Does One Need a Tour of Duty in Consulting to Leapfrog to a Biopharma CEO Role?

Henry A. McKinnell, PhD, MBA,former Chairman and CEO of Pfizer, Inc., former chairman of Moody’s, and co-founder and past Chairman of the Infectious Disease Institute in Kampala, Uganda.

Henry A. McKinnell, PhD, MBA, is the former Chairman and CEO of Pfizer, Inc., former chairman of Moody’s, and co-founder and past Chairman of the Infectious Disease Institute in Kampala, Uganda.

He is a member of the boards of directors of Lapix and the Science and Technology in Society Forum and serves as a senior advisor to several biotech and private equity firms. He serves as chairman emeritus of the Connecticut Science Center, the Business Roundtable, the Pharmaceutical Research Manufacturers Association, the Food and Drug Law Institute, and the Medical Device Manufacturers Association.

Dr. McKinnell holds a Bachelor of Commerce in business from the University of British Columbia and MBA and PhD degrees from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Q. With Bloomberg News’ recent reporting that longtime “CEO Factories” like General Electric and IBM have been supplanted by professional-services firms,¹ are you mentoring your alma mater’s MBA students to enter consulting before pivoting into the healthcare vertical? With Stanford’s 2024 graduates pursuing consulting (14%) versus healthcare (6%) post-graduation,² it seems like many students identified this trend even before the 2025 Bloomberg report.

A. McKinnell: The first thing that comes to mind is the Italian art of sprezzatura, the art of making the hard look easy. This is not the first “sprezzatura” recommendation being advocated to make success look effortless.

First, there was 'follow your passion,' then 'manage your personal brand,' and now, experience in consulting. Success is never easy. Sprezzatura is art. It’s not real life. In real life, success in sports and in business is hard.

During my 36 years working for Pfizer as well as over 40 years serving on various boards, none of these three topics ever came up during 1,000-plus promotion discussions of which I had participated. Interestingly in fact, as a Harvard Business Review article shared, there has been a growing body of research that has pointed to how those who are passionate about their roles are more likely to be exploited in terms of being asked to work longer hours and agree to demeaning requests unrelated to their jobs.

As the authors mentioned, this trend was largely because employers tend to think that passionate people view “extra work” as a reward.³ If that's what you believe, there is no C-suite in your future. When the game is tied and there are two minutes left on the clock, a winning coach substitutes in the first-string players. In fact, “extra work” is a reward in both sports and in life. If your goal is to avoid “extra work” or to sit on the bench during those last two minutes, that’s your choice, but choices have consequences, and getting to be CEO is not one of them.

And so, when my student mentees from Stanford, Oxford, and UCLA ask for career advice, I candidly explain that becoming the CEO of a Fortune 500 is extremely hard and there are no easy hacks to secure such roles. Decision makers are not debating your concluding comments about how passionate you are for a new role. Instead, we are focused on three simple but crucial criteria including:

• Performance in prior roles: How well did you perform in prior roles? What were the target key performance indicators and what did you do to help overachieve on these targets?
• Potential for future success: Given where a company is striving to be in the coming years, what experiences do you bring to the table to help reach this aspirational vision? And remember, while the stock market saying of past performance is no guarantee of future returns, most hiring managers do believe that the best predictor of future success are prior ones reached by a job candidate.
• Personal integrity that is aligned with a company’s culture: With CEOs having such a visible role at Fortune 500s, their daily actions can provide a positive or negative reflection upon the whole entity. As such, hiring managers are looking for candidates whose prior actions align with the firm’s culture and values. At Pfizer, “living the values” was a key criterion for promotion.

Finally, let me share some recent career conversations which I have had with my Stanford students around probabilities, options, and personal choices. With approximately 1,500 biopharma start-ups in the US,⁴ we recognize that about 80% will fail and 20% will succeed.

Given the typical 30-to-40-year career tracks, many students are convinced that while not guaranteed, they should eventually land into one of those “20%” winning firms. So, there is that option to go big with one of those start-ups where you will be exposed to a variety of functional areas in a short period of time and secure a wide breadth of experiences.

