executive who benefited from an internal development program, observation is part of the work.

A new seat, still ahead

The public recognition has followed an international path too. In 2023, King Felipe VI of Spain awarded Duato the Order of Civil Merit, Commander by Number. In October 2025, the Spain-U.S. Chamber of Commerce honored him as its Business Leader of the Year at the Metropolitan Club in New York. The geography of those honors fits the geography of his career.

On September 17, 2026, PepsiCo announced his election as an independent director, with his service and Audit Committee membership scheduled to begin on December 1. Chairman and CEO Ramon Laguarta highlighted his experience with strategic change, portfolios and complex global operations. As of this profile’s October publication, that new board assignment still lies ahead.

Another institution is about to make use of the experience he accumulated while staying with one employer. Meanwhile, a telling image remains the classroom: a senior executive with a flip chart, discussing how to make a difficult conversation useful. Duato’s long apprenticeship has brought him considerable authority. He keeps returning to the small, teachable acts through which other people acquire their own.