About the Author

Bachelor of Science from Clarkson University

Halden Zimmermann currently works at Danaher Corporation, where he is the Vice President of the Life Sciences at Leica Microsystems. Using his expertise in both strategic management and continuous improvement principles, he has turned around its North American marketing and inside sales organizations.

In less than five years at Leica, he has driven organic revenue and profit growth, increased demand creation 90% YOY, innovated to revamp product development and launch approach to drive 50% growth in launches, and doubled lead generation to create a $1 million+ pipeline. His strength is providing strategic and tactical leadership in infrastructure design, product development, segmentation, target marketing, pricing, and deployment of best-in-class-solutions.

Educational Background

Before becoming a talented marketing and management executive, Halden successfully pursued a dual-degree from Clarkson University’s engineering department, earning a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering and Engineering Management. He participated in many interesting engineering projects. Most notably, he led his Solar Race Car team to create an innovative design for composites and structure for the 1,000-mile race than spanned from Indiana to Colorado. He went on to earn his MBA from the Simon School of Business at the University of Rochester. He also received schooling abroad, participating in international exchange programs at the Bern School of Business in Switzerland and in Paris, France.

Received his MBA from the Simon School of Business, Univ. of Rochester

Zimmerman also held many first place rankings representing his dojo for Kata and Sparring throughout his college career. He is also a certified Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and Continuous Improvement Champion (George Group Certified) with experience leading 100+ Kaizen events with over $50m in impact (commercial, operations and product initiatives). He has authored many continuous improvement best practices guides and articles, a continuous improvement handbook for managers and classes / articles on a sense of urgency culture in organizations. In addition there are multiple clients in Halden’s name around B2B value added products, which were spurned from the leadership roles he had at Cardinal Health.

At Leica

He is currently the Vice President and General Manager for Leica Microsystems. Leica is an operating company of Danaher, focused . The company is primarily focused on industrial technologies, life science research imaging solutions and medical / surgical capital. Hewas initially brought in to reshape Leica’s approach to marketing and spur organic growth in an acquisitive intense environment. Some of the best practices implemented have been used across the Danaher platforms and are still in use today. Zimmerman was then given additional responsibility as P & L leader for one of Leica’s largest advanced capital business. Creating a focused strategy, improving feet on the street, converting to an aggressive hunting organization and restructuring to take cost out resulted in 10pts of share gain and operating profit improvement of 50%.

Leica Microsystems.

To learn more about Continuous Improvement, check out his blog page.