>>I would pick Lonnie M. Smith, although a medical device company, I have to be impressed with someone that can take a company from obscurity to a 5 billion-market cap.
Hoping ISRG was close enough to the general field of biotech / pharma.<<
I have been lucky enough to have gotten to know several of the very early engineers at Intuitive who built da Vinci essentially from scratch.
One of them said to me something close to this a few years ago: "After what we came up with, any Harvard MBA could have made a success out of Intuitive." (Lonnie has a Harvard MBA.)
That guy was peeved because he felt that after the first commercial version, Smith didn't support the R&D team sufficiently and supported some outsiders who didn't know what they were doing. As a result, improvements were less ambitious than first anticipated, and they took many more years than necessary to be realized.
That was his view.
I think his comments are probably way over the top and I am very impressed with the Intuitive management team. (I have followed the company closely since the IPO.) But I think there is a valid point here. CEO's get a lot of the credit when a tech or biotech company succeeds, but often the lion's share of that credit (or blame - as the case may be) should belong to the scientists and/or engineers in the background.
Investors are often not in a position to distinguish.
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