Homegrown talent takes helm of Franklin Lakes-based Becton

Vincent Forlenza was one of 10 MBAs recruited by Becton, Dickinson and Co. in 1980 for a management training program. The goal was to recruit and train people for successful careers at BD.

"And it did work out that way for me," said Forlenza, who this month became the chief executive officer of BD, a medical technology company based in Franklin Lakes with 30,000 employees worldwide.

Forlenza, 58, an Allendale resident, quickly advanced to various leadership positions at BD, after his earlier jobs included a stint in Grenoble, France, working in strategic planning and in the hypodermic needle business for BD Europe.

He later commuted between his home in Allendale and California as head of the BD Biosciences division. As president and chief operating officer he oversaw BD's three business segments — BD Medical, BD Diagnostics and BD Biosciences.

Forlenza, 58, was born in East Orange and grew up in Sea Girt. He and his wife, Ellen, have two daughters. He is chairman of The Valley Hospital board of trustees, and in his spare time he enjoys playing acoustic guitar, golfing and bicycle riding. (Interview edited and condensed.)

The first thing was the industry we're in. When I was coming out of [the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania], I was looking at two different industries — one was health care and the other was in the environmental sciences area. I chose health care, and I was happy I did because you can get up every day and do something good for patients. The second piece is you do it with technology. I like that interface between business and technology. I was very fortunate when I moved into BD that I had the chance to do business development roles and strategic planning roles that often have a big component of product planning. I liked the sciences I was involved with, I liked the purpose of the work, and I liked the people I was working with.

BD is a very collegial company. It's a company that runs a worldwide matrix of businesses, functions and regions, and for this to work you have to be able to work well with one another. It's an "and also" culture instead of an "either or." How are we going to get together, drive to consensus and get to a better solution? And that's something I enjoy.

Remote testing has been more an issue for us in the developing world. In the developing world, the idea is to make the products much simpler to use, so they can be taken out of the cities and into rural areas, for example, for HIV testing or [tuberculosis] testing. On the device side of the business, needles and syringes, we're working with pharmaceutical partners in creating self-injection products, auto-injectors. Instead of having to go into the doctor's office to get the injection, you can do it at home and you can do it yourself. So you've dropped the cost of the entire system.

For me and for the company, the biggest challenge is to increase our innovation capacity. These markets are changing very rapidly because of the pressures on health care systems worldwide. So you have markets changing rapidly and technology that's also changing fairly rapidly. While we have a good new-product development pipeline, with a series of new products that are coming out in all three of our businesses, the challenge is to increase that flow and do it in the context of a deeper understanding of the customer and how they're changing to make sure that we are targeting the right set of needs.