Four Practices To Grow A Pharma Enterprise Mindset

Imagine that your company is getting ready to launch a new oncology therapy. While you have strong clinical data, HCPs are concerned about reimbursement challenges and limited real-world evidence tied to long-term outcomes. They also want clearer guidance on patient selection criteria.  

To launch well, you must address these challenges holistically across medical affairs, sales, marketing, and market access. But your departments work in silos, risking misaligned messaging and missed opportunities.  

“Even though we try to work together,” said a pharma industry sales training manager at a recent Amplity Learn workshop, “Things still get lost in translation between training, sales, med affairs, and brand. It’s a constant cycle of realigning.”  

Master the Pharma Matrix Through Enterprise Mindset 

With stringent regulations, multiple moving parts across brands, and an ongoing competitive environment, pharma departments must coordinate to succeed.  

The key is enterprise mindset. That’s the ability to see how your work fits into the larger company goals. This is essential for senior leaders, and surprisingly important for individuals at all levels.  

When done consistently, enterprise thinking and cross functional collaboration leads to: 

• Greater efficiency: breaking down siloes reduces duplication of effort. 

• Greater customer focus: efforts become aligned around the needs of HCPs, patients and other stakeholders.  
• Creative problem solving.

Enterprise mindset won’t happen without effort. Here are four practices to build your capacity: 

1. Read up on your company mission and goals 

• Is your company publicly-traded? Read the annual report and chair’s letter to stockholders.  

• For either private or public companies, seek to understand the annual business plan and departmental goals. What constitutes success for each part of your organization and your organization as a whole, this year? What is the strategic road map of your organization?  

2. Seek to Understand the Larger Organizational Eco-system  

Many of us may have a mental model of a company as an industrial production line, with a product ‘proceeding’ through different phases of development and popping out into the market. The truth is, companies are more like biological systems, with each part dependent on and interacting with others.  

The paradox is that we are incredibly dependent on the larger system, while each part of the system is also very specialized and functionally focused.  

Does your HR department have an organizational chart? If so, study it. If not, ask your direct manager for a better understanding of business units. Then ask yourself: 

• How does each part fit into the whole?  What are their key responsibilities? 

• Which parts of the business drive profit, and which are cost centers?  

• Where are the feedback loops? 

3. Learn About Other Business Functions and Cultivate Cross-functional Relationships 

Each business function has its own language, skills, competencies, sub-culture, and mental models. If culture is broadly defined as, ‘the way we do things around here,’ challenge yourself to learn culture of a different department. 

• Schedule a 1:1 with someone in another department, just to get to know them. Learn about their day-to-day activities.  

• At your next company off-site, sit with a person from another team, and be genuinely curious about what they do.  

4. View Your Company and Products From a Patient’s Perspective   

Pharma companies have many customers: prescribers, pharmacists, pharmacy benefit managers, managed care organizations, researchers, shareholders, regulators, and most importantly, patients and their families.  

Consider what each stakeholder wants and expects from your organization, because customers certainly don’t look at our organizations within our departmental siloes.   

Embrace the Complexity of Enterprise Thinking 

Developing an enterprise mindset isn’t easy, especially within large pharma companies with distributed workforces and, potentially, regulatory barriers between functions.  

It takes deliberate work to set aside functional priorities and gain a larger view.   

So start small. The next time you’re about to begin a project or set goals, shift your perspective from “What do I need to achieve?” to “What does the organization need to achieve, and how can I contribute?”