BusinessTN

Ask Bill Evans, director and CEO of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, if he’s a businessman, and he’ll deny it. “No,” says the 56-year-old with a doctor of pharmacy degree who has worked for St. Jude for more than 30 years. “First and foremost, I’m a scientist. I’m a researcher.” A scientist who has dedicated his career to raising childhood cancer survival rates. A researcher who is determined to understand why drug treatments work in one child and not in another.

No doubt—it’s a noble profession. Walk the art-covered halls of St. Jude to see just how important, how absolutely necessary it is. See a mother and her son singing along to the jukebox in the in-patient unit. Watch nurses wheel a sleeping little girl sucking her pacifier on a gurney to a recovery room after a bone marrow transplant. Clear the way for a curly-haired boy pulling his bald-pated little brother in a red wagon through a waiting area with two large aquariums and a dome lit up with stars like the night’s sky.

Then, consider this. Since founder Danny Thomas opened St. Jude’s doors in 1962, St. Jude has developed protocols that have brought survival rates for childhood cancers in the United States up from less than 20% to about 70%. In certain types of cancer, such as Hodgkin’s disease, survival rates are now in the 90th percentile. In recent years, the institution has also waged war on other diseases like pediatric aids and influenza.

An internationally renowned institution and resource, St. Jude treats about 5,000 patients a year and has treated children from all 50 states and more than 70 countries. Families do not pay beyond what insurance covers, and those without insurance are never asked to pay. This year, the American Lebanese Syrian Associated Charities (ALSAC), which functions as the fund-raising arm of St. Jude, will bring in about $530 million in public donations. ALSAC CEO John Moses says 85 cents of every dollar raised goes to the hospital, covering 70% of the hospital’s expenses—which include health care and research costs and on-campus patient lodging, food and travel expenses.

That’s a taste of what’s going on at the institution Evans leads. But consider a few more numbers.

St. Jude’s operating costs are more than $1 million a day. Annual expenses total about $420 million, and the hospital employs more than 3,000 people, representing payroll of about $200 million a year.

Such facts and figures suggest that whether intended or not, somewhere along the way Evans stumbled into the realm of the business world. At some point between 1972, when he walked through St. Jude’s doors as a UT School of Pharmacy graduate student, and 2004, when he became the institution’s fifth director and CEO, Evans not only became a businessman, but became quite a good one.

Regardless of how he sees himself, the fact remains that Evans leads one of Tennessee’s most recognized and lauded institutions. He’s armed with the experience of conducting research within St. Jude’s infrastructure and the perspective that comes from working under all four of his predecessors.

“He’s our leader,” says Marlo Thomas, who, as St. Jude’s public outreach director, has been the face of the institution since her father Danny Thomas died in 1991. “He is the one who helps us set our strategic plan for the next five or 10 years. The board has to approve it, but he has to have the vision for maintaining the mission and keeping us on track.”

Sitting in his office—among framed photos of Danny Thomas with Elvis, Marlo Thomas with some St. Jude patients, and a younger picture of himself with third director Joe Simone and Danny Thomas—Evans explains that he never intended to become No. 1 at St. Jude. In high school, the Clarksville, Tenn., native, who liked chemistry and biology, took a part-time job in an apothecary shop that sparked an interest in health care and pharmacy. After earning a bachelor of science degree at UT Memphis, Evans attended the UT College of Pharmacy, through which he conducted a project with a professor at St. Jude and discovered his passion for research. In 1976, he accepted a position at St. Jude as assistant professor, thinking he’d stay at the hospital for about six years. By 1986, he was the chair of the hospital’s pharmaceutical department. In 2002, he was named scientific director and executive vice president. Two years later, he became the second internal appointment and the first non-MD to take the helm.

“I think I ended up [as director] in part because I am very comfortable listening to other people and trying to extract from those folks the best approach or idea and some sort of consensus,” Evans says. “But I’m not afraid at some point to pull the trigger if there’s not a consensus, and the decision has to be made. I’m also comfortable surrounding myself with people who are smarter and better than I am.”

Words reminiscent of any savvy, self-effacing executive. But Evans, remember, is a scientist. He’s won several national awards for his research and authored more than 300 articles and book chapters. Even as director, he oversees the people and work being done in his lab and publishes papers in scientific and medical literature. He says his experience in the scientific realm has been helpful in his director role because it allows him to identify where improvements are necessary, better explain St. Jude’s mission to the public and convince the board of directors when a particular direction is beneficial.

