“Model Excellence, Everybody, Every Day.”
Christopher Temple is an accomplished operations executive, transformation leader, and strategic advisor with more than 20 years of professional experience driving organizational performance, operational excellence, and sustainable business improvement. His career has been defined by an ability to enter complex environments, establish clear priorities, engage teams around a common purpose, and translate strategy into measurable results. Across medical devices, life sciences, defense, consumer products, industrial manufacturing, and other highly demanding operating environments, Christopher has developed a reputation for adaptive, results-oriented leadership. His personal philosophy, “Model Excellence, Everybody, Every Day,” reflects his belief that lasting organizational performance begins with leaders who consistently demonstrate the standards, behaviors, and accountability they expect from others.
Throughout his career, Christopher has progressed through engineering, manufacturing, continuous improvement, operations, and executive leadership roles, giving him an unusually comprehensive understanding of how organizations create value from the production floor to the executive suite. His expertise encompasses Lean transformation, operational excellence, strategic deployment, process improvement, P&L leadership, quality systems, root-cause analysis, product development, talent development, and cross-functional team leadership. Rather than approaching transformation as a collection of isolated initiatives, Christopher focuses on aligning people, processes, operating systems, and strategic objectives so that improvements become embedded in the organization. His ability to connect high-level strategy with disciplined execution has enabled him to lead transformations involving businesses of dramatically different sizes, ownership structures, industries, and stages of development.
Most recently, Christopher served as Chief Operating Officer of Helix Linear Technologies, a manufacturer of high-precision linear motion solutions serving automation, medical, aerospace, and defense markets. As an operations executive responsible for business transformation, he implemented a companywide Lean turnaround strategy that improved on-time delivery by 40%, reduced idle hours by 41%, and increased total units shipped by 45%. A focused asset-productivity initiative produced a 65% departmental productivity improvement and contributed to a 23% increase in companywide finished goods production. He also advanced quality-at-the-source practices, reducing internal nonconformances by 66% and decreasing disposition time by 98%. His leadership extended into emerging technology as well, where an artificial intelligence adoption strategy dramatically reduced quotation and material-sourcing cycle times while enhancing onboarding and safety-investigation processes.
Before Helix, Christopher served as President of FYF-JB, a private-equity-backed portfolio of consumer brands that included Jolly Pets, Horsemen’s Pride, and Barker Beds. In that role, he was responsible for delivering growth strategies across a business serving B2B, direct-to-consumer, and e-commerce channels. His companywide Lean turnaround generated a 70% productivity improvement, moved on-time delivery from 22% to 98%, reduced customer complaints by 54%, and cut standard lead time by 50%. Christopher also led a targeted commercial initiative that produced a 31% year-over-year revenue increase, a 55% improvement in EBITDA, and a 4.2-times increase in new-product revenue. His integration leadership following an acquisition generated $1.67 million in cost savings while improving product margins, productivity, and space utilization, demonstrating his capacity to combine operational discipline with commercial and financial value creation.
Christopher’s leadership experience in life sciences further broadened his perspective on operating in complex, highly regulated environments. At Athersys, he advanced through senior operations leadership and ultimately served as Vice President of Operations. He led a clinical operations transformation that increased monthly site activation from approximately 0.75 to five sites per month, doubled year-over-year monthly site enrollment, and reduced costs by $5 million versus budget. He also helped improve the first-pass yield of the company’s flagship product from 63% to 80% by developing a companywide root-cause analysis model, protecting approximately $1.8 million in batches. These experiences strengthened his ability to apply disciplined operational thinking in environments where quality, innovation, regulatory considerations, financial stewardship, and organizational agility must operate together.
Earlier, as Director of Operations with Georgia-Pacific, Christopher held P&L leadership responsibility for a $106 million manufacturing operation with more than 200 employees. Charged with leading a turnaround environment, he had responsibility spanning safety, quality, manufacturing, process engineering, logistics, finance, and continuous improvement. His nine-month transformation effort improved key-asset productivity by 38%, increased sitewide production by 16%, and generated approximately $4 million in annualized EBIT contribution improvement. He also developed a daily management system that reduced sitewide turnover by 53% and first-year turnover by 68%; the system proved sufficiently effective to be adopted across approximately 40 sites. His work demonstrates a leadership style that views operational performance and workforce engagement as complementary rather than competing priorities.
