Peter Nicholas, who helped found Boston Scientific in 1979 and led the medtech giant as chief executive from then until 1999, died on May 14, the company confirmed.
Nicholas’ death came shortly before what would have been his 81st birthday on Monday, May 16. According to The Boston Globe, he died of cancer in his home in Boca Grande, Florida.
“As a pioneer who helped shape the field of minimally invasive surgery, Pete Nicholas is remembered worldwide for his contribution to vastly improved patient outcomes and equally impressive increases in healthcare efficiency,” said Mike Mahoney, the current CEO and chairman of Boston Scientific. “Within the Boston Scientific family, Pete was also a lifelong mentor, motivator and friend to hundreds of employees.”
Nicholas was born in Maine and served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy before co-founding Boston Scientific alongside John Abele in 1979. At the time, they were aiming to lower costs, reduce trauma and increase the accessibility of medical treatments.
“The combination of John’s and my very complementary knowledge, skills and background created a near-perfect recipe for success,” he said in a 2020 interview with his graduate alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. “We never thought about failure—rather, we thought about how we were going to build our business and, as we came to think of it, become the ‘biggest, fastest-growing and best company’ in our device world.”
He continued, “So, for us, success was in front of us and ours to lose. The name of the game was execution, and the proof was in the pudding, as they say. We were able to assemble a great team, and the rest is history.”
Even after stepping down from his two-decade post as CEO in 1999, Nicholas remained closely involved in Boston Scientific’s day-to-day operations, including as chairman of the board. It wasn’t until 2016 that he finally stepped back from the company, retiring from his post as chairman a year earlier than expected.
In the 2020 Wharton interview, which came as Nicholas was awarded the school’s lifetime achievement award, he discussed his approach to leading a company that he’d grown from an $800,000 startup to an international corporation raking in more than $8 billion in annual revenue by the time he left.
“Successful leaders are less comfortable talking about their own accomplishments and more commonly leave it to others to do that. I have always placed more value on the leaders who lead from the front and are the doers, enthralled not by self, but by the outcomes that they and their teams achieve,” he said.
“It’s a deeply personal issue, too. When you move the needle and make a difference that is valued by the corporation, other people may know it or not. To the true leader, it doesn’t really matter. They know it, and it makes them feel good because they have accomplished something valuable to the company that otherwise might not have happened.”
Nicholas is survived by his wife Ginny—great-granddaughter of Eli Lilly’s founder and namesake—who met Nicholas while they were both undergraduates at Duke University and helped kick-start his career in the healthcare industry at her family’s company. He’s also survived by their three children and seven grandchildren as well as his brother Nick, who served on the board of Boston Scientific for more than 20 years.
He paid tribute to his family and the families of his colleagues in the 2020 interview.
“We all try to spend as much time as we can with our families, but we also know the sacrifices they make to support us as individuals so we can do our jobs. We also know that most of us attribute much of our own accomplishments and success to the support we get from our families—those we love the most and who are the most valuable people in our lives,” Nicholas said.
“We have all been blessed in so many ways,” he continued. “Those who have been blessed have an obligation to return those blessings not only to those they love but also more broadly in service to the greater public good. If we can all do that, we can all say that we have lived a good life.”