Still, his modesty surfaces here, too, as he claims the best scientists do not fall into the administrative track. Regardless, others say his scientific background, coupled with his natural leadership ability, make him the perfect St. Jude CEO.

“You just have to be around Bill for a few minutes to sense his passion for what he does,” says Larry Jensen, president of Memphis brokerage firm Commercial Advisors, who served on the Memphis Area Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors with Evans. “He wants to engage you as an individual and make you understand what St. Jude is doing.”

Bill Troutt, president of Rhodes College, describes Evans, who is on Rhodes’ Board of Trustees, as “one of the most gifted leaders I have ever worked with.”

“He embodies all the qualities of the most successful academic leaderss—vision, energy, passion, intelligence, general concern for others,” Troutt says. “He always quickly moves to the core of even the most complex issues.”

Marlo Thomas says Evans is an excellent listener who is fair and well-respected by St. Jude faculty and has a “good eye” for recruiting talented people to join the organization. That can be difficult when the competition includes academic institutions in Boston, New York and San Francisco, but both Thomas and Evans agree that recruiting the best and brightest is a CEO responsibility that is critical to St. Jude’s mission.

“If you find an outstanding doctor or scientist, what they want is a place where they can do their best work,” Evans says. “They all think they’ve got the big discovery somewhere inside them—the new treatment, the new breakthrough—but they recognize that they have to be in a place where they can do that. They have to have the resources, colleagues, equipment, support and the facilities.”

With Evans leading the charge, St. Jude, which was ranked No. 1 in The Scientist magazine’s “2006 Best Places to Work in Academia,” is doing more than just a few things right. And children with cancer are not the only ones reaping the benefits. Memphis and the state of Tennessee profit not only from the intellectual capital St. Jude attracts, but also from the fact that more than 90% of the money ALSAC raises for St. Jude comes from outside Tennessee but is spent here.

Despite St. Jude’s progress, Evans cautions that cancer is still the leading cause of death by disease in U.S. children. He recently led St. Jude through the strategic planning process, and the 2006-2011 plan contains several lofty goals. One goal is to increase the overall cure rate of childhood cancers in the U.S. from 70% to 90%. The institution would like to accomplish that alongside a companion goal—the discovery of new, child-specific cancer drugs that are less toxic and more effective.

“There are some amongst our leadership who said, ‘You have set the goal too high,’ and ‘We’re not going to get to 90% in 10 years,’” Evans says. “I think that if you don’t set the goal high, you’ll never get there. So, I say let’s set it high, and if we fail because we get to 88% or 87%, we still have made a lot of progress.”

For St. Jude, cure rate is the equivalent of a public company’s share price, and it’s how Evans measures success. “We have five million donors that we know about that support St. Jude in some way or another,” he says. “Those are our investors. Those are our shareholders. We don’t have stock, so they don’t want to see our share price go up because that doesn’t exist. They’re investing money in St. Jude, and the return on that investment is a rising cure rate.”

St. Jude is investing $50 million over the next five years to set up a department that identifies candidate drugs for treating childhood cancer. In the past, doctors have been able to use adult cancer drugs for children because they were non-specific, but because the latest therapies are highly targeted to attack specific genetic abnormalities in cancer cells, they are not likely to work on child tumors. “If you’re the CEO of pick your big pharmaceutical company, you want to make a profit and make the share price go up, and therefore you’re going to develop new anti-cancer drugs for breast cancer, lung cancer, prostate cancer—the ones that have 100,000 cases a year.”

To eliminate that void, St. Jude plans to pioneer the discovery of new drugs, taking them through the preclinical models and then handing them off to a small pharmaceutical or biotechnology company with the idea that once St. Jude removes the risk, these companies are more likely to produce a drug that may only yield $25 or $50 million a year.

For Evans, it’s about doing what others can’t or won’t do. It’s about remaining a dynamic institution that’s willing to redefine itself to stay ahead of the pack. Evans recently discovered a book—Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne—that supports his vision for St. Jude. “Pick two entities—it could be two computer makers,” Evans explains, walking to his desk to get the book. “Both are fighting to be slightly better than the other, and they spend all their time worrying about their competition. The alternative is to create an institution that does things completely differently than anybody else. You do not try to compete against the nearest competitor—you try to strike out on new waters.”

Sure, Evans is a scientist. He’s also a father and a grandfather. An accomplished ballroom dancer. And a husband who has been married to Mary Relling, a fellow St. Jude faculty member with her own long list of accomplishments, for about 20 years. He lives and breathes St. Jude’s mission. He practically embodies it. But make no mistake—he’s a businessman, too. And a fine one at that.