No one should take on these jobs without taking on the accountability. It's easy to talk about this now. I think any CEO that tells you it's easy at the time is being a bit disingenuous. It's definitely a moment that makes you properly stop and think.
Today on the CEO Signal, we're talking to Dame Emma Walmsley, the former CEO of global pharmaceuticals company GSK. She took the helm with a mandate to shake it up. Not everyone liked that, but we caught her at the end of 2025 just as she was handing over to her successor Luke Miles. This is a rare chance to hear a CEO reflect on the full arc of their tenure. From Seapore, this is the CEO Signal.
Good morning, Edge. How are you?
Very good. Great to have you in New York.
I do love New York City. So Edge, I sat down with Emma recently for a CEO Signal interview, and I remember her telling me, 'I'm not famous for my patience.' But you've known her for a lot longer than I have. What have you seen of her?
I've seen Emma lead in the boardroom. She starts with her curiosity and incredibly insightful questions. And when she speaks, not only is everyone listening, she changes the dynamic in the room. So, what are you hoping she'll open up about today?
Well, I'd really love to hear about the arc of her accomplishments and where she took GSK from beginning to now where she's announced she's leaving.
Yeah. And I think along that way, there were some moments of real challenge and tension. And I want to hear from her what that was like, particularly when she was challenged by an activist investor a few years ago called Elliot Management. Because those things really put a CEO on the spot.
Absolutely. Lots for us to learn today.
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Welcome, Emma. We are so thrilled to have you here. It's great to see you. I get to see you in the boardroom, but this is the first time I get to have an opportunity to ask you some questions about where all your curiosity came from, how you're such a great leader. So, I'm really looking forward to this session.
Well, I'm absolutely thrilled to be here and you know, Penny, if you ask me to do something, I say yes. So, thank you.
Thank you. Look, we've got a whole load of questions about, you know, how you've led through some really interesting challenges. Made some big strategic decisions and executed them. But, first of all, welcome back to New York. You lived here for several years.
Yes, I was here in the early 2000s for five years when I was working for L'Oreal. I was running a great American iconic brand called Maybelline. And I moved here from London with two young kids and my husband. And I left here 5 years later for Shanghai with four young kids.
So this your sort of early experience of the US health care system.
Well, actually in lots of ways. Yeah. I mean, not to get into it in too much detail but two of those four children were quite sick when we were here and one of them had open heart surgery actually and the other one spent the first two weeks of her life in an ICU in New York. So I saw the very best of the American health care system actually. And you know, I think there's no doubt that those kinds of foundational experiences can inspire your decisions for where you allocate your time capital later. And you know, it's been, I had an extraordinary career with L'Oreal for 17 years all over the world but there was definitely a moment when I thought it was a great opportunity to then move into healthcare.
What was the most formative bit of that time with L'Oreal? What did you take from it that you've carried through to GSK?
You know, I didn't go on holiday abroad as a child. So to have all of that world opened up to me in an organization that was incredibly creative, super smart people. So it was an incredibly exciting and creative time with wonderful people. But the most formative part was understanding what it takes to lead and run global brands and global businesses and the incredible humility you get from moving into a new culture, a different language. Some you speak, you know, operating in Paris and speaking French was fine for me but then moving to China in 2007 at a time when everything was booming and growing so fast, that was an incredible experience.
What was it like in the senior leadership room trying to convince French leadership, you know, as a Brit, to meet the moment in each of those markets?
So, look, I think it was, there's no question you had to stand up and speak up for what you believed in and stand by your convictions. And I always loved the fact that one of the big boardrooms in Paris at the time, I don't know if it's still true, you know, I left nearly 16 years ago, was called the 'salle confrontation', which was literally the idea of, you know, confronting ideas. So you learned to act on your feet but always be underpinned with facts. It's a very performance-oriented culture.
So Emma, my experience of you though is that you have enormous confidence in inquiring, in opening up the conversation. Where did that confidence come from? Does that from your upbringing, from you know, experience being in a military family, going to boarding school? I don't know if the source of it is confidence or curiosity.
I don't know if the source of it is confidence or curiosity. And I think the source of it is probably the latter, but I'm not afraid to ask questions. I think, you know, I'm the oldest child. I'm sure that says all sorts of strange things. Or important things. I don't know.
I'm the oldest of three, too.
