It’s a familiar story. A big, financially successful corporation sees that firms which have mastered digital technology can move more quickly, operate more efficiently, mobilize more resources, attract more talent, win over customers more readily, and enjoy more elevated market capitalizations. But when they invest in digital technology, the initial results are disappointing.
“Many companies struggle to reap the benefits of investments in digital transformation, while others see enormous gains?” say Marco Iansiti and Satya Nadella in their article “Democratizing Transformation” in HBR (May-June 2022). “What do successful firms do differently?”
Digital transformation, the authors say, “requires that executives, managers, and front-line employees work together to rethink how every aspect of the business should operate.” This is not an easy message to digest or implement, especially when the initial results of digital investments are disappointing. A firm that is finding the right path is Novartis, a Swiss firm with over 100,000 employees that researches, develops, manufactures, and markets healthcare products in more than a hundred countries.
The CEO since September 2017 is Vasant Narasimhan, a U.S. citizen of Indian descent. He has a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences, an M.D. from Harvard Medical School and his master’s degree in public policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government. He joined Novartis in 2005 from McKinsey and rose quickly through the ranks to become chief medical officer and global head of drug development. He became CEO at the young age of 41.
As CEO, Narasimhan inherited a company that his predecessor had spent most of his time restructuring and pruning. He set out to use digital to make more gains.
As the Wall Street Journal reported in 2018, “as CEO, he is pushing a series of tech-based initiatives he says could jump-start the company’s drug pipeline. He wants to introduce artificial-intelligence to find new biomarkers, molecules that can help identify patients most likely to respond to a specific treatment and speed up clinical trials.”
