Pharma Veterans

Interview Excerpts Ex-CEO Novartis – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #1077 Dear Colleagues! This is Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #1077 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. Dr. Daniel Vasella Credit: Edmond Dantès Credit: Tiger Lily Preamble Dr. Daniel Vasella M.D. held several medical positions in Switzerland before he was hired in 1988 by Sandoz Pharmaceutical Corporation, the former US subsidiary of the Swiss company, Sandoz Pharma Limited. In 1992, he was promoted as the CEO of the parent Sandoz company. Vasella was instrumental in the merger between Sandoz and Ciba-Geigy, another Swiss company, to form Novartis in 1996, which is now the fifth largest pharmaceutical company in the world. He was appointed CEO of the new entity in 1996 and was named Chairman of the Board of Directors in 1999. In 2010, Vasella stepped do...

Navigation Plan for CEOs and Top Executives 2 – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #1059 Dear Colleagues! This is Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #1059 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 is in continuation with the previous post. The key information and excerpts are taken from McKinsey article. Link at the end. #3 – Leadership Mobilization Checklist • Team Composition – Is my senior team the right size, comprising people with complementary skills and characterized by an ‘enterprise first’ mind? Tough question. A group of high performers becomes truly effective only when its members’ skills complement one another. If it is so, then the overall performance will be bigger than the sum of individual performances. When Asher-Topilsky became the CEO of IDB bank, it was un...

Navigation Plan for CEOs and Top Executives – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #1058 Dear Colleagues! This is Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #1058 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: Rene Terp Credit: Tima Miroshnichenko Preamble I am very impressed with the quality and range of work done by McKinsey &Co. The reports and articles generated by them are par excellence. They have published a great article in November last year in which they drilled down the learning taken from in-depth interviews of many of the most successful CEOs of current times and converted it into a checklist of 18 questions, of which every CEO should have the answers. These questions are spread across 6 dimensions.  I would like to take this checklist and apply it to senior executives rather than CEO alone. In our pharma organizations, emplo...

CEOs at Work – Part 7 – Sum Up – Pharma Veterans’ Blog Post #544 by Asrar Qureshi Dear Colleagues!  This is Pharma Veterans’ Blog Post #544. Pharma Veterans welcome sharing of knowledge and wisdom by Veterans for the benefit of Community at large. Pharma Veterans Blog is published by Asrar Qureshi on WordPress, the top blog site. Please email to asrar@asrarqureshi.com for publishing your contributions here. Continued from Previous…… We have gone through various aspects of CEO job. It is time to sum up this discussion. The sum up of CEO role and responsibilities may be considered as follows. CEO is the most important position in an organization. The importance arises out of his/her role and responsibilities. The following attributes are critical for a successful CEO. Vision Vision always comes from the top. It sets the direction of the organization which everyone else is obliged to follow. Clarity, soundness, and breadth of vision are its strengths. Communicating the next critical s...

CEOs at Work – Part 5 – Other factors – Pharma Veterans’ Blog Post #543 by Asrar Qureshi Dear Colleagues!  This is Pharma Veterans’ Blog Post #543. Pharma Veterans welcome sharing of knowledge and wisdom by Veterans for the benefit of Community at large. Pharma Veterans Blog is published by Asrar Qureshi on WordPress, the top blog site. Please email to asrar@asrarqureshi.com for publishing your contributions here. Continued from Previous…… Much of other findings in Nohria-Porter study do not resonate with Pakistan landscape. We may have large corporations by our standards, but we do not have large corporations operating globally. Some groups in Pakistan are really big in turnover, but their management practices are not at the same level as those of global CEOs. Our challenges are that we still work with tools, thinking and methods which date back from a long time. We are not even desirous of changing it. The biggest argument against change is that our employees also live in old tim...

CEOs at Work – Part 5 – Time Allocation – Pharma Veterans’ Blog Post #542 by Asrar Qureshi Dear Colleagues!  This is Pharma Veterans’ Blog Post #542. Pharma Veterans welcome sharing of knowledge and wisdom by Veterans for the benefit of Community at large. Pharma Veterans Blog is published by Asrar Qureshi on WordPress, the top blog site. Please email to asrar@asrarqureshi.com for publishing your contributions here. Continued from Previous…… Nitin Nohria and Michael Porter study [link appears at the end] is a very revealing study, and we need to dig more into it. Let us look at some further findings. Emails CEOs are incessantly copied in emails. Most of these are supposed to be for information only. A small percentage really requires some action. However, the CEOs may feel pressured to respond because ignoring would appear to be rude. The risk in unmeasured response is that it may draw them unnecessarily into certain operational matters which they should not otherwise get entangled...

