Leadership and Transformation with Guy Hadari at Biogen

It's a pleasure to be here, to be on.

Okay, so my current role is the global CIO at Biogen. I guess everybody is familiar with Biogen. I've been the CIO almost two years. CIO is an interesting role, probably we will talk a lot about it in this podcast, but just as an introduction, Biogen is a global company. You can call it biotech and you can call it pharma, it's kind of in between I would say. So some would call it biotech, but it's not really a biotech, it's a grown-up biotech so to speak. A phenomenal company dealing with the most difficult, I would say, health areas around neuroscience and really, really tough things to crack. And I think that's exactly what is exciting in this company, the fact that they really try to touch areas and frontiers that nobody is really looking to address as well. So that's my current role now.

Oh, one piece. So it's interesting, I had a discussion with my team, part of my team, two days ago and somebody was asking me that question, actually one of the people there. And my piece of advice, but it's not fair because this advice comes from me after 60 years of experience, I mean since the day I was born. So it's not so fair, I'm not sure I would give this advice to people if I was 35 or 40 years old. But the piece of advice is: be careful from your comfort zone. Develop the comfort zone in life and especially in the professional life. Right, you have your comfort zone, I don't know what it is but I'm sure you do. I have my own comfort zone which took me 25 years to recognize what is my comfort zone and the fact that I actually do have a comfort zone. And I was battling with myself in the last 20 years how to get away from my comfort zone because if you give up your comfort zone, that's where you will stay. And if you evolve and develop yourself, whatever is your development plan, whether it's functional, managerial, leadership, technical, doesn't matter. The toughest thing is to address things with yourself and with your colleagues and your people and the environment in a way which is not coming out of your comfort zone. It sounds easy, for me it has been incredibly difficult. So if I need to pick one advice, that would be my advice.

Fear is one thing, all right? I am afraid as well, but then when I'm afraid I'm going back to my comfort zone. And the point is not just to identify the fear, the point is to identify, all right, what am I doing when I'm afraid? How do I handle that out from my comfort zone? And how should I get out of this comfort zone and handle it in a different way? So yeah, let's not reverse the order, you keep asking me questions, otherwise you'll find yourself analyzed.

Yeah, so nothing, absolutely nothing worked as planned. Nothing in my life. Well, disclaimer, and actually, you know, when young people, and I consider myself not to be old but let's call it experienced, okay? It's a nice way of putting it. They ask me about planning and how do you plan your next phase and career, etc. I said, guys, you can plan until tomorrow, things will happen to you. And the real trick is to be open enough to things that are coming at you, good or bad, and do something with it. Okay, so I didn't grow up wanting to be a CIO, honestly. I didn't know what a CIO is when I started. I started, believe it or not, I wanted to be a clinical psychologist. That's why I said be careful that we don't reverse the order here, watch yourself. But I went to the university, I did the BA, I didn't finish the master but I was really towards the end. I started the training as a clinical psychologist, so you know, I spent eight years thinking that's what I'm going to do. It's a big part of your life, especially when you are young. But in parallel I started to get interested in computers and statistics and stuff, and basically made it my livelihood while I was a student. You know, I was actually doing all the statistical analysis for the frightened students that were my friends that didn't want to do those kind of things. And lucky me, it paid my bills. And then I set up my own startup company which had nothing to do with psychology. At this point I left psychology after eight years, which is a long time. And then one thing led to another and I sold my company to a bigger company, and then this bigger company was actually, I sold it again, and then this company was sold to PricewaterhouseCoopers or PwC, you know, one of the big five, and then IBM acquired PwC. And suddenly from thinking I'm going to be either a clinical psychologist or a startup crazy guy, I found myself in the last place on Earth I'm not joking I really wanted to be. I didn't like corporate America, IBM is the mother of corporate America as you know. And every time I went by the IBM buildings when I was young I told myself I will never work in this place ever, ever. And then I found myself in IBM for eight years. Okay, so I was planning stuff but things were coming at me. And then the last thing before I will let you jump to your questions, so how did I become a CIO? I was supposed to be nominated as the CEO of IBM in Israel, that's where I grew up. And I was groomed and prepared and everything, you know, and I was really living the dream back then, I was going to be a CEO. And something happened, doesn't matter what, and somebody else came actually from abroad to be the CEO. That was the disaster of my life, like really, I really wanted to be a CEO. And I thought that's it, my career is over, right? And then I said, you know what, I'm going to approach Teva. You know, Teva is a huge pharma, generic pharma company. I went to Teva, I knew somebody at Teva, and I said I want to be your CIO. So the person that I met, he said, okay, have you ever been a CIO? No. Do you know something about pharma? Yeah, I go to the pharmacy and I... that's basically what I know. You know, and then all the questions he was asking me, I said no, I was never a CIO. He said why do you think you can be a CIO? And I gave some kind of an answer. They ran me through a whole source of evaluation and tests and you name it, and then I became a CIO. And trust me, I knew nothing. Honestly, the only thing I knew about CIO is the abbreviation. Well, I knew it because I was in technology in IBM, etc., so obviously I knew what it is, but I didn't know how to be the CIO. And here I'm getting into a, back then, 22, 23 billion dollar company, a giant, a monster, and I'm the CIO of the company. And then I said, well, what the hell did I do? How am I going to survive there? And that's it, and I became a CIO. I was six years there, I was also the Chief Digital Officer at some point, I became parallel. Then I went to Shire and then Biogen. So point is, failure is an opportunity, easier said than done, but yes. And the second point is, you can plan until tomorrow, things not always happen according to plan and you better be open to what reality is throwing at you.

