Med Ad News: Tell me a little about the Center for Creative Leadership.

Kim Palmisano: We are an executive education provider, top 10 in the world ranked by the financial times, and we help clients worldwide cultivate creative leadership. The way we define that is the capacity to achieve more than imagined by thinking and acting beyond boundaries. Since our inception, we have over 400,000 participants graduate from our open enrollment programs each year. We’re a unique center for business education that combines the research of behavioral science with practical, real-world business application.
We work with about two-thirds of the Fortune 500 companies, 80 of the Fortune 100 companies are our clients, and every year we work with about 3,000 organizations from a 120 countries across the 4 different continents.

Med Ad News: What percentage of those clients are in the pharma industry or in related areas?

Kim Palmisano: The percentage, I couldn’t say, but I can tell you that we work with more than 70 pharmaceutical and biotech organizations.

Med Ad News: What does it take to be someone who can recognize a need and then lead the organization or division in a new direction to address that need?

Kim Palmisano: We at CCL believe that it takes the realization that our success of the past is no longer the formula for how things must be done in the future. That it takes a greater inner reflection on how I, as the individual, personally need to change, and it’s less of an absolute reliance on my manager and my company president to show the way to success.

Karen Addison: Our research shows interdependence leadership is the wave of the future, so it’s no one leader that can do it anymore, but it’s how that leader manages relationships with others and can bring together a leadership team and culture in the organization.

Med Ad News: So that requires finding like-minded individuals or can they instill that thought process in others?

Karen Addison: It’s our philosophy as a center that leadership can be learned, and so it’s a matter of developing your people, but its also recognizing you can’t do it on your own. The days of that kind of one fearless leader out in the front are behind us, and it’s much more of a networked approach to leadership that’s going to take organizations forward.

Kim Palmisano: We realized that today the challenges that we’re facing are just more complex than ever before and that these challenges, these events that these challenges are bringing forth, the complexity of them, are requiring leaders to react and interact and behave in new and different ways. And what we mean by that is it’s important to develop your leadership agility and adaptability along with the intuitive ability to make decisions. Those are the key competencies that we talked about here. And that’s going to lead to success for the organizations to be able to go in new directions.

Med Ad News: Could you get into specifics at all how that actually is done? How do you teach that?

Karen Addison: What we try and work with is having people bring their own issues to the classroom. We have an exercise called a Key Leadership Challenge, so when I come to the program, any number of programs, but particularly our custom programs, I bring with me a challenge within my organization over which I have some control that I can’t solve on my own that may have been there for awhile and is so complex in nature that maybe we’ve never had solutions to that problem before, because we’ve not had that problem before. And we use that as a foundation for their time with us and say what is it that I learned about communication, what is it that I learned about strategy versus tactics, what is it I learned about myself and the diversity in my work place so that I can leverage that diversity to meet these challenges and keep it anchored in what they’re facing on a day-to-day basis.

Med Ad News: As they bring these problems in to address, have you seen any trends in what people are saying? In what kinds of challenges they’re facing and what they need to deal with?

Kim Palmisano: Yes. The issues are more complex today. We did a 10 Trend study in 2007, and it supports the idea that what has worked in the past no longer works in the future and what we have found that the executives that we talk to in that study have felt only 50% of their organizations were topping class in innovation, so that’s especially relevant to the pharmaceutical industry.
They also confirmed that the challenges that they are facing today are more complex than they were just five years ago. When we ask them what contributed to this complexity, the top three answers were internal changes – structure and process – marketing and dynamics, and talent shortage.

Karen Addison: I just finished a program with Bayer, and the change theme was enormous with that group of leaders. In the pharmaceutical industry right now, with all the mergers and acquisitions, change is not just process but there’s cultural change that has to take place. Who’s in charge kind of change that has to take place? How do you create new values that work for both sets of people who may have had very different cultural values in the past?

Med Ad News: In the trends we’re seeing there’s a shift in the growing importance on biotechnology and specialty medicine. Have you been seeing clients come in with this type of issue and is there a different type of leader needed to lead a biotech versus a traditional pharma company?

Kim Palmisano: Being innovative and working collaboratively on those particular dynamics is what’s key today, and we know that to work collaboratively no longer means communicating well and working with others. It’s about a focus of getting a new product to market or working with ownership and accountability as a team member as a part of an organization so that you are moving forward for the success of the end goal.
So we have learned that working collaboratively with trust, getting rid of the me factor of getting the credit. It’s a trust factor, it’s taking ownership of yourself as part of a member of the team that has a common goal. And working in that way for new innovation.

Karen Addison: And recognizing that team may cross boundaries that in the past created silos in the organization or were such that we’re not going to collaborate with that group or we don’t really need input from this group of people. But they do, and they’re finding out that they do.