Pharma Veterans

Major Shifts in Management Thinking Over Twenty Years – Shift #5 – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #1188 Dear Colleagues! This is Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #1188 for Pharma Veterans. Pharma Veterans Blogs are published by Asrar Qureshi on its dedicated site https://pharmaveterans.com. Please email to pharmaveterans2017@gmail.com  for publishing your contributions here. Credit: Kampus Production Credit: Mikhail Nilov Preamble This series shall explore major shifts in management thinking and paradigm shifts over the last twenty years. Shift 5 – From Leader as Controller to Distributed Leadership: Why Psychological Safety and Culture Now Drive Performance For most of the 20th century, leadership was defined by control. Leaders planned, directed, monitored, corrected. Managers were the brains; employees were the hands. This “leader as controller” model made sense in an era of predictable markets, slow technological change, and strict organizational hierarchies. Stability was the goal, and co...

Major Shifts in Management Thinking Over Twenty Years – Shift #4 – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #1187 Dear Colleagues! This is Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #1187 for Pharma Veterans. Pharma Veterans Blogs are published by Asrar Qureshi on its dedicated site https://pharmaveterans.com. Please email to pharmaveterans2017@gmail.com  for publishing your contributions here. Photo by Alex Shute on Unsplash Preamble This series shall explore major shifts in management thinking and paradigm shifts over the last twenty years. Shift #4 – From Stability to VUCA to Antifragility: How Leaders Must Evolve for a Turbulent World For most of the 20th century and even the early 2000s, leaders operated in business environments that were relatively predictable. Markets behaved logically, competitors were known, supply chains were stable, and planning cycles lasted years. Strategy was a linear exercise: analyze, decide, execute. Change happened, but it happened in slow, manageable waves. Then the world shift...

Major Shifts in Management Thinking Over Twenty Years – Shift #3 – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #1186 Dear Colleagues! This is Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #1186 for Pharma Veterans. Pharma Veterans Blogs are published by Asrar Qureshi on its dedicated site https://pharmaveterans.com. Please email to pharmaveterans2017@gmail.com  for publishing your contributions here. Credit: Lara Jameson Credit: Nataliya Vaitkevich Preamble This series shall explore major shifts in management thinking and paradigm shifts over the last twenty years. Shift 3: From Shareholder Primacy to Stakeholder Value For almost half a century, companies around the world operated under one dominant idea: the purpose of business is to maximize shareholder value. This philosophy, popularized by economist Milton Friedman in the 1970s, held that a company’s sole responsibility was to generate profits for its owners. Everything else, employees, environment, customers, and community, was secondary. This idea shaped corporat...

Major Shifts in Management Thinking Over Twenty Years – Shift #2 – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #1185 Dear Colleagues! This is Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #1185 for Pharma Veterans. Pharma Veterans Blogs are published by Asrar Qureshi on its dedicated site https://pharmaveterans.com. Please email to pharmaveterans2017@gmail.com  for publishing your contributions here. Credit: Andrea Piacquadio Preamble This series shall explore major shifts in management thinking and paradigm shifts over the last twenty years. From Fixed Strategy and Execution to Agile and Adaptive Learning Organizations For much of the 20th century, strategy was treated like architecture, something solid, detailed, and enduring. Senior executives gathered every few years to design a five-year plan, complete with market forecasts, production targets, and growth milestones. Once the blueprint was approved, execution teams were tasked with delivering it faithfully. The system rewarded precision and predictability. Strateg...

Major Shifts in Management Thinking Over Twenty Years – Shift 1 – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #1184 Dear Colleagues! This is Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #1184 for Pharma Veterans. Pharma Veterans Blogs are published by Asrar Qureshi on its dedicated site https://pharmaveterans.com. Please email to pharmaveterans2017@gmail.com  for publishing your contributions here. Credit: Polina Zimmerman Preamble This series shall explore major shifts in management thinking and paradigm shifts over the last twenty years. From Hierarchies and Control to Networks, Systems, and Ecosystems For over a century, organizations were built like machines, precise, hierarchical, and predictable. Managers sat at the top, issuing commands down a well-ordered pyramid. Employees were expected to execute those commands efficiently, with minimal deviation. It was a world of control, clarity, and compliance, one that worked well in an era of stability and scale. But the last twenty years have completely rewritten the ...

