All Categories

For more than 27 years, I have been blessed to work with the same executive assistant. I know how long it’s been because Georgia started with me when my daughter, Ariel, was seven months old and, you guessed, she is now 27 (Ariel, that is).

This topic of “transition” came home to me (literally and figuratively) over the Thanksgiving holiday. With our adult kids returning, my husband and I decided it was time to have them go through their “bins” and throw out, donate, or take back with them, their childhood.

Networking! You know, that activity that one either embraces or goes running away from as quickly as possible. For many, the word evokes a grueling, overwhelming, unnatural process, and something that requires stepping way out of one’s comfort zone.

For those of you following closely (thank you!), you may recall that in an earlier e-conversation — 21st Century Commercialization — More than a Point in Time! — we defined commercialization as neither a function nor a process.

At your next company lunch and learn, try this experiment: Ask ten people from different functions to take a blank piece of flip chart paper (assuming you still have flip charts!). Then ask them to draw a picture of how key decisions are made in your organization.

Summer is a wonderful time for catching up on our reading – whether business, pleasure, or something in between. This month, we sought out recommendations from leaders in our biopharma ecosystem, which is why we are calling today’s e-conversation,“Reading Recommendations from the High Cs” (C-Suite, VCs, and Commercial Leaders in Biopharma).

Ah, June, the season of life transitions — weddings, graduations, school progression and, with the year nearly half over, a reminder to reflect on where we have been and where we are going in 2019.

Back in the early 2000s, I was head of commercial strategy at Millennium Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I remember saying to then CEO, Mark Levin, that we had an opportunity to define how the company vision, “Transcend the Limits of Medicine,” could be translated at the customer level.