Yeah. And I have a brother who's a lawyer and a sister who's a therapist. So, both of those things are probably necessary in every family. But I think there's no doubt that growing up in a military family has a huge influence on all sorts of dynamics. A sense of discipline, a sense of hard work, a sense of duty and responsibility. But I think the core of it was, you know, don't waste the opportunities that you have. And a very strong emphasis on education.
I want to pick up on the asking good questions because you mentioned that French boardroom, you know, 'salle confrontation'. Have you brought that ethos to the GSK boardroom or to the GSK leadership team?
I think it's really important that we do. You know, one of the risks when you're a CEO is that you don't have enough straight talk, put it on the table, difficult conversations because people at the beginning it's easier, but then people learn to start to try and anticipate what you want or what you expect and it is harder to have that equal to equal debate. One of the things I like to do with my leadership team is not have these huge performative CEO sessions. You know, when people are nervous to come in and present, I really like to have small meetings, a bit less formality, a bit more debate. And I've often found myself having, because I come across as having conviction and an opinion, which I do, but I also am quite comfortable with shifting it if the facts change. And so I often have to remind people to disagree.
Can I ask was there a moment where you started to, early in your CEO leadership, where you knew you had to create that permission to be able to have confrontation and disagreement? How did you, you know, give us a specific, how did you allow people to get comfortable that it was okay to disagree with you or to offer other opinions?
Well, I think I learned this from a brilliant head of R&D that came in, which is look, let's literally explicitly invite the counter view. And you know, we do an enormous amount of business development in our industry. Half of our, and it's one of the things that we changed most at GSK because we had to completely reset the balance sheet by demerging the consumer business. We had been going through an era where we'd been disinvesting in R&D and decided to do it all in house. And that's just not what we then did a complete pivot, doubled the spend in R&D. And we're now in a world where half of our pipeline comes externally. But the issue when you're doing deals, and we've probably done 50 of them, is that you get a bit of deal fever. And you know, everyone knows we want to do something. There's been a huge amount of work. People have been working all night. You got the banks coming. You know, all of that stuff's going on. And I think having a stop and think and doing the red team case or the bear case is an explicit tool you can use to take a counter view. And then the other thing that I like doing is something we called a pre-mortem on how things can go wrong, which sounds a bit depressing. This is the 'memento mori', the skull in the corner of the painting, is it, where you look at how bad things can go. And that's a really useful tool when you're about to allocate a large amount of capital or make a big strategic choice is just to step back and go okay let's take the counter view of this recommendation.
I find myself in order to encourage more confrontation if you will, or disagreeing agreeably if you will, is to actually applaud people afterwards for taking that risk.
That's a great example and one of the things I actually, this is why I'm laughing about it with Hal who's now a board director but was our head of R&D. You know there were a couple of times when we had some tricky things to call and he and I said look this is going to be in quite a large forum. Why don't you just extremely disagree with me on that point in the meeting? So we did that a couple of times which is really helpful and people saw it happening. And actually there was an even better example of that which is when we were looking at a deal, he was looking at a deal and I didn't particularly love it and but it was his decision. And we wanted to, that was one of the cultural changes we most wanted to make at GSK was moving from kind of lowest common denominator decision making to a world where we were very clear on the single point accountability of the decision maker. That doesn't mean you don't invite input from lots of other people but we wanted to remove this big corporate land where decisions just kept being pushed up and there was something that was within his remit to decide. I wasn't sure about it and I gave him in a public environment the input that if it was my decision I wouldn't do it. That I was happy for him to take the responsibility of the decision and he decided to do it and we did all of that in a public way so that it wasn't the world where you just had to guess what the boss thought and that was going to become the outcome.
So publicly modeling that it's okay to have those debates.
Well, it's not only okay to have those debates, it's okay for a more senior person to delegate a decision and give full authority to that individual.
That's extremely powerful and it also creates enormous accountability.
Correct. And you know that's one of the things in big companies you have to make sure if you want to drive to a more performance culture, this question of accountability, especially in heavily matrixed organizations and heavily regulated organizations is really really key.
So one of the things that you've talked about yourself and I see it in your nature is your impatience.
Listen what about you? Well, it takes one to know one, right? We bond over that.
Yes, that's true. Where'd that come from? For me, my impatience started with the idea I lost my parents at a young age and I felt like life is short and I have a lot of life I want to live in a short period of time. Now, fortunately, my life has gone on longer than theirs did. But, it started at a very young age. Where did impatience come into your life?