Novartis Pharma Exits from Pakistan – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post 1183 Dear Colleagues! This is Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post 1183 for Pharma Veterans. Pharma Veterans Blogs are published by Asrar Qureshi on its dedicated site https://pharmaveterans.com. Please email to pharmaveterans2017@gmail.com  for publishing your contributions here. Preamble This blog post summarizes the facts around the transaction, analyzing likely benefits and risks, and offering practical takeaways. Novartis Pakistan sold to IIL (Getz Group affiliate): what it means for the industry, patients and policy In May 2025 Novartis announced an agreement for its Pakistan business to be transferred to International Investment II Limited (IIL), an investment holding company affiliated with Muller & Phipps and part of the Getz Group, and in November 2025 Pakistan’s Competition Commission (CCP) completed a Phase-I review and authorized the transaction. The deal transfers control of Novartis Pharma (Pakistan) Limited fr...

Trust, Safety, and Shared Ownership – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #1182 Dear Colleagues! This is Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #1182 for Pharma Veterans. Pharma Veterans Blogs are published by Asrar Qureshi on its dedicated site https://pharmaveterans.com. Please email to pharmaveterans2017@gmail.com  for publishing your contributions here. Credit: Andres Ayrton Credit: fauxels Credit: Karola G Preamble This blog post is inspired by a quote taken from Corey Blake of https://roundtablecompanies.com . The quote is “People can’t own their 50% until they feel safe that the other party will own theirs too.” Trust, Safety, and Shared Ownership: The Hidden Equation Behind Every Relationship In every professional or personal relationship, we like to believe that fairness is simple. Each person does their part, contributes their share, and together things work. Yet, in reality, collaboration, whether between two people, teams, or entire organizations, often falters not because people won’t do the...

International Atomic Energy Agency Annual Report 2024 – Key Points – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #1181 Dear Colleagues! This is Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #1181 for Pharma Veterans. Pharma Veterans Blogs are published by Asrar Qureshi on its dedicated site https://pharmaveterans.com. Please email to pharmaveterans2017@gmail.com  for publishing your contributions here. Credit: EG Credit: Hassan Ahmad Credit: Vladimir Sladek Preamble This blog post is based on the Annual Report 2024 of International Atomic Energy Agency, presented to UN General Assembly in October 2025. Link to report at the end. IAEA 2024: From Peaceful Uses to Climate, Security and Development The IAEA is often associated with nuclear safeguards and non-proliferation. But the Agency’s 2024 review shows its scope increasingly reaches into clean energy, climate mitigation, health, food security, technical cooperation and global development. Here are the major take-aways: Expanding Technical Cooperation & Development...

ROI of Executive Coaching – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post 1180 Dear Colleagues! This is Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post 1180 for Pharma Veterans. Pharma Veterans Blogs are published by Asrar Qureshi on its dedicated site https://pharmaveterans.com. Please email to pharmaveterans2017@gmail.com  for publishing your contributions here. Credit: Sean P. Twomey Credit: Jacqueline Goncalves Credit: Joel Santos Credit: Lubomir Satkos Preamble This blog post is based on the insights from an INSEAD article. Link to report at the end. Beyond ROI: Why Executive Coaching Must Focus on Behavioral Change, Not Just Numbers When organizations invest in executive coaching, the first question is nearly always: What’s the ROI? How many extra units of profit, how much improvement in leadership scores, what increment in productivity can be traced back to six-or-twelve months of coaching? The INSEAD article pushes back hard against this numbers-first mindset. It argues that effective coaching is about transformati...