Olumide Soroye and the art of making the next day better

On June 30, 2025, Olumide Soroye became chief executive of Fortive. Two days earlier, the company had completed the separation of its Precision Technologies business as Ralliant. A new boss usually inherits an office, a set of expectations, and a calendar already beyond repair. Soroye inherited those things alongside a freshly redrawn company. His promotion came with a subtraction.

James Lico, Fortive’s founding CEO, retired from the president, chief executive, and director roles. Soroye stepped into all three. Tami Newcombe would lead Ralliant. The handover had the unusual quality of a family photograph in which everyone was about to leave for a different appointment. The familiar faces remained; their destinations had changed.

For Soroye, the task was to give the remaining Fortive a direction people could understand and a performance they could measure. There was already a name for the programme: Fortive Accelerated. The promise involved faster profitable growth, disciplined decisions about capital, and investor trust. Each sounds agreeable in a presentation. The interesting part is what happens when they compete for attention on an ordinary Tuesday.

His route to that Tuesday had passed through an engineering classroom in Nigeria, business school, law school, consulting, online marketing, and property information. The industries changed. A recurring concern followed him: how to turn information into something useful at the moment somebody has work to do.

Three degrees, then the operating chair

Soroye earned a bachelor’s degree in metallurgical and materials engineering from Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria. He also holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a Juris Doctor from Loyola Law School. Engineering, business, and law make a fairly crowded academic calling card. Together they span the object, the enterprise around it, and the rules under which that enterprise operates.

Those qualifications establish the range of his education. His professional record supplies a more practical connection between them. At McKinsey & Company, where he became a partner, he spent more than a decade working on growth, product, and sales strategy in technology. His assignments included organisations in software, semiconductors, and industrial businesses. Advice was his business before operating became his responsibility.

Consulting offers repeated encounters with a particular puzzle: why a sensible plan fails to become a better result. An operator has to live with the answer after the presentation ends. Soroye’s subsequent roles moved him into that longer relationship with execution, first at QuinStreet and then at CoreLogic.

At QuinStreet, he was a senior vice president and general manager of its technology and home services businesses. In September 2013, CoreLogic appointed him managing director of Information Solutions, with responsibility for developing and managing products and services in its data and analytics segment. The appointment placed a person with experience connecting businesses and customers inside a company whose raw material was property information.

The welcome from CoreLogic’s then CEO, Anand Nallathambi, singled out product innovation, a client focus, and a global perspective. These were specific reasons to hire him. They also describe the territory in which his career would continue: businesses that already possess information, and customers who need that information to accomplish something.

Information has to earn its keep

Soroye remained at CoreLogic until August 2021, leading its Property Intelligence and Risk Management segment. His work there combined digital workflow development with strategic acquisitions. A property record can sit in a database. It can also become part of a decision about a building, a transaction, or an insurance policy. The distance between those uses is where a great deal of enterprise software earns its living.

In 2020, CoreLogic described an integrated insurance offering connecting underwriting, claims, property data, and risk monitoring. Soroye discussed the opportunity to improve the experience across the property lifecycle. The commercial idea was concrete: make connected information useful to institutions whose work already depends on it. An impressive store of data has limited charm if the person doing the job must still spend the afternoon assembling the answer.

That distinction helps explain the continuity in an otherwise varied résumé. QuinStreet, CoreLogic, and Fortive occupy different markets. Each has given him a view of the junction between a customer’s problem and a product intended to solve it. The connection is visible in the work itself; it does not require a story about a childhood revelation or a grand plan unfolding without interruption.

Fortive hired him to lead Intelligent Operating Solutions, with an official start date of August 9, 2021. Lico highlighted his experience developing workflow solutions and improving growth and profitability. After years in software, analytics, and information businesses, Soroye was entering an organisation where those capabilities sat alongside instruments and industrial products.

Go where the work happens

At Fortive, improvement has its own institutional vocabulary. The Fortive Business System, usually shortened to FBS, is the company’s operating model for continuous improvement. Soroye has publicly championed it. For a reader outside the company, the useful question is how such a system changes what people actually do. Acronyms are inexpensive; altered habits tend to cost more effort.

