Ivan Tornos had a speech with him Friday night. His PR team wrote it, and he was told to read it.
He didn’t.
“Number one, it is very boring, and number two it is not mine,” the Zimmer Biomet CEO told the crowd at Seton Hall University’s Joseph A. Unanue Latino Institute Generaciones Gala held earlier this month at Cipriani Wall Street.
“I’d rather give you an imperfect speech from the heart than to read a speech that I didn’t put together.”
Tornos said he wasn’t going to talk about Zimmer Biomet’s robots, its surgical technology or its ground-breaking and transformative work in 120 countries.
Tornos talked about himself instead, because, he said, he was an immigrant too.
What followed was the talk of the night: 51 years of his life, boiled down to five words.
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Adversity: Tornos grew up in Spain. His father, an alcoholic, died when he was 5. The uncle who stepped in as his father died nine months later. His mother, now 90 and sitting in the front row, became both parents.
When he told her at age 5 that he wanted to go to the moon, she packed his bags.
“Adversity can be your friend if you allow adversity to be your friend,” he said.
Courage: Adversity doesn’t create courage, Tornos said. It reveals it. He pointed to students in the room who came from Cuba, who had been homeless or who couldn’t afford school.
“Courage is the one thing you need to have to be the leader that we need in America today,” he said.
Commitment: Tornos came to the U.S. in 1990, at 15, with one goal: to lead in health care and help others. He once told a Johnson & Johnson HR manager who could barely understand his English that he would be CEO of the company one day.
“You better remember me,” he recalled telling the manager.
He didn’t run J&J. He runs Zimmer Biomet, and he said he was telling the students that so they know they can do it too.
Connections: Borrowing from his friend Arnold Schwarzenegger, another immigrant, Tornos said there’s no such thing as a self-made man.
“Surround yourself with people that become multipliers to your dreams,” he said. “Surround yourself with people that divide your pain.”
The most important connection, he said, is the partner you choose. He turned to his wife.
“I tell you, you get the right person to be your partner, 90% of your job is done,” he said.
Compassion: Tornos closed with eight words from the Gospel of Luke that he said saved his life: To whom much is given, much is expected.
Anyone sitting at a table at Cipriani, he told the crowd, is among the most blessed people in the world, and that comes with a responsibility to give back.
Then he took on YOLO, which he called the worst acronym he has heard in 35 years in America. He described it in terms not suitable for print.
“You only die once, but you live every day,” he said.
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Tornos also had a promise for the institute’s scholars. He asked the roughly 50 students in the room to stand, take out their phones and record him.
“I promise you, your adversity will pay off,” he said. “I promise you, at the end of this journey, there’ll be a job, and that job may be with Zimmer Biomet or with somebody else.”
One of those students was sitting at his table: Candela Gutierrez, who came from Cuba not long ago and wants to be a pediatric surgeon. Tornos called her out by name.
He also credited Lori Tarke, the institute’s executive director, for getting him involved at all.
“It’s you, your compassion and your leadership that got me on this stage, and it’s you that is going to keep me in this project for as long as I’m alive,” he said.
Adversity, courage, commitment, connections and compassion. None of them were in the speech his PR team wrote. All of them stuck with the crowd.
