the 5,400 employees of Novartis Vaccines & Diagnostics work in Europe, and Stober said, “In Europe, though, it’s a lot harder to replace, like, take people out. So what we were doing was reassigning people to roles with less responsibility. So folks who wanted to be part of something special, part of that leadership climate and culture, started to change the way they were doing business too, and it really made a difference.”
In terms of changing a corporate culture in which employees are resistant to change and unable or unwilling to communicate, Stober said the solution is to teach employees how they can work together.
“What we found was that there were lots of things that just got in the way,” Stober said. “They didn’t trust this person, or they didn’t understand, or the leader wasn’t down there with them.”
So Novartis embarked on employee training programs, using exercises that often required co-workers to give each other feedback. “You should have seen these people,” Stober said. “They were scared to death. But once they started doing it, they realized, I can go and talk to the person next to me… We had this climate where people were afraid to go tell someone something.” Throughout this process, Stober added, senior executives reminded employees that their work in providing vaccines for public health needs was a noble purpose.
By early 2009, Stober said the revamped company began to see gains in the number of inspections and in its technical operations, including reduced manufacturing cycles and capacity improvements.
So what did the turnaround really mean? To Stober, it means that Novartis responded with energy and confidence as the H1N1 swine flu outbreak became a global pandemic, with more than 182,000 cases and 1,000 deaths in 177 countries, by June 2009. As a result, Stober said, Novartis was the first company to report it could successfully manufacture the H1N1 antigen. It was also the first “top flu vaccine player” to publish results from a H1N1 clinical trial, and the first company with both U.S. and European approvals for its vaccine.
The big question remaining, though, is whether Novartis can now produce something it’s never had—a successful, multi-billion-dollar vaccine on the order of Pfizer’s Prevnar (a pediatric vaccine for certain strains of pneumococcal infections) or Merck’s Gardasil (a vaccine developed to prevent genital warts and cervical cancer that’s caused by the Human Papilloma Virus).
“Our meningitis portfolio is probably the closest thing we have that’s headed in that direction,” Stober told me. In releasing its 2009 financial results in January, Novartis said its Vaccines and Diagnostics business is expecting regulatory approval this year of a vaccine that targets four types of meningococcal meningitis. Novartis also has a candidate vaccine in late-stage development for Meningitis B. “Beyond that,” Stober said, “Our pipeline is packed full. We have so many different products that we are struggling to decide which ones we’re not going to develop right now.”
And that’s certainly a better problem to have.
