How Being ‘Like Water’ Helped One Man Revamp Medtronic’s 401(k) Plan

# Retirement Benefits

# People and Talent

Todd Thorsen’s yearslong persistence and patience eroded obstacles and flowed to a superior plan for participants.

From concept to completion, Todd Thorsen spent more than five years overhauling the 401(k) defined contribution plan at Medtronic. He wanted participants to have access to what the company offered in its pension plan—customized investment options that provided employees and retirees more diversification and flexibility at very low costs.

In a video you can watch by hitting the play button below, Mr. Thorsen says he approached the prolonged process with a combination of persistence—”I’m just going to wear people out”—and patience. He says his philosophy is to be like water that will eventually reach its level no matter how long it takes. “Water trickling down a hill, it just digs a hole. It eventually gets to where it wants to go,” he says. “I knew I was going to win. I just didn’t know when.”

To be clear, Mr. Thorsen knows that for treasury teams to win and achieve their goals on huge projects like revamping a 401(k), finance leaders must set a tone of close collaboration and cooperation with other functions, in this case, global benefits. In the video, he says the partnership resulted in “almost a quid pro quo with the benefits people—you’re going to get what you want; we’re going to get what we want from the investment perspective.”

Mr. Thorsen, a former NeuGroup member who left Medtronic in 2023 as senior managing director of global investments, is now CEO of Hunter, Keith Industries, a family-owned holding company where he oversees operations and private equity investments. But he remains an investor in Medtronic’s 401(k) plan.

“It’s performed really well,” he tells NeuGroup’s Antony Michels in a forthcoming episode of the Strategic Finance Lab podcast, available on Apple and Spotify . “So I’m still in it, even though I left Medtronic a year ago, because I really can’t replicate it anywhere else. So I’d be hard pressed to want to take my money out.”