Pixar’s Catmull has some good advice for pharma execs
Pixar
I am always on the prowl for, and rarely find, truly new management ideas that can be applied to drug R&D. Usually, ideas held out as new really aren’t, they’re just rehashed ideas, sometimes supported by new evidence. Sometimes, though, used ideas that are stated well and in new ways can be just as valuable.
Take the September 2008 essay by Pixar’s co-founder and president, Ed Catmull, in this month’s HBR (currently posted without subscription req.). Mr. Catmull drops more than a few pearls for others to find as he tells how he and his staff have managed to keep Pixar (and now also Disney Animation) creatively and commercially successful since inception in 1995, despite a pronounced growth in both budget and staff.
The analogy between movie development and drug development isn’t as far-fetched as you might suppose. Both endeavors begin with an initial creative idea from one or two individuals that must be developed and refined with the addition of thousands of additional ideas from dozens or even hundreds of people with various arcane and often unrelated skills. The development cycle is relatively long in both endeavors, as compared with, say, a consumer disposable or software product. Both industries are risky. Although Pixar has been very successful, it’s counterparts often struggle to make money, and like big pharma, they typically rely on a few blockbusters for the majority of their profits. Both industries strive for novelty, knowing that novel product is often more commercially successful (more likely to be a blockbuster), because of a higher probability of providing more of what customers want–in the case of Pixar that would be escape, fun, relaxation and the like and in the case of drugs, a longer life, better health, equal health at lower cost, etc.
Pixar films
Some of Catmull’s most valuable insights (italics) and my comments on each follow:
Creativity must be present at every level of every artistic and technical part of the organization.
Same is true for pharma. There is always room for improvement in every task and process no matter how mundane, and such improvements, even when aided by statistical crutches like Six Sigma, require creative indivduals willing to put up new ideas for consideration by management.
Executives have to resist the tendency to avoid or minimize risks.
Right on. Originality, whether in discovery or development, process or product, requires risk-taking. Big risk-taking in these businesses. The solution for managers who can’t escape their risk-averse tendencies is to channel them into risk management via portfolio management and technology sourcing initiatives that help ensure that risk is being “spent” in the right places and at the right times and that the riskiest bets are appropriately hedged. Also, as Catmull states, executives need to prepare for and recover gracefully from expected frequent failures.
Smart people are more important than good ideas.
Should go without saying, but I’d bet a lot of life science executives believe the opposite. As Catmull argues, and I second, good ideas are needed all along the movie-making/pharma R&D value chain, not just at the beginning. A few good ideas can be bought, but continual production of good ideas can’t be bought; they must be home grown and that takes nurturing of many “smart” people. Catmull sums up this well-worn idea plainly: “If you give a good idea to a mediocre team they will screw it up; if you give a mediocre idea to a great team they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something that works.”
It’s okay to hire people who are smarter than you are.
Managers are intimated by people who assertively espouse their own ideas, especially if their ideas are atypical or foreign, or if they are presented in atypical ways. It’s normal for managers to feel intimidated, but the tendency to avoid hiring (and promoting) assertively creative people must be avoided. Hiring managers must strive to bring together the “smartest”, most creative people they can find. This means hiring people who can challenge the status quo, often folks who provoke reactions like “I couldn’t relate” or “rubs me the wrong way” during first meetings with staff. Short of hiring people with frank personality or communication disorders, it’s important to bring aboard people of all personality and communication types who are capable of continually generating new ideas. Teaching poor communicators how to play well with others can be done after hiring.
Creative vision [for a project] comes from one or two people and not from either corporate executives or a development department.
In pharma, second-guessing of project champions by an entrenched bureaucracy is a problem (see my recent post on the subject here). Bureaucracy of this type must be dismantled to get the most of smart project leaders. Pharma must encourage more distributed decision-making and autonomous action by its project leaders. At Pixar the “brain trust” (equivalent to SVP-level functional leads in pharma) provide advice to directors and their teams; such advice isn’t mandatory and the brain trust has no authority over a movie director. Therefore, directors feel free to go to the trust for advice. This is the type of senior management leadership system is needed in pharma. Creative people don’t need to be told what to do. They need to be given a guide for what is expected from them in the end, and it should be almost solely up to them how to get there. If the senior management can’t trust its project leaders this way, it needs to hire better people.
Encourage people in different disciplines to treat each other as peers by sharing work in progress.
This is happening more in pharma with matrixed project teams, but there are still silos where work is kept hidden until it reaches a state of completion (usually success; failures often remain hidden). All functional groups that contribute to drug registration and launch, including discovery and marketing, need to be folded into the extended team matrix, and all relevant project information shared. Feedback on progress needs to be given and accepted.
Encourage people in similar disciplines to treat one another as peers by dismantling barriers to communication.
I love this one. One of the worst things that has happened to pharma R&D organizations is the construction of communication walls between the R and the D. These must come down! Scientists at all pay levels must feel free to communicate with each other without barriers imposed by management. There should be no restrictions to the free flow of ideas. Indeed, the free flow of ideas must be encouraged by use of technologies that improve access to explicit knowledge (e.g. structured documents) and that promote expansion of tacit knowledge (e.g. IM, chat rooms, etc).
Stay close to innovations happening in academia.
This practically goes without saying for pharma now, as just about every large company has some internal academic collaborations group, but the industry needs to improve how it extracts value from academic collaborations without compromising the primary academic mission.
Do postmortems on projects and vary their format to uncover new lessons.
Postmortems in pharma are sometimes done, but they are usually done poorly in my experience. Lessons learned need to be generalized thematically, captured, and archived for use across the organization. Varying how postmortems are done is also a good idea.
Use process data to support people’s impressions of performance.
Measure. Measure. Measure. It’s hard to make any intelligent decisions in a complex, long-cycle environment without good data to guide and test them. Frankly, pharma is way behind many other industries when it comes to collecting process/performance data. The leader in this area might be IBM, although their level of indvidual data-gathering borders on paranoiac. Businessweek just did a book excerpt focused on IBM’s “numerati”.
Let new hires know that they’re encouraged to speak up with new ideas.
If you manage others and you want only one take-away from Pixar’s example it has to be this one. Hire people who can challenge the status quo and then encourage them to do so.
