Pharmaceutical industry

Companies say they want breakthrough products, but most are far more adept at making incremental improvements to existing lines. A pioneering division at 3M successfully navigated a process that leads to breakthrough thinking.

Your organization can become more decisive—and can implement strategy more quickly—if you know where the bottlenecks are and who’s empowered to break through them.

The “bounded awareness” phenomenon causes people to ignore critical information when making decisions. Learning to expand the limits of your awareness before you make an important choice will save you from asking “How did I miss that?” after the fact.

Expand access to medicine, and the rest will follow.

Your entire day revolves around willpower.

On November 1, 1994, P. Roy Vagelos retired after nearly 20 years at Merck. As head of the research labs from 1975 to 1985 and then as CEO, Vagelos turned...

Some people just can’t make up their minds. The same goes for some companies. Leaders can eradicate indecision by transforming the tone and content of everyday conversations at their organizations.

By describing the landscape of unmet customer needs and analyzing where new offerings have worked before, you can chart a path that will produce successful innovations time after time.

Don’t settle for just making your product better. Let your customers make it great.

Most CEOs who specialize in turning around struggling companies focus on costs. But for Fred Hassan, chairman and CEO of Schering-Plough, the primary...

For a leader, a public apology is always a high-risk move. Understanding what apologies can and cannot do will help you avoid both foolhardy stonewalling and unnecessary contrition.

In the drug business, marketing is now as important as science.

Better treatment depends on it.

When the biotech pioneer had to get a blockbuster drug to market fast, it didn’t lock itself into a rigid supply chain. It joined with partners to become a virtual manufacturer.

Managing in my homeland taught me to treasure the provincial as well as the universal.

Big projects fail at an astonishing rate--more than half the time, by some estimates. It's not hard to understand why. Complicated long-term projects...

A few key obstacles and how to overcome them.

Innovation isn’t just about new products.

What stands between you and the yes you want? According to negotiation experts David Lax and James Sebenius, executives face obstacles in three common...

The continued vitality of the most successful U.S. and European pharmaceutical companies in the face of accelerating scientific and technological change...