Yeah, life before learning it was I thought I can do everything and I know everything and nobody's smarter than me. This is as a young, passionate person. Life after that said, be humble. From some part of the things you do, but not everything, okay? So be humble. Be much more inquisitive than knowing. You know, we have a tendency to come at things knowing what it is, what we need to do, what's, you know, whatever we need to know. And when I've learned that there's much more than what you see in all situations, there's much more than what you see at first glance, and you have to be with a question mark in your mind. And again, when I was young I had an exclamation mark, I know this, this is the answer, I'll go there. And then the exclamation became a question mark. You know, it's a process, it's not like one day I woke up and said, but the more I encountered complicated situations, which I did, I mean in my role, the more I learned that actually a question mark is much better than having an exclamation mark.

Well, let's talk about digital a little bit if you want, please. I'm not sure you would be happy that you invited me to this session after I will tell you what I think about digital, but I will. But this comes... I love it, bring it on, I'll throw it, don't worry. I was the most passionate person I know when I mean around digital. And which again, for people who do not know, it's a really big company, it's the largest generic company in the world. This company serves 200 million patients every day. Wow, listen careful to the number, 200 million patients being served by Teva via its medications every day. So just to give you... and I was an extremely, extremely passionate person about digital. I got the role as I told you to be the CDO together with the CIO. And actually we formed obviously a team and I was a very, very big believer in, I would say, the real potential transformation that digital can bring to pharma, especially to Teva. And I want to make a distinction between transformation and transposition. I'll give you an example in a second because a lot of things we call today transformation is just what I call transposition. I'll give you an example so it will be clear. And I was putting everything I had in this digital journey that Teva had. But we had great ideas, I'm telling you, and I will give you one or two ideas. And I must say that after spending what, 10, 15 years around the digital promise in pharma, in life science, not in general, we are talking about life science, this is my industry, I'm starting to get a little bit to see some reality about what it is, what it can bring. And maybe reality by the way is a good thing because you know, usually when we start we think that we are going to conquer the world and digital is going to save the day and everything we were not able to do in the last 150 years, did it have income, and with AI all problems will be solved. I mean at least that's what we are being told by everybody and obviously this is not the case. So I have some realizations on digital. I think digital can do stuff for life science, it's not like, don't get me wrong, is it going to take this industry upside down as the promise? I don't think so, at least not in the foreseeable future. Unfortunately, I don't want to declare the death of digital in life science because it's, you know, who am I to say that, but I think a lot of water needs to go under the bridge before something serious will really be transformed in pharma digital. Now, when I see transformation and transposition, let me give you one example. So, you know what we do now is a transposition. Why? Because in the old days, all days, we were probably sitting in a studio physically, probably face to face in a physical medium or in a physical setup, and probably would conduct roughly the same discussion. We have transposed this physical process into a virtual process. We've transposed, did we transform something fundamental? Not really. All right, that's my example. And if you take the dozens of things that we call transformation, because it's much sexier to talk about transformation, which is basically more of transposition, I'm not saying it's not important to transpose, but are we really changing the nature and how we really do what we do now, which is conversing? And I don't think so. So when you really go deep and learn a little bit about what digital means for, but again for pharma, a lot of important things are happening, but will be wrong, a lot of advancements and new stuff, is it transforming the industry? Yet to be seen. And my problem is that it's okay to do what we do, just let's stop, let's stop bombarding the world, we're telling it that we are going to change pharma from left to right, upside down and everything will be different and we will discover drugs we never thought we can, and you know, I can give you the list. And AI obviously is going to save the day, and you know, so many people talk about AI, they don't even know what the abbreviation of AI is. No, I'm not joking. And then they say AI, ML, ML is actually part of AI, which is a general category of everything, so you don't need even to say AI, ML, AI is enough. So yeah, there is some disillusion at least in my eyes from what it is. It's a long speech, but it's important.

