S teven Rales, along with his younger brother Mitchell Rales, is the co-founder of the industrial conglomerate Danaher Corporation. In the early 1980s, the brothers left their father's real estate business to pursue a then-unconventional strategy of using the principles of leveraged buyouts to acquire and consolidate small, niche industrial manufacturing companies. They developed a unique and highly effective management philosophy, the Danaher Business System (DBS), which is based on the Japanese principles of continuous improvement, or 'kaizen'.

Applying the DBS with rigorous discipline, the brothers built Danaher into a massive and highly profitable global science and technology powerhouse. They transformed the company by pivoting away from its industrial roots and focusing on acquiring companies in the higher-growth sectors of life sciences and diagnostics. In 2016, they spun off the company's remaining industrial businesses into a new entity, Fortive Corporation. Steven serves as the chairman of Danaher. In addition to his business career, he is a film producer and the founder of the independent film studio, Indian Paintbrush, which has produced numerous acclaimed films by director Wes Anderson.