CEOs at Work – Part 4 – Time Management – Pharma Veterans’ Blog Post #541 by Asrar Qureshi Dear Colleagues!  This is Pharma Veterans’ Blog Post #541. Pharma Veterans welcome sharing of knowledge and wisdom by Veterans for the benefit of Community at large. Pharma Veterans Blog is published by Asrar Qureshi on WordPress, the top blog site. Please email to asrar@asrarqureshi.com for publishing your contributions here. Nitin Nohria Michael E. Porter Continued from Previous…… Nitin Nohria, a dean at Harvard Business School, and Michael E. Porter, a professor at Harvard Business School, are well-known to management students and practitioners. Several years ago, both launched a study to understand what CEOs actually did on and off job.  The study design was to track the entire activities of a CEO 24/7 at 15 minutes intervals for 13 weeks. It was a tall order, but they were able to enlist a number of willing CEOs and their executive assistants. Porter and Nohria collected 60,000 hour...

CEOs at Work – Part 3 – Time Spending vs Effectiveness – Pharma Veterans’ Blog Post #540 by Asrar Qureshi Dear Colleagues!  This is Pharma Veterans’ Blog Post #540. Pharma Veterans welcome sharing of knowledge and wisdom by Veterans for the benefit of Community at large. Pharma Veterans Blog is published by Asrar Qureshi on WordPress, the top blog site. Please email to asrar@asrarqureshi.com for publishing your contributions here. Continued from Previous…… There is a huge body of work on CEOs, on their role, leadership, style, time management, effectiveness, inspiration, and much more. The reason for extended focus is because the role of CEO is extremely important. In today’s post, I shall present to you some findings from a survey published in Harvard Business Review in October 2017. [Link appears at the end] The survey was conducted by Oriana Bandiera, Stephen Hansen, Andrea Prat, and Raffaella Sadun. They have done plenty of work on this subject and we referred to one of their r...

CEOs at Work – Part 2 – Celebrity CEOs – Pharma Veterans’ Blog Post #539 by Asrar Qureshi Dear Colleagues!  This is Pharma Veterans’ Blog Post #539. Pharma Veterans welcome sharing of knowledge and wisdom by Veterans for the benefit of Community at large. Pharma Veterans Blog is published by Asrar Qureshi on WordPress, the top blog site. Please email to asrar@asrarqureshi.com for publishing your contributions here. Continued from Previous…… If you go back 50-60 years, no one knew the name of the CEOs of even very large corporations. During 1960s and 70s, we used to hear about 22 families who were dominating the business in Pakistan and were alleged to have accumulated the most wealth. The families included Saigols, Adamjees, Dadabhoys, Dawoods etc. These families were into multiple business lines. However, no one knew who the CEO of PEL or Lawrencepur mills or Dawood-Hercules were. India had its Tatas and Birlas, but it was the same situation everywhere. Jack Welch and Andy Grove a...

CEOs at Work – Part 1 - Family Firms– Pharma Veterans’ Blog Post #538 by Asrar Qureshi Dear Colleagues!  This is Pharma Veterans’ Blog Post #538. Pharma Veterans welcome sharing of knowledge and wisdom by Veterans for the benefit of Community at large. Pharma Veterans Blog is published by Asrar Qureshi on WordPress, the top blog site. Please email to asrar@asrarqureshi.com for publishing your contributions here. Statistics say that almost all businesses start as family business. Later, some choose to go public while majority stays as family business. In the US, going public is popular, but even there 90% businesses are family businesses. For example, Wal-Mart which is a giant at 485 billion US$ in turnover and 2.3 million employees, is still a family business. Recently, I came across a study survey titled ‘Managing the Family Firm: Evidence from CEOs at Work’. The authors include Oriana Bandiera of London School of Economics, Andrea Prat of Columbia University and Raffaella Sadun o...