Um, I think I was born with it. Some of it may be genetic and my father was quite an impatient man. And I think probably like you, I have this overwhelming sense that you have one life and you should fill it with as much as you possibly can and not waste a moment. And I think one of the advantages of having been able to live all over the world as I have, is there's just so much you don't know about. And so much more to discover and learn. It's a sense of curiosity and I just get a bit frustrated by wasting time on stuff. You know, we always talk about strategy being, you know, how you allocate capital. I think strategy is also how you allocate your time capital and whether that be professional strategy and you know what you spend your time on running the companies that we do or you know what you want to do with your life. And I just think the world has so much opportunity and we have so much responsibility to drive change and impact and I'm impatient for that.
So, Emma, can you just set the scene for us a little bit? Nine years as CEO, three years since the Haleon demerger, the consumer business, and you've announced your plans to hand over to your successor. What does this particular chapter of your time at GSK mean to you?
Well, I think, being a CEO is the privilege of a lifetime. Maybe alongside being a mom, but and so I am immensely grateful to have had the opportunity and I'm actually extremely proud to be leaving having done two things that I think most of us would like to achieve. One is to have a company in materially better position than when you started and GSK is a completely different company in terms of structure, strategy, performance momentum. But the second thing that I'm immensely proud of is enabling a smooth succession. And that's in the interests of the company's momentum. It's in the interests of shareholders. You know, I was announced in September 2016. I took over at the beginning of 17 and I actually interviewed my successor Luke Miles in December 2016 when I started, in a very dodgy wine bar in Cambridge.
Were you already thinking of him as a potential?
Yes, because I was an insider outsider with a brief to change everything. Of course, the most important thing I needed to do was hire the best people in the world to go with me on that journey and I knew Luke could be a candidate for the commercial part of that.
So, in setting him up for success, when did you go to the boardroom and say we need to really think about a transition over a period? What was that conversation like in that boardroom?
Well, I don't think it happened like that. I mean, how did it happen? So first of all, I believe that succession is a job that should start day one.
It was certainly, I mean we've reviewed it at the board every year and I certainly put it on the table at the end of my first year. And you know, I think these things, you have to remember they are human moments as well. They are without doubt. However well planned they are and however happy everybody is and how orchestrated they are and the brilliant due process of internal and external and a proper definition of what the next chapter of the company needs and is required. And you know even with all of that when you've given everything you've got to a company for a long time they are not without their emotion of all transitions. I think it's probably like moving house. Even if you've decided to do it and you're handing it on to a new family, it's memories, its impact, it's a big slice of your life. So the reason I mention that is it's not without emotion. So it's important to not make it emotional and or not make it, you know, some difficult topic to raise. I think you make it part of currency. It's hugely helpful and then you also have to make it very deliberate and I really believe in this. I think it's, you know, one of the most rewarding parts of leadership is how do you invest in development not of one person by the way because that's important too but of a group of people to open up all of their possibilities for professional impact inside the company and outside if necessary.
You're operating in a famously short-term focused capital market and that's a perennial I'm sure for any pharma company CEO. You had a very specific and acute illustration of that tension a few years ago where an activist shareholder Elliot Management came along challenging your leadership and your strategy challenging you personally. Wonder if you can take us inside that moment. Who was your first call to?
Well, obviously talking about it with the board was extremely important. I mean, step back. It's easy to talk about this now. I think any CEO that tells you it's easy at the time is being a bit disingenuous. It's definitely a moment that makes you properly stop and think. And when it's personal, it adds an extra layer of flavor to the experience. No question. But, I think first thing is no one should take on these jobs without taking on the accountability for the comprehensive performance of the company in every sense and without being ready to have people ask questions about that and challenge that. Learning to not be defensive about it and to be at your most honest with yourself about what you believe about it is really key and be ready to answer those questions. I think the moment that mattered most is when you say okay, what do I think objectively and you know it's hard to muster that level of clarity on it for sure but what do I stand by with full conviction around the purpose and strategy of the company and what will I continue to stand up for on that front and that's what we did and we did it with the board. And then you just have to accept that there's going to be noise. And the most important thing I did in all of this, looking back on it, was to anchor in my own belief in what we were doing, but more importantly to absorb the pressure, personally and not let the rest of the organization be distracted.