Yeah, I mean, look, it's not dramatically different and in some cases even more complicated to be honest. I mean if you think about a provider space and the entity which is called the patient and how do you really handle a patient, there could be a big transformation there to be honest. And by the way, I don't want to call it digital, I mean anything we do today is analog, right? Really, everything we do is digital anyway, so let's just drop the digital and talk about the substance. Can there be a transformation in the provider? I think that it's a gigantic lift, you know. Just think about one thing, I mean, think about the electronic medical records. The electronic medical records systems or platforms are mostly designed around the transactions, the billing, the transactions, less around the patient. Yes, if I go into my EMR today I can probably see my appointments and my visits, but is there a way to really create a different approach in the provider side around the entity which is called the patient? Probably there is, right? Is that an easy task? I think it's a gigantic task. Is there amortization in the provider side to do it? Not really, not sure. It is a very difficult space to be, to be honest, also the provider side, you know.

Huh, I'm not reading right now because I don't, well, I'm not so proud about it, but I loved the first two books of Harry Potter.

Yeah, agreed.

Yeah, I mean, obviously I'll give you my perspective. I will not go into detail specifically on Biogen, you know, due to the sensitivity, but I'll tell you what I think a CIO is and is not, okay? And you make the ties to Biogen because it's my philosophy anyway. First of all, I have to tell you an interesting joke. In one of my interviews to one of the companies as a CIO, which I'm not going to tell you which one, I was interviewing with a phenomenal guy, and he opens up the interview and he says, you know what's the abbreviation of CIO? I said, of course I know, I mean it's Chief Information Officer. He said, no, your career is over. So at that moment I knew I want to work with this guy anyway. So let me tell you something which is my philosophy, and if it's my philosophy, definitely that's the way. If you are a CIO of a relatively large organization, I'm not talking about the CIO of a 20 people company, I'm talking about the CIO of a company like Biogen or Teva, in your role as a CIO, 20, I'm just picking a number, is technology, and 80 is management. And I think this is one of the biggest misunderstandings organizations generally and people and CIOs have about what is actually the role of a CIO. Now let's be clear, I need to know technology, I need to understand technology to some extent, obviously I can't be a professional technologist in all domains, right? But if you think about what's the role of the CIO, it's actually managing first and most importantly a very large, complicated, multi-disciplinary, multi-layered, multifunctional organization that basically touches all the aspects of the organization that he sits in. So you know, finance, HR, manufacturing in the case of pharma, commercial, R&D, legal, you name it, it is touching everyone, all the time, morning, evening, night. So I think that the first philosophical principle is this is number one about management. And you know, there is no school for how to become a CIO manager or a CIO leader. There's no school. People think that, oh yeah, I'm very good at understanding infrastructure, just speaking as an example, then I can become a CIO. Wrong. It's actually not true. Oh, I'm very good at understanding databases, I'm just again picking, oh, I am an expert in Microsoft, or whatever, I'm an expert in SAP ERP, oh no, hence I can be a CIO. It's a very wrong logical jump. And this is something I've learned from my experience. And you know, to some extent I was lucky that I came to the CIO role not being a technological expert in anything, my first role in Teva, because then it forced me actually to be a manager, right?