Christopher developed significant medical-device and international operating experience during his years with STERIS. His responsibilities ranged from manufacturing and site operations leadership to multi-site continuous improvement, including work with diagnostic, therapeutic, and support products for the GI endoscopy market. As an Operations Director in São Paulo, Brazil, he led the turnaround of a steam sterilizer manufacturing operation serving dental and hospital markets. His efforts improved on-time delivery from 74% to 98%, reduced occupied floor space by 25%, significantly lowered customer complaints, generated millions of Brazilian reais in annualized savings, and improved product gross margin from 17% to 38%. His experience living and leading in Brazil, combined with fluency in Portuguese, provides Christopher with a valuable international perspective and an appreciation for the cultural awareness required to lead effectively across borders.
Christopher’s foundation in medical-device manufacturing was also shaped at Avery Dennison, where he held operations leadership responsibility within an ISO 13485 medical-device environment. There, he led safety, quality, service, productivity, and cost-reduction objectives while supporting product launches, production performance, and cross-functional improvement initiatives. Earlier in his career, his engineering experience included manufacturing and continuous improvement work associated with defense programs, including the TOW, AIM-9X, and JSOW missile programs. Together, these roles provided a technical and operational foundation that continues to inform his executive decision-making, particularly when evaluating manufacturing systems, quality, risk, product development, and execution challenges.
At the center of Christopher’s leadership philosophy is the conviction that transformation succeeds when people understand the objective, see leaders model the desired behaviors, and are empowered to solve problems. His expertise in Lean manufacturing, Six Sigma, value-stream thinking, Kaizen, continuous improvement, operational excellence, quality systems, and cross-functional leadership gives him a substantial technical toolkit, but his career demonstrates that he uses those disciplines in service of broader organizational goals. He is particularly skilled at establishing achievable objectives that align with business strategy, building management systems that make performance visible, and moving difficult problems toward resolution even when circumstances are uncertain. His approach combines analytical rigor with a strong emphasis on coaching, accountability, talent development, and organizational engagement.
Christopher earned a Bachelor of Science in Manufacturing Engineering and Technology from Brigham Young University, providing the technical foundation for a career that has continually expanded in scope and responsibility. His international exposure includes extensive experience in Brazil and South America, and he is fluent in Portuguese in both oral and written communication. He is also affiliated with the Association for Manufacturing Excellence, connecting his professional interests with a broader community dedicated to enterprise excellence and continuous improvement. His experience communicating transformation concepts also extends beyond the workplace, including participation in a podcast focused on improving profits through Lean principles.
Christopher is pursuing board and advisory opportunities because he believes the lessons accumulated through decades of transformation leadership can create value beyond a single operating role. He brings firsthand experience leading organizations through turnarounds, growth initiatives, integrations, operational challenges, cultural change, quality improvement, and strategic execution. For boards overseeing medical-device, defense, consumer-goods, manufacturing, life-sciences, or other operationally intensive businesses, his perspective can help bridge the critical space between strategy and implementation. He understands not only how to identify opportunities for improvement, but also how leadership teams can establish the systems, behaviors, metrics, and accountability necessary to convert those opportunities into sustainable enterprise value.
His board-level value proposition is ultimately grounded in execution. Christopher has repeatedly worked in environments where organizations needed more than recommendations—they needed leaders capable of translating ambitious objectives into practical operating models and measurable outcomes. His combination of executive leadership, engineering discipline, international experience, Lean expertise, commercial awareness, and transformation experience enables him to examine challenges from multiple perspectives while remaining focused on results. Whether advising an organization through growth, operational transformation, integration, quality improvement, leadership development, or strategic deployment, Christopher brings a disciplined commitment to creating organizations in which excellence becomes an everyday expectation rather than an occasional initiative.
Character:
Christopher leads through accountability, consistency, and a belief that leaders must personally model the standards they expect throughout an organization. His commitment to “Model Excellence, Everybody, Every Day” reflects a leadership philosophy centered on empowering people, sustaining improvement, and building cultures in which performance and personal responsibility reinforce one another.
Knowledge:
He combines deep expertise in operations, Lean transformation, manufacturing, quality, strategic deployment, and process improvement with experience spanning medical devices, life sciences, consumer products, industrial manufacturing, and defense. His progression from engineering and manufacturing roles to P&L and executive leadership gives him practical insight into both the technical mechanisms and organizational dynamics that drive enterprise performance.
Strategic:
Adept at converting strategic objectives into operating systems, measurable priorities, and disciplined execution, with a record of improving productivity, margins, delivery, quality, safety, growth, and profitability. His experience with turnarounds, acquisitions, business integrations, growth strategies, and international operations enables him to assess opportunities holistically while maintaining a clear focus on sustainable value creation.
Communication:
Christopher has led and influenced employees, managers, executives, cross-functional teams, and international workforces through significant periods of organizational change. His communication style emphasizes clarity of purpose, visible performance expectations, coaching, and alignment, helping diverse stakeholders understand not only what must change but how their individual contributions support the broader organizational mission.
