20 May, 2025
Dig Howitt is the CEO and President of Cochlear, a $17 billion ASX-listed global powerhouse in hearing technology. Dig has overseen the company’s expansion into more than 180 countries, driving advancements that have transformed hundreds of thousands of lives around the world.
With a background in engineering and global operations, Dig joined Cochlear in 2000 holding key roles in manufacturing, product development, and international markets before being appointed CEO and President in 2018.
Ahead of his conversation with Ellen Fanning at the upcoming QUT Business Leaders’ Forum on the Tuesday 24 June, we sat down with Dig to find out more about his leadership style, how Cochlear is utilising AI and the importance of innovation.
AI is transforming healthcare and technology at lightning speed. How is Cochlear leveraging AI to stay ahead, and what should executives be doing right now to ensure their organisations don’t get left behind?
Cochlear has built automation into its products for several years to improve the experience for our customers. There is an opportunity to enable even better hearing outcomes in noise through further automation and AI and there is also the opportunity to streamline care and lower the costs of by using AI.
For all business, AI has the potential to improve productivity and efficiency. Like many companies Cochlear has a range of pilots underway to determine where the opportunity is the biggest and where the risk of unintended consequences is low.
With increasing geopolitical tensions and shifting global alliances, how do you factor political risk into your long-term strategy, and what should Australian business leaders be watching most closely right now?
Fortunately, Cochlear’s business is reasonably well insulated from macroeconomic conditions. Our approach to monitoring geopolitics is to get a high level understanding of how geopolitical changes or events might impact our business and then to determine if early action or preparation could help mitigate the impact. We have a long term aspiration, a strategy to achieve our aspiration and then plans to execute our strategy. Like all strategies there is risk assessment and risk management processes in place to support the execution of our plans. We ensure that we devote the vast majority of our effort to executing our strategy. An important aspect of risk management is to match the amount of effort put into analysing and mitigating risks to the potential consequence of the risk and the controllability of that risk. While there has been more uncertainty in the world over the last 5 years it is important that our focus on risks stays grounded in the potential impacts to our business and the extent to which we can mitigate these with early action.
What does it really take to lead a global med-tech company at the forefront of innovation, and how can Queensland businesses position themselves to play in that league?
A committed, capable and passionate workforce, like we have at Cochlear, makes leading the company much easier than it could be. The role of leadership is to set an ambition for the future and then develop a strategy and plans to achieve the ambition. This involves being as clear on what we choose not to do as it is on what activities we will do. Making these choices is hard but critical. Then we aim to ensure Cochlear people understand our ambition and strategy and we have the capability and the culture to deliver on it. We invest in our culture and in being clear on the behaviours we want people to exhibit.
Specifically on innovation: Genuine innovation takes time, commitment and investment. Dedicating money and people to innovation is critical if a business wants to differentiate through innovation. Also, innovation improves over time, the experience from failures and misses helps future opportunities. That is, being curious and wanting to keep learning are essential characteristics of innovative people and innovative organisations.
You’re leading a business that not only competes globally but literally changes lives every day. How do you build a strategy that delivers both high performance and deep purpose, and what’s the real ROI on doing both?
At Cochlear we are very fortunate to work in a business that changes people’s lives and is also a growing, global, technology business.
Our Mission sets out our purpose and outlines our strategy:
We help people hear and be heard.
We empower people to connect with others and live a full life.
We transform the way people understand and treat hearing loss.
We innovate and bring to market a range of implantable hearing solutions that deliver a lifetime of hearing outcomes.
Our passion for our Mission is the energy that drives people. This passion is critical but is not sufficient. We must ensure we have the practices and disciplines that define successful businesses and ensure that we are always trying to improve. We work hard to remain disciplined and focused on our processes and our goals and have the discipline to make trade-offs between competing priorities. This is difficult and we continue to work to improve how we prioritise.
For Cochlear there is genuine long term alignment between our customers, our employee and our shareholders. It is in the interest of these stakeholders that Cochlear is a successful business over the long term. Our customers are lifetime customers, they depend on their implant for hearing for life. Cochlear is only able to provide our customers with support if we remain a successful business for their lifetime. Similarly, our employees’ jobs and career opportunities depend on Cochlear being successful and our shareholders want the financial returns from long term success.
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