How Humanities Can Unlock Creativity and Impact in Biotech with Lisa Bowers
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In the world of Biotech, we often obsess about the science and the technology, but fundamentally, health care companies are made by humans for humans. The impact on humanity can be tremendous, think about how COVID-19 vaccines have made an impact on not just our health, but our wellbeing, our relationships, our humanity.
In this interview with Lisa Bowers, she brings a perspective often lacking in Biotech – the arts. What’s fascinating about the discussion is the irony of that, but also a way to use our everyday experiences with the arts and humanities to improve our leadership and the brands we are trying to build.
Lisa was most recently the Chief Commercial Officer for Day One, Biopharma. Prior to that, she was the CEO, founder and board member of Rhia Ventures, a social impact investment organization focused on reproductive health. She was also the COO of Tara Health during that time. She had spent almost 17 years at Genentech and Roche, holding numerous leadership roles across marketing, sales, supply chain, and strategy
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In this episode, we cover off on a variety of topics:
Opening for Bon Jovi in Las Vegas
The concept of “Controlled Recklessness”
Bring humanities into the fold through questions
Rodin’s hands and the patient experience
Brand matters in Biotech
Resources and mentions:
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, a book by Patrick Lencioni
Ursula K, Le Guin, author and poet
Seasons of Love – Rent, the musical
KEY LESSONS
Enable “controlled recklessness” in your business
Biotech is a heavily regulated industry. Sometimes the mere mention of words like “reckless” and “whatever it takes” can get your hand slapped by the ever present legal and regulatory department. Lisa contends that there should be a space where creativity should be allowed, much more than that, it should be fostered.
“We do not mess with what is legally important, what is regulatorily required. We do not mess with things that require ethics and integrity. We're not reckless with the lives of patients, with the lives of our employees. There's so much that needs to be tightly controlled in a highly regulated, high stakes business like Biotech. But can't we, in our cultures, create the opportunity to fail associated with decisions that are not that high stakes?”
Hence the idea of “controlled recklessness”. It’s about building a safe space where disagreements can freely emerge, resulting in conflict that brings about new and different thinking. Here, Lisa offers a peek into how she thinks, as she brings up a documentary about pianos: Miracle in a Box: A Piano Reborn
“There's a great documentary about a shop that only refurbish Steinway pianos. And there was a quote in it where they were talking about how a piano actually works. You press this thing, and then there's a hammer that strikes this thing, and then there's a string. And the quote that someone said that I actually wrote down was, only a free collision can make music.”
That’s powerful. “Only a free collision can make music”. This phrase from the documentary about pianos offer such vivid and amazing insight into what you need for innovation and new ideas – a team that trusts each other, shoulder to shoulder “with no light between you and the next person” where colliding ideas can freely flow.
Use the power of the arts to become a better leader
Lisa helps us understand the job of an executive and leader.
“Build a cohesive leadership team, create clarity about what that team should be doing and over-communicate that clarity. Make sure that incentives and structures in a company are aligned with what you say you're about”
And becoming a leader in health care, she was struck by how much of humanity is not a part of the day-to-day discussions.
“I was struck by how much of humanity is sometimes left behind in our business in Biotechnology. I mean, we're so focused on extrinsic factors associated with customers and regulators, and we think much more about science and the data. But these businesses are in fact created entirely by humans.”
She offers a tangible way for any of us to bring arts into our practice of leadership. And it doesn’t involve becoming an artist or a classical pianist like Lisa. It’s asking ourselves what we enjoy about the arts and simply being pointed about how that experience relates to our work.
“How do we bring the value of the arts into the biotech community in general? I think, I think you don't have to make art to have art in your life. What's your favorite band? Seasons of Love, which is in the musical rent, it just happens to be a song that I relate to. And it's not just the words but in fact it's the way that the instruments pile on each other and then kind of drift away. That made me start to think about, how it relates to how we think about what gets loud and what gets soft in our company.”
Medicine as the entry point to impact the patient experience
Lisa’s background in public health and as an artist, she see medicines as merely an entry point to impact the entire human experience.
“I'm interested in the long-term population impacts outside of the pill. Which was what brought me to this industry because the pill is the entry point. It's the ticket to get you involved in these challenging therapeutic areas with these amazing patients and their families and these amazing physicians.”
And when we are talking about the patient experience, she brought up the sculptor Rodin and how amazing he was able to capture the person’s life through their hands. So much so that physicians were able to diagnose the condition of his subjects a hundred years later…
“It turns out that a surgeon at Stanford discovered that many of these hands appear to have specific conditions. If you're a hand surgeon, you can look at how a particular hand's musculature is shaped and say that person has arthritis, or that person has, genetic disease X. Rodin’s ability to truly understand what someone with a particular disease in their hands is feeling and only represent it from the hand is amazing.”
This realization and feeling about a patient’s experience through their hands made it viscerally important for Lisa how a Biotech company needs to understand the patient’s pain to design medicines that can relieve that pain. In addition, there is the potential opportunity for such a company to improve that experience beyond a pill.
“Why is that related to what we are up to in Biotech? The science is certainly an important part of whether the drug is gonna work or not. But how do we know what pain we're trying to relieve unless we understand not just what's happening clinically within the patients, but also the patient's experience of it.”
A Biotech brand matters anytime it needs to influence anyone to do anything
One of the reasons I relate so much to what Lisa is talking about is the fact that branding is both art and science. And its importance is so much more than the visible artifacts like the logo, the colors, the campaign… It’s the process of getting to a brand strategy that helps any business articulate clearly their WHO, WHY, HOW, and WHAT.
“If you can't articulate your brand, can you articulate your business? And if you can't articulate your business, how is your organization going to deliver efficiently and effectively on what your promise is? And how will investors or customers or anybody around you know how to engage with you?”
She was also very clear that unless you don’t need anything from anyone, you need to build a brand.
“Brand matters no matter the size of the Biotech. Unless it is fully in a silo and requires nothing of anyone. Five guys in a garage and they have all of their materials they need and they're testing it on themselves… but when they've gotta go out and raise $20 million or they need to attract employees, or they need to sign onto vendors who don't have space for them, you're recruiting investigators and you're recruiting patients and the families of patients to take a pill that no human has ever taken…Branding can sound like a small thing, but it's actually a big thing. And it's important whether you're spending a million dollars on it or twenty grand”
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