Moreover, even with salaries which are lower than large cap biopharmas, the equity upside attracts Stanford MBAs who tend to lean towards entrepreneurial opportunities as Stanford professors Eesley and Miller’s research findings revealed.⁵

Q. Well for those current HBS, Stanford, MIT Sloan, and Wharton MBA students as well as recent graduates who are diving straight into large cap bio-pharma, what is your advice for them as they navigate their career journeys?

A.McKinnell: First, deliver outstanding performance in all of your assignments regardless of post-graduate role. Such a track record will build hiring managers’ confidence in investing time and resources for you to potentially take on various functional roles across their global locations. As Korn Ferry recently shared, “…ignore the ‘follow your passion’ cliché. It’s backwards. Passion rarely precedes competence; it usually follows it. Get good at something first—ideally something hard, useful, and in demand. That’s what creates confidence, opens doors, and often becomes a passion.”⁶

Second, challenge yourself to take on roles which might not initially appear to be a logical fit. For example, when I joined Pfizer in 1971 in Tokyo, I volunteered for sales training, a request that was initially puzzling to my new supervisors given my doctorate from Stanford. But I brushed past the perceived lesser status of sales positions which some MBAs unfortunately believe; recognizing that understanding how sales worked would be essential to comprehending the business unit as a whole.

Three years later, Pfizer promoted me to country manager of Iran. Unlike some of the other potential locations, like France and Switzerland, which might have been an easier place to bring my wife and our three young kids in tow, the Iranian assignment provided an invaluable general manager role at just 28 years old.⁷ Having yet another assignment in Hong Kong as President of Pfizer Asia provided the global experience and track record which the Board felt was crucial for my eventual promotion to CEO.

Third, set high goals that can support your career aspirations. To your earlier point about teaching a class at Wharton where half your students were high school valedictorians, they need to recognize that being selected for a CEO appointment is going to be very difficult as the competition only gets fiercer. And your readers should recognize that it is not only other students from the Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, and other top schools, but also leaders who have proved their mettle during training like Navy Seals, where one report pointed to planned 80% attrition rates.⁸

And even if you are someone who has always been at the top of whatever you have strived for, remember the value of continuing to set high goals for yourself. For example, when Pfizer became the number one ranked firm in the pharmaceutical industry, I challenged my colleagues on how we needed to move beyond number one. This process led us to articulate a new vision for Pfizer—to become “the world’s most valued company to patients, customers, business partners, colleagues, and communities.”

And we challenged ourselves to think hard about what we could still do even better. For instance, after one of our mergers, I challenged all of our colleagues to capture the best practices of each company and craft them into a new and better organization. Specifically, our US sales organization benchmarked one force against the other, identified best practices, and uncovered over 200 improvement ideas.⁹ And so, even if you are currently number one in an area, set the bar higher and people will notice.

Finally, while it is commendable to work hard in your career aspirations, make time to pursue other interests that are meaningful for you. In my case, for example, service on more than two dozen public and private company Boards of Directors and trade association boards have added a perspective which I could not have attained by focusing internally exclusively.

About the Author

Michael Wong is a Part-time Lecturer for the Wharton Communication Program at the University of Pennsylvania. As an Emeritus Co-President and board member of the Harvard Business School Healthcare Alumni Association as well as a Contributing Writer for the MIT Sloan Career Development Office, Michael’s ideas have been shared in the Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review.

References

1. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-05-29/why-so-many-ceos-start-at-consulting-firms-like-accenture-pwc
2. https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/organizations/recruit/strategies-resources/employment-reports/full-time
3. Berry, Zachariah and Jachimowicz, Jon M., When Following Your Passion Turns Toxic, Harvard Business Review, November 18, 2021
4. https://growthlist.co/biotech-startups/
5. Eesley, C.E. and Miller, W. F., Impact: Stanford University’s Economic Impact via Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Foundations and Trends in Entrepreneurship, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 130–278, 2018
6. https://tinyurl.com/3x6xh87k
7. https://tinyurl.com/4js3pfs2
8. https://www.sandboxx.us/news/special-ops/new-navy-report-reveals-rare-seal-training-attrition-data/
9. Koberstein, Wayne, Pfizer on the Front Lines, Pharmaceutical Executive, February 1, 2002.