Padraig McDonnell and the value of showing up

Long before the chief executive’s title, there were evenings on the roads of Ireland. Padraig McDonnell and his colleague Declan Murray were travelling to customers, doing the unglamorous work on which an instrument company’s reputation depends. Years later, McDonnell would remember those journeys when explaining why he joined Hewlett-Packard. The beginning of his career story belongs, in part, to somebody else.

They had first worked together in an instrumentation laboratory, as customers of HP. Murray left to become a customer engineer there. McDonnell watched his friend join a business whose appeal extended beyond the equipment it sold. Keeping that equipment useful mattered too. When an opportunity came, he followed.

In 2023, McDonnell publicly thanked Murray for helping him make the decision a quarter of a century earlier. Murray had become a two-time winner of Agilent’s President’s Club sales award. McDonnell’s recollection of their shared evenings ended with the phrase “showing up for customers.” It is an unusually serviceable description of a career. It contains a destination, a responsibility and very little room for posing.

A laboratory before the corner office

McDonnell joined HP in 1998 as a customer engineer. He moved into sales the following year. The progression matters because it gave him experience on both sides of the purchase: helping people use an instrument, then persuading them to choose one. In that sequence, a promise made by sales eventually becomes a job for somebody in service.

His education crossed several Irish institutions. He earned a science degree at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, followed by postgraduate diplomas in chemistry and biochemistry at NUI Galway and in strategy and innovation at University College Dublin. The subjects offer a compact preview of his working life: understand the science, then work out how a business should serve it.

By 2007 he was leading the Ireland business team. His responsibilities subsequently widened into regional sales leadership and, in 2014, a vice president and general manager role spanning Europe, the Middle East, Africa and India. A local customer relationship had become an international management problem. The distances grew; the question of what customers needed remained recognisable. The sequence also resists the tidy mythology of the overnight appointment. Each change added a different kind of responsibility, making the eventual promotion easier to understand through assignments than through a single decisive moment.

The move that changed the map

In 2017, McDonnell moved to the United States to lead Agilent’s Chemistries and Supplies Division. He had grown up in Cavan; California became home. He has described the relocation as “a big, big change.” For a career spent within the same corporate family, this was a substantial change of surroundings.

The move also widened his view of what the company supplied. Chemistries and consumables occupy a different place in a laboratory’s working life from a major instrument purchase. They connect a manufacturer to repeated, everyday activity. Read alongside his earlier field experience, the assignment helps explain the breadth of his eventual commercial responsibilities.

He became president of Agilent CrossLab Group in May 2020 and added the chief commercial officer role in November 2021. The combined remit included sales, services, service delivery and marketing. These are functions that can easily have separate conversations about the same customer. Putting them within one leader’s remit made their connections part of his daily work.

Inheriting the company, changing the machinery

On February 21, 2024, Agilent named McDonnell CEO-elect and chief operating officer. The handover had a precise timetable: he would become president and CEO, and join the board, on May 1. Mike McMullen would remain available as an adviser until retiring at the end of October. Institutional memory had been given a transition period.

The board’s choice rested on a long internal record. Agilent credited McDonnell with growing its services business while improving profitability and customer satisfaction. His commercial work had also addressed the customer’s journey through the company. That combination is central to his appointment: growth and service were being presented as related achievements.

McDonnell called McMullen a mentor when the succession was announced. Their connection gives the handover a more personal dimension than a change of names on an organisation chart. The incoming executive had spent years inside the company he was being asked to lead. He knew its habits as well as its products. Familiarity, of course, also leaves a new chief with fewer excuses for being surprised.

By November 2024, he was changing the organisation. Agilent announced three business groups organised around customers and markets, with CrossLab serving across them. The applied business covered fields including food, environmental analysis, forensics, chemicals and advanced materials. Services, software, automation and consumables sat together within CrossLab.