Oh yeah, oh yeah. Let me tell you my second statement. Everybody wants to be a leader, nobody wants to manage. It's very easy to talk about leadership, and not to say that leadership is not critical, not to say that leadership is not important, but I want to make a distinction. The problem that I have with that is we are living all the time and we are transforming all the time, these are the two words that you are hearing today, give me a break, right? Nobody is transforming anything every second and nobody is leading all the time. Yes, there is leadership, but leadership cannot replace the need to manage. Yeah. Now you can be a manager without being a leader, maybe you can be a leader without being a manager, I don't want to get into this philosophical debate. But I'm a little bit tired, seriously, of hearing all the time we lead here, we lead there, we transform here, we transform there. First of all, it is a huge organization, extremely complex, it has a lot of operational aspects, you know, wake up in the morning and make sure that your mic is working and your new PC that you just brought in is working, right? Okay. There's a big budget that you have to run, huge budget, you know, it usually is a big spender. Sure, you need to know how to run it, okay? So if I think about my approach, my philosophy, I mean, first thing is about management. And I'm telling you, all the teams that I've been working with, and you know, when we started the journey together, it was not easy for them as well because people are used to, here comes the CIO, let's talk about the technology here and the technology there. Obviously I deal a lot with technology, don't get me wrong, right? But it is a very, very important, critical layer of just learning how to manage a big organization with all the complexities and dimensions that a big organization is holding, right?

Yeah, obviously I can't. The only thing I can say, I really can't, and let's say what is not public knowledge, there's nothing I can show. The only thing I can say, listen, and this is public knowledge and I think this is important, I think Biogen has really picked up one of the toughest, I don't want to say the toughest, one of the toughest areas of human health or disease areas or therapeutic areas, which is the neurological space. In that respect, I think the company is a pioneer and the company is regarding itself as a pioneering company. Not easy to be a pioneer, you win some, you lose some, like in all pharma. Sure. But we are really trying to pave the way in areas that have been there for, I don't know, hundreds of years or whatever, and really see what we can find out. So I can't really share plans that are in the making, that makes sense.

