“A lot of the most successful leaders in healthcare sitting in the C-suite often have strong … [+]
Lawyer-turned-journalist Alex Knapp has interviewed dozens of CEOs at global healthcare companies over the years as a Forbes Senior Editor who oversees healthcare coverage. What are the qualities that make for successful healthcare industry leadership, and who are some of the most impressive he’s had a chance to meet?
Knapp discussed those questions by video on Friday at a gathering in the Chinese city of Yixing, near Shanghai, at the “China Healthcare Breakthroughs: Transformative Leadership Summit.” The event was organized by Forbes China, the licensed Chinese-language edition of Forbes, and attracted approximately 200 industry leaders.
The first quality – often overlooked — is that an effective leader must have a firm grounding and understanding of science and not simply business, Knapp said. “A lot of the most successful leaders in healthcare sitting in the C-suite often have strong scientific training in their own right,” he observed. “That’s essential for making the decisions you have to make in order to meet the demands of healthcare here in the 21st century.”
Second, Knapp said, is openness to collaboration. “The healthcare industry is unique among industries in that there are a lot of collaborations between different companies in terms of drug development, distribution, manufacture, and other aspects of the industry,” Knapp observed. “That willingness and openness to collaboration is crucial to success.”
“Third,” he continued, “is a willingness to take risk. Healthcare can often be a very conservative industry because it’s an industry that deals with very long timetables. However, playing it too safe and too careful can leave you behind competitors who are more willing to innovate and more willing to follow the science where it leads.”
Fourth, Knapp said, is a patient focus even at the expense of profit. “Success in the healthcare industry really demands that you put care for patients and care for their health above growth and profit. And while that seems counterintuitive, it’s really the only way to ensure long-term success. It’s also best for the customers and best for the world at large.”
One example of industry leadership that struck Knapp came from Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla in connection with the development of a Covid vaccine. “We actually spoke with him early in the pandemic when he had made a decision to commit hundreds of millions of dollars of company resources into the development and manufacture of a vaccine,” Knapp said.
“That vaccine didn’t exist yet. They started to develop it in partnership and collaboration with BioNTech, a company that they had already been working with to develop treatments for other diseases. Through his leadership and through that commitment of resources — which was firmly grounded in the science that they already had — Bourla successfully led Pfizer to develop the first approved vaccine for Covid in the United States.”
Under the CEO Reshma Kewalramani’s leadership, Vertex Pharmaceuticals of Boston “has really taken a … [+]
Another example of healthcare leadership, Knapp said, came from Reshma Kewalramani, CEO of Boston-headquartered Vertex Pharmaceuticals. “Under her leadership, Vertex has really taken a lead in developing gene therapies for diseases in collaboration with other partners. And they’re really looking at diseases that are currently treated as chronic conditions — long term health care management (problems) which can consume a lot of time and resources.”
Through gene therapies, Vertex is pursuing “true cures for these disorders, meaning that patients could be liberated from constant treatment, from constant care for doctors, and able to live their own lives in better ways,” Knapp said. “They have several products in their pipeline that are really seeing some positive results. I’m excited to see what’s going to happen under her leadership.”
Knapp also cited successful leadership during Covid by Carl Hanson, CEO of AbCellera Biologics, a Canadian start-up that grew by helping Eli Lilly find antibodies to treat symptoms of Covid-19. Hanson, a university professor, used machine learning and other techniques to quickly identify therapeutics that he can then collaborate with bigger pharmaceutical companies on.
The flip side of successful leadership, Knapp said, is “notable failures, especially in the digital healthcare industry here in the United States. We’ve seen several healthcare companies who are founded by people who didn’t necessarily have a background in healthcare,” he said. Rather, “they did have a background software backed by investors who mostly didn’t have experience in health care or science, but primarily software.”
“Many of them prioritized growth above where they could sustain that growth and still be able to have revenue and provide care for patients,” Knapp said. “We’ve seen several notable companies have to lay people off, reduce the areas in which they’re able to offer services, and really leave their patients in the lurch, because the prioritized growth didn’t have a firm grounding in the science and in the healthcare industry. And as a result, many of those companies are facing serious challenges.”
Other event participants included Nisa Leung, managing partner at Qiming Venture Partners; Dr. Bob Li, physician ambassador to China and the Asia-Pacific at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Canter; Innocare CEO Jasmine Cui; Profex Chairman Pavlos Kontomichalos; AstraZeneca China President Leon Wang; MSD China President Anna Van Acker; Gilead Sciences China General Manager Jim Jin; and Bristol Myers Squibb China President Siyuan Chen.
Click here for the Chinese-language version of this post.
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