I recently spoke at a fantastic Vanguard Network forum in Boston with a focus on Succeeding in the New Life Sciences’ Ecosystem. This forum brought together an incredible group of business leaders from across healthcare and life sciences to tackle some of the thorny issues faced by CEOs as these industries evolve.
At Straightline we partner with organizations in many sectors, with Health and Life Sciences as one of our strongest. This forum really evidenced a sector being confronted by more types of evolution than others. With the increasing levels of connectivity and digitalization, this industry is being forced to adapt to a new world. The old approaches of siloed companies, teams and innovation and the beliefs in a reduced focus on the corporate brand while blockbuster products take the limelight struggle to be relevant in this new landscape.
The fascinating talks and discussions covered many of the daunting tasks facing today’s Life Sciences CEOs: how to adapt as a leader, how to build the right teams and support the right technologies and routes to innovation, how to position and provide an unambiguous narrative to stressed capital markets and how to forge value-creation relationships in the new partnership economy.
To me, the theme that ran through all of these topics was the need for businesses, and their senior management to keep their eyes open to change, to give authentic meaning to their decisions and to deliver coherence in how they present these decisions. Specifically, balancing authenticity and coherence means that any organization needs a shared set of well-defined guiding principles that underpin the aligned and strategic decisions the brand makes.
The Life Sciences and Healthcare industries have historically been slow to invest in their corporate brand and, at this point in time, it is doubly important that they define genuine and meaningful Brand DNA and execute on this coherently for all their audiences.