Behave, Pharma: Why Culture Is Top Of The List

Pharma Leaders Highlight Company Culture As A Crucial Ingredient For Success

Dec 11 2019

• By Melanie Senior

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Drug pricing and access issues expose the pharmaceutical sector especially acutely to calls for companies to meet ethical and social goals, alongside commercial ones. Digital is up-ending pharma’s processes, its workplaces and its consumers. R&D productivity is spluttering. Amid this turmoil, CEOs highlight company culture – the way an organization behaves – as a crucial ingredient for success. But what is a “right” culture? Organizational culture is neither static nor singular. It is continuously influenced by acquisitions, markets, new technologies and new generations. And pharma’s history suggests that culture change cannot happen without sufficient people change.

Change — Culture change still needed in big pharma • Source: Shutterstock

It is not enough to have the cleverest scientists, the best technology or the fairest prices. These days – perhaps more than ever before – culture may be the most important ingredient in pharmaceutical companies’ success. “Defining the kind of culture you want in the organization is absolutely fundamental,” said Emma Walmsley, CEO of GlaxoSmithKline PLC, at the FT Global Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology conference in London, November 2019. “Structural changes in R&D are not that significant. Spending time moving around the deckchairs … can be enormously disruptive.”

She did not explicitly mention the multiple R&D re-shuffles at GSK, which dragged on for about 15 years after the...

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