tl;dr-
As a child, wanted to be a doctor because learning science & using it to help people seemed right; also everyone else seemed into it then
Lack of dedication to academics in college + cramming for MCATs 2 weeks before + med school interviews + love of House MD made me question myself
Lucked into consulting after YOLO’ing my way into a random graduate program; a hard pivot from the original ‘let’s get a Masters in education, teach high school chemistry, and reapply to med school’ Plan B
Five years in boutique consulting firms working on biopharma market access & commercialization led me to Novo Nordisk - where I learned what leadership & collaboration truly mean to me
Became Director of Corporate Strategy & Operations at a clinical-stage biopharma when I felt my growth at Novo was slowing down (and realized I really didn’t want to ‘just’ do consulting anymore)
Three major lessons (roughly 1 every 10 years)-
Learning if you’re right about something - a person, an idea, a strategy, an organization, etc. - is always more important than defending that you are right
Decisions made while immersed in your surroundings - your market, your customer experience, your segmentation, your life - are generally more meaningful than those made in abstraction - i.e. based on your philosophy, disconnected data, legacy & culture, or even your own ideals
Embrace what - what identity, what habits, what mindset, etc. - makes you the most productive & content, even if it goes against every self-help influencer Twitter thread or conventional knowledge
***
No strategy talk today! (We’ll be returning to healthcare strategy content soon, don’t worry.)
The last two weeks since I started my new role have been a trip - as they always have. Meeting new people, learning new processes, understanding the shape of the company from the culture to the infrastructure to what’s written in black & white across an endless amount of PowerPoint presentations - and then structuring out in collaboration with my leadership what I need to accomplish within the first few weeks, much less 90 days - is a thrilling roller coaster ride that never fails to leave me breathless. As an introvert, I’ve always found it helpful that, whenever confronted with this acceleration of information intake & mental processing, I take a break to sit with my thoughts & let them settle. I’ve always been a fan since I was a child of unconscious cognition since the first time I mentally wrote an entire term paper in the shower after struggling with it for a few weeks.
(As an aside, this is probably why one of my NYU writing professors told me that it’s very clear that I use writing as a way to organize my thoughts as a form of ‘thinking.’)
It’s ironic that for someone who loves strategy, I didn’t really ever have a career plan for myself. Looking back, many of my decisions were made in probably the least traditionally ‘strategic’ way possible. I wanted to be a doctor not only because I wanted to help people, but because it was something engrained within the Asian-American culture that I grew up within. I didn’t pick my undergrad - and certainly not my graduate school - with any ‘real’ planning or selection criteria. I picked consulting out of KGI because ‘solving problems & getting paid for it’ seemed cool, not because of any of the marketing messages you’ve read from McKinsey, or BCG, or LEK, or so forth. Now, of course over time my decisions became more directed as opposed to a ‘sure, why not’ laissez-faire attitude, but I’ll admit I’ve continued to hold onto some of that cavalier, almost chaotic ‘let’s just try it!’ energy.
It’s also funny because at the time of those decisions in high school, college, grad school, and so forth I was quick with justifications on ‘why’ they were the right decisions - but in looking back, much of it was impulse and this weird ‘feeling’ that something needed to change. In many ways, my journey to professional maturity involves me embracing the elements beneath that chaotic, messy way of thinking & augmenting them with the more critical & logical aspects of my personality.
Is that surprising for a strategist to say? I think if you asked me that a few years ago, I would have agreed but not so much - and I’ll tell you why. Even in the most ‘logical’ fields - like mathematics, I suppose - the language, institutions, organizations, and the entirety of our interface with those topics is built by humans. Accordingly, how can any effective strategy be truly devoid of a human element - or, on an even more fundamental level, birth itself not from a human? If you don’t believe me, think about the common healthcare industry refrain of customer centricity. This principle of knowing your market, or knowing your audience, or any number of other variations all comes from the same place - understand the base elements to understand the big picture. For organizations & for strategy, that’s not the assets, the data, the financial performance, the measures - it’s the people. And humans can be a little messy, a little imperfect, and a little chaotic at times.
Pragmatically, this humanistic focus is increasingly something I believe we as a society will begin to prize even moreso than before because of technology. Imagine, for instance, that every individual human is a company with their own capabilities, their own assets, etc. etc. In a futurist world, where technology has automated rote tasks - like answering the phone or finding a piece of data or making a calculation - where do you think the value of each ‘PersonCo’ increasingly will lie? It certainly won’t necessarily be in their ability to memorize a function or type a word in a keyboard (though some vestige of those markets may exist). Rather, it will be about their ability to bring that function to life through execution & management, or to inspire through their writings & stories. In short, the more human one is, the more valuable one will be.
So how does one become the best ‘PersonCo’ they can be? Haha, I certainly don’t have anything close to ‘the secret’ but I also don’t think it’s that difficult to grasp. It’s really just about how do you ensure you keep growing in richness & depth as an individual while remaining situated and secure (because - yeah, getting lost in the sheer amount of knowledge is a real thing that leads to, for example, a lack of customer centricity). That ‘how’ is based on the behavioral habits & patterns you build for yourself (and finding that perfect set is akin to any company revisiting their capabilities in preparation for the future). Each cycle you run through will change you a little - add onto the depth of who you are - but don’t worry, you’ll never reach the end. Our existence has not evolved enough to process the amount of information in the universe or transcend our mortality in any meaningful way, even with technology (no matter what some people may say). But hey - if I’m wrong, great; means I learned something new that day.
But if there’s a fourth learning to all of this, it’s take a breath & let things settle. Bask in your situation - the good, the bad, the neither good nor bad - and just let it stew. You may be surprised at how helpful it is for your ‘PersonCo’s’ must-win battles.
Oops, guess I ended up talking about strategy after all.
Oh well.
-WY