Executives & Improvement

The familiar metaphors for business competition — war, sports, chess — suggest that the leader’s job is to lead the company to victory. But in the real world of business, the game never ends; the goal posts constantly recede, and ultimate triumph never arrives. You can never win, only improve. The real job of the leader — especially the pharmaceutical company leader faced with continuing globalization, relentless competition, and increasing cost pressures — is not to show the way to victory but to show the way to improvement — again and again — and whatever temporary advantage it confers in a world of endless competition. As a result, most pharmaceutical executives today have two jobs: doing their work to serve their customers and improving how that work gets done (see Improving vs. Doing below).

The two jobs differ sharply. When we are doing our work, we are operating within the processes — business, manufacturing, operational or administrative — through which most work gets done. But trying to improve those processes requires that we step outside of them, analyze them and devise better ways of doing them. The big problem organizations struggle with is how to allocate time and resources to ensure that both jobs get done.