James E. Willett

James E. Willett has spent more than thirty years hiring, mentoring, and promoting people, which is another way of saying he has spent thirty years watching how careers really start.

He has led teams and businesses across the medical device industry: Executive Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Tenacore, Executive Vice President and Chief Product and Innovation Officer at Vyaire Medical, President of TRIMEDX, and Vice President and General Manager of Covidien's Respiratory Solutions business, which he helped rebuild into the billion-dollar division it is today. Earlier roles took him through Medtronic, Zimmer, Karl Storz Endoscopy, and Applied Medical, guiding the market introduction of technologies including the Medtronic StealthStation image-guided surgery platform and the LigaSure vessel-sealing system.

One thread runs through all of it: building teams, and deciding who to bet on. He sat on the other side of the hiring desk for three decades, reading résumés, interviewing the nervous and the overconfident, and promoting the people who turned out to be worth it. He watched, over and over, how much of the advice young people are given is well meant and wrong.

He has also lived this decision at home. He and his wife raised two sons, and both went through exactly the process this book describes: the pressure, the applications, the campus visits, the conversations about money that nobody enjoys having. Both attended private four-year universities. He has sat at that kitchen table as a parent, not only as a hiring manager, and a good deal of this series was written from that chair.

Willett holds a Bachelor of Arts and an MBA from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He is the founder of C2 Consulting, where he coaches people through the decisions this series is about, and he lives in Colorado.

The Career TRUTHS series is his answer to the advice he kept hearing and wishing someone would correct: straight talk and real tools for the decisions that shape a working life.