An organisation chart is hardly recreational reading. Yet it expresses a consequential choice: which people must work together before the customer has to ask them to. In McDonnell’s case, the new structure gave organisational form to the customer focus that had accompanied his promotion.

What “customer first” costs in effort

The wider transformation acquired the name Ignite. In late 2024, McDonnell described its purpose as improving the company’s ability to execute, producing revenue growth and stronger margins. It was an operating ambition with measurable consequences, rather than a change confined to the sales pitch.

He subsequently set out the practical difficulties of reorganising a global business: employees needed regular communication, a transition team had to guide the changes, and customers needed continuous support. The revealing part is the last requirement. A company cannot reasonably ask a laboratory to interrupt its work while the supplier finishes rearranging itself.

In a 2025 interview, he linked the strategy to a simpler buying experience and greater laboratory productivity. He described investments in digital channels and software alongside the unified commercial organisation. The argument was that customers were buying the ability to accomplish work, with instruments forming part of the answer. That brings the conversation back to those early service calls, though the budget and vocabulary have expanded considerably.

“The world is our laboratory.”

Padraig McDonnell, 2025

His Singapore discussions added another dimension: the value of having expertise close to the people using it. In 2025 he described a local operation with more than 600 employees and a 172,000-square-foot facility. He stressed talent, scientific capability and collaboration. A global company still needs people who understand the particular place in which a customer works.

The engineer’s question for AI

In June 2026, Agilent announced a collaboration with OpenAI and Boston Consulting Group to deploy artificial intelligence across products, operations and customer workflows. Early work would concentrate on customer experience and the new-product pipeline, with expansion planned over the following six to twelve months.

The announcement set out an ambition and a deployment programme. Its significance for McDonnell’s story is the continuity of the proposed uses: more capable instruments, better software and faster access to useful insight. The technology changes the means of delivering assistance. Customers still have work to complete and decisions to make.

There was already a manufacturing dimension to his interest in digital tools. In early 2025, he went to Davos to accept World Economic Forum Lighthouse recognition for Agilent’s Shanghai and Penang factories. Their use of technologies including AI, robotics and data analytics put operating practice alongside product development in the company’s account of innovation.

He has also discussed sustainability in practical manufacturing terms, including tracking gas use, instrument temperatures and electricity consumption. That is a useful counterweight to the grand language technology companies can favour. A factory has meters. The measurements give management something more demanding than a well-phrased intention.

Numbers with a date attached

By August 26, 2026, Agilent was reporting third-quarter revenue of $1.88 billion, up 8.1 percent as reported and 7.3 percent on its core measure from the previous year. GAAP operating margin reached 23.6 percent. The company raised its full-year outlook. Those were company results under McDonnell’s leadership, produced by an organisation of many thousands of people.

The figures offer a way to test his operating argument without treating a single quarter as a verdict on a career. Better execution is his claim; revenue, profitability and customer response are among the places to look for its effects. An executive’s account of momentum becomes more useful when a reader can put a date and a number beside it.

Cavan remains in the picture

Another kind of recognition arrived in March 2026. At the Ireland Funds’ San Francisco gala, held at the St. Francis Hotel during the organisation’s fiftieth anniversary year, McDonnell received its Corporate Leadership Award. AMD executive Ruth Cotter introduced him, connecting his roots in Cavan with his current role in California.

The occasion places his transatlantic career within a wider Irish community. It also provides a different setting from the laboratory or investor conference: a gathering supporting Irish charities and causes, with business, culture and philanthropy sharing a room. His biography has acquired international scale without losing its point of departure.

Outside work, his interests include tennis, running and live music. These details deserve to remain ordinary pleasures, spared the indignity of being converted into management lessons. A concert need not explain a quarterly result.

There is, however, one lesson he does explicitly carry from an earlier mentor: a leader should “remove obstacles for the team.” Set beside his recollection of Murray and their Irish journeys, it suggests a consistent way to read his career. The responsibility grows, and more people depend on the answer. Somewhere, somebody is still waiting for help getting the work done.