One answer appears in his account of a 2024 CEO Kaizen event. He thanked the organisers of more than 70 improvement events across 12 locations and three continents, alongside the operating company leaders who hosted them. The list included Fluke, Industrial Scientific, Intelex, Accruent, ServiceChannel, and Gordian. The geography mattered because the exercise was distributed across teams doing different kinds of work.

He also credited Kirsten Paust and her team for organising the event. That detail gives the corporate language a human scale. Someone has to make a multinational week of improvement happen: organise people, involve local leaders, and carry the exercises into actual businesses. Continuous improvement still needs a diary invitation.

In his later public account of the 2026 President’s Kaizen Week, Soroye described more than 40 events involving operating company presidents. The areas of work ranged from innovation and commercial execution to customer experience and lean operations. He wrote about spending time at gemba, the place where work happens, and about teams applying AI within those exercises.

The emphasis was on putting a new capability into an existing discipline. That is a more demanding proposition than adding AI to the final slide of a strategy deck. A useful application has to improve some part of the job. The surrounding process supplies a way to ask whether it did.

“The Fortive Business System remains the engine of our success”

Olumide Soroye · June 2025

A smaller company, a public scorecard

The June 2025 Investor Day set out a Fortive of ten operating brands and approximately 50 percent recurring revenue. Soroye’s plan paired the established business system with emerging technology, including AI, while putting capital allocation alongside operating growth. He was taking charge of a company with an existing machinery of improvement and proposing to increase its pace.

The early numbers made clear that a new chapter does not arrive with a clean economic backdrop. In the second quarter of 2025, continuing operations recorded a 0.7 percent decline in core revenue. That quarter largely preceded his tenure as overall CEO. It nevertheless formed part of the starting position against which the next stage would be judged.

The first full quarter after the separation brought a different result. Third-quarter 2025 core revenue rose 1.9 percent. Fortive also repurchased $1 billion of shares during the quarter and raised its full-year adjusted earnings outlook. Growth, the use of cash, and expectations for the future were moving onto the same public scorecard.

By the first quarter of 2026, core revenue growth reached 5.3 percent. The company said additional selling days provided about 150 basis points of benefit to revenue growth, a useful qualification when comparing quarters. It also completed approximately $500 million in share repurchases. The details matter: a reported increase can have several contributors, and an operating story deserves more than one attractive percentage.

In July 2026, Fortive reported second-quarter revenue of $1.10 billion and core growth of 6.7 percent. It raised its full-year adjusted earnings guidance. Those figures describe company performance under Soroye’s leadership; they do not assign every result to one executive. A chief executive sets priorities inside an organisation whose results are produced by many people, customers, and circumstances.

The ambition remains measurable. Can the teams introduce useful products faster? Can they deepen customer relationships? Can the company choose among acquisitions, buybacks, and other uses of cash with care? Soroye’s programme puts those questions in public, where the next set of results can answer back.

Another place on the calendar

His responsibilities extend beyond Fortive. Verisk appointed him to its board in August 2022. He now chairs its Finance and Investment Committee and serves on its Executive and Risk Committees. For an executive whose career has repeatedly involved data and analytics, the board seat provides another setting in which information, technology, and business judgement meet.

In Washington, he also serves on the board of the Washington Roundtable, whose members work on public policy affecting the state’s economy and opportunity. Soroye lives in Seattle with his wife and their four children. His employer is based in nearby Everett. The international career has a specific home address at the scale that matters here: a city, a state, and a family.

Among the personal details he has shared are visits to more than 40 countries and attendance at more than 100 children’s sporting events a year. The second number deserves a moment. Corporate biographies usually favour the miles travelled and organisations advised. Here is a tally devoted to showing up for games. Even a carefully managed calendar must occasionally submit to a fixture list.

There is a pleasing difference between the two scoreboards in this story. One reports revenue growth and the deployment of billions of dollars. The other belongs to children playing sport, with a father in attendance. Neither needs to be turned into a management parable. Together they give a little dimension to the person behind the title.

Soroye’s next years at Fortive will be judged through results. His career has brought him from materials engineering to the work of managing information, products, and people. Now the responsibility is to make an established organisation improve repeatedly, with enough clarity that its customers and colleagues can feel the difference. The next day will arrive regardless. Making it better is the assignment.