Digital Empowerment: The Key to Strategy Leadership
My first Reuters panel, alongside leaders from Pfizer, ViiV Healthcare and Novo Nordisk: how Medical steps into the strategic leadership role it glimpsed during the pandemic. I opened with a story from my own time as a patient that shows how deep the industry’s trust deficit really runs.
What were the key learnings?
The panel asked what outcomes Medical should lead towards beyond trust. My opening story: lying in resus after coming off my bike in 2020, I asked to see a medicine’s Summary of Product Characteristics before accepting it, and the treating doctor told me not to worry about what the pharmaceutical industry “puts in there to scare you”. One doctor saying that to another doctor is the scale of the trust problem the industry faces.
My main arguments: trust has to be built internally as well as externally, because colleagues quite reasonably ask whether digital will replace them. It will not; humans buy from and sell to humans, and digital supplements the human interaction rather than substituting for it. Create safe, pressure-free opportunities for medical and commercial colleagues to get comfortable in front of a camera, instead of spending millions on third parties to do it for us. And think in “day after tomorrow” terms: Medical creates long-term value inside yearly budget cycles, so find your senior sponsor and be ready to accelerate when the moment comes. My phrase from the stage: be like seaweed on a rock, hang in there, because it will change.
We also covered measuring the quality of engagement rather than substituting sales metrics, content that stands alone in its own right (a heart failure module I worked on at AstraZeneca was so useful that a national pharmacy chain hosted it free, just for the traffic), and Medical’s role in redesigning patient pathways before somebody outside the industry does it first.
