An international pharmaceutical company faced the challenge of adapting to the leadership requirements needed in today’s more ambiguous, regulated and global environment. Leaders need to adopt not only a global mindset, but also an enterprise-wide view of the company, while motivating employees and challenging their own and others’ thinking.

Duke Corporate Education (Duke CE) partnered with the client to add specific areas of learning to accompany core action learning projects and provided elements of leadership training through assessments for greater self awareness, conversation practice, motivational leadership and cross-cultural reflection. Additionally the design complemented projects by addressing topics of strategy, innovation, globalization, marketing and brand. The program provided dialogue with senior executives, included the CEO, as well as project presentations to the CEO and Executive Leadership Team.

Executive projects involved challenging the CEO’s strategy through group shadow council projects. In this cascaded program, senior leaders then took part in evaluating potential new initiatives that the company has since adopted. The client team undertook a major survey of the return on their investment concluding there has been a notable change in behaviors and performance of the executive participants while similar feedback suggests the same for the senior manager groups.

International Pharmaceutical Challenging Orthodoxies 01