This is a common narrative. A big and successful company realizes that digital-literate companies can move faster, work more efficiently, marshal more resources, attract better talent, win customers easier and have higher market capitalizations. But the initial results from their digital investments were underwhelming.
“Why do many firms fail to realize returns on their investment in digital transformation while others make huge profits?” ask Marco Iansiti and Satya Nadella in their article ‘Democratizing Transformation’ published in Harvard Business Review (May-June 2022). “What are the winning companies doing differently?”
According to them, this means “executives, managers, and front-line employees must work together to rethink how everything in the business should be done.” Yet it’s not an easy message to take in or act upon given initial disappointing outcomes of digital investments. One such firm is Novartis, with over 100000 workforce that researches, develops, manufactures and markets healthcare products across one hundred countries.
Vasant Narasimhan is a US citizen who has been CEO since September 2017. He has a BS degree majoring in Biological Sciences as well as an MD honours from Harvard Medical School and Master’s degree in Public Policy from John F Kennedy School of Government. In McKinsey he was employed until 2005 when he joined Novartis rising rapidly to become CMO then Head of Global Development before becoming CEO at age 41.
Narasimhan became the CEO after his predecessor had spent most of his time reshaping and trimming the company. His aim was to gain more ground using digital.
“Mr. Narasimhan is also pushing tech-based initiatives as a new chief executive that he says could jump-start its drug-pipeline plant.” According to The Wall Street Journal (2018), “He wants to use AI which will be used for biomarker discovery — molecules capable of pinpointing patients who are most likely to respond to a particular treatment as well as hasten clinical experiments.”