In baseball, if a player averages three hits every 10 chances he's good player; if he averages four hits per 10 chances he's a first ballot Hall of Famer and the stuff of legend. Many call baseball the ultimate failure activity, but the pharmaceutical industry is much more challenging where else is a 1-in-10,000 success rate is considered acceptable?

One would think it's a challenge simply to get out of bed every morning knowing more failures surely await you in the office, but not so, said Pfizer CEO Jeff Kindler at the 2010 World Innovation Forum, where ExecuNet exclusively reported for attendees.

What makes it worth it, said Kindler, was recently when "our oncology business was proud to present stunning data on a new lung cancer drug for young people who were non-smokers. They had a genetic mutation that made them susceptible, and this medicine has an extraordinary rate of cure and remission. When we saw this, it gets people charged-up to come to work."

With that type of success occurring so infrequently in the pharmaceutical business, Pfizer adopted an organizational and cultural model designed to promote and reward innovation, while also encouraging risk and accepting failure. "We know about failure because most investments we take fail," said Kindler.

Creating a culture of innovation can be challenging, particularly with a workforce of 90,000. "We nurture innovation internally and externally. There is an entrepreneurial spirit inside the company. Inside, we have adopted a model we call the spirit of small and the power of scale," Kindler explained. "Very large and complex companies can sometimes fall into a culture that is bad for innovation...stifling. At the same time, I happen to be of the view that there are types of innovation that only large companies can do. For us, we have to find the right balance."

Pfizer found the "value of small" by creating entrepreneurial research units led by their chief scientists with organizational cultures of their own within the larger organization. "Large scale complex clinical trials can only be done with the right resources. It requires scale and resources and global vision that a large company can harness if done appropriately."

"You have to always recognize and communicate to the organization that if the world around you is moving dramatically faster than the organization, you're in trouble. The one thing that becomes clear to me every day is that the world is moving faster. You can attain change, but you can never be done or satisfied. You must have an enormous sense of agility. I wake up every day and think 'Someone is trying to find ways to destroy my business.' I ask myself, 'How do I act better than the competitors?' As a leader, you have to create a culture and organization of people who are thinking like that every day."

Robyn Greenspan
Robyn Greenspan is the Editor-in-Chief at ExecuNet, where she is responsible for setting and driving the editorial content engagement strategy across the private business network's publications and expert-led programming. She is also a Huffington Post blogger. You can follow her on Twitter @RobynGreenspan

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