Bridging the Gap: A Large Pharma Blueprint

David Kamenir, Vice President, US Enterprise Strategy and Business Development, Novo Nordisk

Growth and innovation require confident decision-making. While large corporations inherently recognize risks, strategic progress hinges on making deliberate choices and embracing necessary trade-offs.

For more than a century, Novo Nordisk has been driving change to improve the lives and health of people living with serious, chronic diseases. Our evolution from a diabetes-focused company to one encompassing multiple therapy areas has enabled us to provide vital treatments to millions of patients and significantly expand our business.

While internal discussions around risk management are important, an overly cautious approach can lead to stagnation. A strategy without clear direction and conviction lacks the power to drive meaningful change.

Here are five essential steps to create, implement, and animate a robust and enduring strategy throughout an organization.

1. Clarify your strategic intent

While expressing a desire for revenue growth is common, understanding the “why” behind that intention is crucial. Delving deeper to uncover underlying reasons (asking “why” multiple times) allows an organization to define specific objectives—whether related to a patient ambition, defined patient outcomes, or entering new therapy areas.

Start with a candid assessment of your company’s current standing. This unbiased diagnostic helps ensure you find the right balance between maintaining what is working well and what needs to be changed, while being clear about what you still do not know. Clarity around the current and projected future health of your organization informs your strategic intent and highlights necessary trade-offs.

For example, if embracing data and digitalization is deemed essential to success moving forward, you could decide it is not a core strength and partner externally to maximize your balance between effort and value. Or you could prioritize being experts in your data and invest in the people and technology you need to drive the change in-house. Either choice could be correct, but clarity in intent ensures focused, coherent efforts across the value chain.

2. Design your roadmap

A successful strategy begins with a well-defined foundation that articulates your strategic intent. This foundation then guides decision-making, defines priorities, and aligns leadership, creating a disciplined and actionable path forward. Establishing a clear decision-making hierarchy and roadmap for strategy management will create the momentum needed for success. A compelling strategy, supported by a detailed implementation plan, transforms ideas into impactful results that drive sustainable growth.

3. Empower your people for execution

Prepare your workforce at every level to carry the strategy forward. Success depends on engaging teams, equipping them with the necessary skills, and fostering a culture of adaptability and commitment.

Organizations must ensure that employees have the skills and resources needed to bring the strategy to life. Investing in training, mentorships, and cross-functional collaboration will help teams embrace new initiatives and execute with confidence. Appointing strategy “champions,” those who provided input along the way, throughout the organization can be a powerful tool to mitigate perceptions of an overly top-down approach, facilitating effective execution.

And as each strategic initiative presents unique challenges, providing targeted support ensures that teams can execute effectively in new and evolving environments.

A well-structured execution plan, aligned to clear ambitions, is key to making sure your strategic roadmap is implemented as intended.

4. Communicate your strategy holistically

A successful strategy must engage and align the entire organization with a broader vision. Notably, that does not necessarily mean every employee will directly relate to every aspect. There are parts of the business that are critical for subsets of customers or patients but are capable of running themselves and do not require an enterprise-wide effort to achieve success or simply do not meet the criteria of being an enterprise-wide strategic priority. There may be other parts of the business that have a strong legacy but are simply not value drivers moving forward. Either way, the strategy needs to be just that—one that clarifies the priorities and trade-offs required for success moving forward. A strategy that neatly illustrates where every part of your current and future business fits is typically not really a strategy, but a mere description of your business.

For example, when Novo Nordisk pivoted commercial focus toward emerging GLP-1RA therapies, we visualized this to the broader organization in a way that made it crystal clear the potential these therapies held, while also redefining the roles of certain other therapy areas to refocus effort in these areas appropriately. This approach resulted in a clear plan of action with sharpened therapy area plans and aligned execution. Creating these defined “swim lanes” at the highest level was one of our keys to success.

5. Ensure your strategy is resilient

A successful strategy thrives on unwavering commitment from leaders, fostering trust and alignment throughout the organization.

Frequent changes in strategy should serve as a warning sign; a strong strategy should be durable yet adaptable to evolving dynamics, triggers and milestones, and the outcome of pre-defined scenarios. Life is unpredictable, though, and therefore, an organization should regularly pressure test its strategy to evaluate necessary strategic, operational, or execution-related adjustments.

Effective strategy development and implementation requires both conviction and adaptability. By clarifying strategic intent, equipping teams for execution, communicating effectively, and remaining flexible, organizations can bring enterprise-level strategies to life and achieve lasting impact.

David Kamenir is Vice President, US Enterprise Strategy and Business Development, at Novo Nordisk