Yeah, I mean, look, you need to understand the health, pharma, biotech industry is, because of what it is, a very conservative industry, okay? And thank God it's very conservative because unlike financial services, we actually produce stuff that you put in your body and we better be conservative in everything we do in terms of safety. But when you come to renovate or change or trying to push some of the platforms that you use today into the future, you have to deal with all the risk issues that pharma is dealing with, which is way more than any industry that you know, like it's way more than financial services or travel industry, because of the nature of what we do. So what are some of the challenges that I'm now dealing with is, yeah, taking some of the platforms and systems, I want to call them, that we've been working for many, many, many years, and how do you really push it into the future in areas around R&D or in areas around the heavy, heavy, complicated areas of manufacturing. These are very, very complicated processes and systems, that's definitely a challenge. And it's a challenge not just for us, it's a challenge for the industry, but in that respect also for Biogen. So we do have a roadmap for the next few years where we feel very comfortable and where we don't feel comfortable enough in terms of how do we bring ourselves to be in the front seat. There is a challenge despite everything I said before about digital, how do we use smartly what is out there in terms of new technologies or sophisticated stuff which is coming. How do you pick the right ones? Because there's dozens and dozens and dozens of things coming at you, okay? Right. So I want to balance a little bit what I said before, but the problem is how do you choose what's right for you, and this is one of the challenges that we have, and how do you make it impactful, okay? I don't want to pick tomorrow a new technology that sounds great and I would use it in a very small corner of the organization and yes it will move the needle half an inch and nobody will feel it. So the problem is to pick the right technologies but also how to use it in a way that moves the needle, doing something impactful, that's a big challenge. And also people think that if you have the right technology coming from the outside, if you don't understand how complicated it is to bring a new technology into a running, live, kicking big organization, you may have the best ever technology out there, okay, perfect, phenomenal, and still you will not be able to use it or take the benefit out of that, because bringing it into the organization, into the systems, into the people, into the processes, into regulation, it's not just not doable, and then you're missing opportunity. So it's not just identifying what's out there, bringing it in, it's this stuff.

For example, I mean, you know that everybody loves to change as long as it's not them who needs to change, but their colleague. So nobody wants to change, let's be honest, neither you nor me. So bringing a new thing inside, driving the new, implementing the new technology, making people change the behavior, getting out of the comfort zone, stop saying we've done it before, right? Okay, so what if you've done it before, let's try a new way. That's actually very challenging.

Yeah, I mean, I have a belief. If I link it, let me link it to technology first and then maybe look, it's a very, very, very, very, very slowly changing industry. And I'm saying thank God for that, I'm not saying the other way around, because you know, you're doing things which are extremely sensitive. I think that if you want to see what potentially can disrupt the industry, really disrupt the industry, I believe that even when, and I don't think it's an if, it's a question of when and how, quantum computing will become real and available, it will change potentially the face of not just pharma, but definitely pharma. You want to talk about disruption, this is disruption, like really a disruption. And I'm sure you know a little bit or more than a little bit about quantum, but it's not a gradual change, that's a real leap forward. Yeah. And talking about pharma, and you talk about drug discovery and everything we do in pharma, there are limitations of capacity, the computing power, we are limited, right? We are limited. Theoretically, this will remove almost all limitations. Nice. And I'm not a pharmacist and I'm not a PhD in chemistry or something, but the guys I talk to and I read, you know, I'm reading a lot and I know the space, it will change everything we do in pharma. And I don't think it's very far down the road, five to ten years, really. This is a big change from a technological perspective. I think more and more we will see new discoveries, the latest discovery around COVID, the mRNA mechanism, this is a new mechanism. So I think if you combine it also with the power of technology, we will see more and more novel mechanisms that are being discovered, which will open up seriously, I don't say endless opportunities, but definitely tons of opportunities. And by the way, again, the COVID example is a phenomenal example. It is a phenomenal example, and that's a sign of things that can happen for us. It's a fascinating industry, what can I say, it's unbelievable, it's really interesting.

You know what, I don't know. Number one, take care of your health. We take for granted our body, we take for granted our youth, we take for granted the fact that at the age of 40 or 50 you don't think that it's coming to an end, not that it's coming to an end on my side, don't get me wrong, okay? Take care of that, it's actually very important. And when I say health is the physical and mental health, I mean both, not just the physical side. Yeah. I think I would give myself that advice. And you know, as a CIO, this is a demanding job, like all other jobs. And when you're young and you think about your career, you know, you put everything you can inside, which you should, which you should. If you're passionate, definitely you should put everything you have into it, while taking care of yourself, right?

Well, me too, I enjoyed it. And I didn't ask you a lot of questions, and trust me, I do usually, my people know, so you will save... I got lucky, Guy, thank you.