Patrick Decker

Patrick Decker did not come to water from a lab or an engineering desk. He trained as an accountant, earned a degree in accounting and finance from Indiana University, started his career as an auditor at Price Waterhouse, and then spent two decades as a finance and operations executive, including a long run in the chief-financial-officer seat at Bristol-Myers Squibb's Mead Johnson business and nine years working across Latin America and Asia. By the time he ran Tyco Flow Control, a roughly four-billion-dollar piece of Tyco International, and then became CEO of Harsco, Patrick Decker had built a reputation for the unglamorous skill that water would soon need: taking a sprawling industrial business and making it run.

Patrick Decker became CEO of Xylem in March 2014, three years after the company was spun out of ITT as, in his own framing, a "pump company". Over the next decade he set about widening that definition. Xylem bought its way and built its way into smart metering, leak detection, analytics and digital services, and in 2023 it closed the biggest move of his tenure, a 7.5-billion-dollar all-stock acquisition of Evoqua that created the world's largest pure-play water-technology company, with around 7.3 billion dollars in revenue and roughly 22,000 employees. Patrick Decker is careful, though, about what that change was and was not, telling me on the podcast that the journey is "not over", and that the company is "never going to walk away from our core".

Patrick Decker's central argument about water is the one that separates him from the typical hardware CEO, because in his telling the binding constraint is not the technology, it is the money and the mindset. "The technologies and solutions do exist today to be able to address our water challenges at an affordable level," he argues, and the real work is convincing utilities, governments and the public that fixing water is not as ruinously expensive as they fear. Patrick Decker pushes hard on public-private partnerships and on redirecting far more federal infrastructure money toward water, and he is blunt that fear is the enemy, because "fear paralyzes, it causes political division", and what the sector needs instead is education around affordability. It is the kind of claim my Leviathan database keeps confirming across the water-tech landscape: the hard part is rarely the science.

Patrick Decker spent a striking share of his time as CEO not on operations but on the microphone, and he is explicit about why. He believes a business leader has a responsibility "not to remain quiet and on the sideline and focus only in on our own economic profits", but to become a platform and a voice for the cause. The clearest expression of that is the partnership Xylem struck in 2018 with the City Football Group, the owner of Manchester City, which by his account reached on the order of a billion people with water-awareness campaigns over four years, a third of them young. Since stepping down as CEO at the end of 2023, handing over to Matthew Pine, Patrick Decker has leaned further into that uplift mission, sitting on boards including Costa Rica's Universidad EARTH and Massachusetts Eye and Ear and describing himself simply as someone working to lift up young people through water, music and football. You can hear the full argument on his (don’t) Waste Water interview below.

“When we say, 'Let's solve water,' I always say, remove the apostrophe from our tagline, and it is, 'Let us solve water.' No one company or organization can do it on their own. We certainly can't.”

Patrick Decker is, in the end, the rare water leader who measured his decade in Xylem not only by revenue but by how many people he got to care about water at all, which is most of why his "Let us solve water" line outlived his tenure.