Achieving Success in Insights – Organon (Merck)

 

As we all know, some insight groups have more impact on their clients or organizations than others.  This podcast focuses on those organizations that are doing a good job making an impact.  The road is not necessarily a direct path – and a lot of steps and missteps happen along the way.

We’ll be talking with leaders from brands and from suppliers that have made a lot of these steps and missteps.  We’ll cover the definition of success, how you know if you’re being successful, how to organize around that idea, and other related topics.

Our first guest is Lisa Courtade.  Lisa is the Executive Director of Commercial Assessment, Insights & Analytics for Organon, a Merck company.  She has many years with Merck including the last 6 years as the Executive Director of Global Consumer Insights. She is active in the insights community as a regular speaker and an all-around force of good for our industry.

Her definition of success for the insights organization is impact – not so much on the traditional metrics of budget or number of projects.  Her focus is on what the impact is on patients, getting medications to people that need them, delivering on previously unmet needs.  All those happen with an eye towards ROI, but also with an understanding that the time it takes to get to the valuable insights can be as important, or more important, than the other resources.

Please read the transcript or watch the video for more about her perspective on the goals of the organization, how to align the structure to the goals, and making change within your own organization.

 

 

Gregg Archibald: Hi everyone, and thanks for joining us.

I’m Gregg Archibald with Gen2 Advisors, and I want to welcome you to our podcast series focusing on how various organizations are achieving success within the insights function.

Over the course of the year, we’ll be highlighting both brands and suppliers that are achieving success in some meaningful way.  We’ll talk about how success is defined and how to do with trials and tribulations relationships and what the future holds.

I’m very pleased to introduce my guest today, Lisa Courtade.  Lisa has been with Merck for 16 years.  She is in an Executive Director role for a company called Organon, focusing on insights, analytics, and assessment.

Prior to this role, Lisa was the Executive Director of Global Consumer Insights for six years, has held a number of other leadership roles at Merck, and has been a constant speaker on the insights circuit and, generally, a force of good for our industry.

Thank you, Lisa, for being here.

 

Lisa Courtade: It’s a pleasure to be here with you, Gregg.

Gregg Archibald: Same.  You‘re now with the Organon, which is a Merck subsidiary at the moment, can you tell us a little bit about Organon and the role that you have now?

 

Lisa Courtade: Absolutely. It’s really interesting to leave Merck after 16 years leading a very large insights function to leading a much smaller organization, but much broader, in terms of the remit, Organon is roughly a 10th of the size, of Merck.  And it is very much a startup company that is focused on women’s health and addressing unmet needs.

We believe that women are foundational to a healthier world, and as a company, are listening to women’s health care needs big and small across the world, and we feel that’s going to enable us to develop treatments and tailor them to meet gaps in health and healthcare delivery worldwide.  It’s very exciting to be a part of a company with such a great mission and be part of building something new.

 

Gregg Archibald: Big congratulations on that opportunity in front of you. That is very exciting.  I want to start out with the idea of success for an insights organization. How would you define it?   How do you know when the insights organization is successful?

 

Lisa Courtade: For me, it’s really all about impact.  A lot of people think about success as how much money they spend, how many people they have, how many projects they’ve done. And, I really look at it in terms of, as we look at the work that we’re doing, are we impacting one patient’s life?  Are we delivering on unmet needs?  Are we getting medicines to people who need them? Are we communicating with them in a way that they understand how to take care of their health?

I think the other part of impact is helping the organization be more effective and efficient with their promotional dollars, with their clinical dollars, and how they invest.  As we think about ‘how do you measure that success?’ really it’s what was the business impact or the ROI on those investment dollars and what was our time to value?

Now, a lot of people are talking about speed and agility, which is incredibly important.  But, from my perspective, it’s more about time to value.  If you’ve got a business decision to make if you have an event in the market, how quickly do you get to helping that business make a decision or serve the needs of the public?

 

Gregg Archibald: Can you talk a little bit about that idea with success? You have goals.  And you listed out two important ones, the ROI and the time to value? And this is the first time that I’ve heard time to value as a phrase, and I like it and I’m going to steal it.  So just letting you know that now.

This idea, how do you set up a system to say we’re doing good in these areas, or we’re not doing good?

 

Lisa Courtade: It’s not so simple.  I think it starts with figuring out, how are you going to design your process?  Because, like many research professionals, many organizations, for a long time, I used metrics like dollars per FTE or number of projects.  I mean, those are an easy sort of financial metrics.

Even if I say my last year as an individual contributor, I ran over 400 studies.  I probably had a budget, personally of about $6 million, and I was proud of that.  But all that says is that I was busy, and I was spending a lot of money.

I think it’s more important to be able to highlight that I did a study that helped identify patients earlier to enroll clinical trials faster so that we could bring a drug to market that helped people live longer and better.  So, we got that there in the market five years faster than we would have ordinarily.  That’s huge.

Or that you could identify a new segment of the population.  And so you could look at that in terms of the lives that you’re saving or in terms of the dollars of revenue or doses that you’re selling of a product.

It’s all about a mind shift, change, and setting up your projects from the very beginning to say, OK, Gregg, you’ve come to me as a business leader, and you want to do a study, and maybe you want to test an ad campaign, or you want to do a new effort.  Let’s talk about what your goals are.  What are your strategic goals for the business?  And how are we going to measure success?  What does success look like?

Now, if we’re moving fast and there’s been a market event, we’ve got to figure out what we’ve got to do, then that’s where we’re really looking at time.  You know, if you’ve got a business deal to make around in licensing a product, or addressing a competitive claim, how fast you do that matters.  And so, you could get the perfect answer, and 12 to 18 weeks, or we can get a good enough answer in five days, and say what your time to value, and having a value on that business is.  I think those are both important metrics to test.

 

Gregg Archibald: Let’s stick to the time to value idea and bring up a couple of other issues that are facing the insights organizations in various ways.  And that’s the idea of agility and the idea of data democratization and let’s start with the latter one.  There’s a tendency for data, to be moved out of the insights organization into the end user’s hands more and more often. We used to own a process 10 or 15 years ago.

We used to own a process, pretty much from beginning and then at the end of 12 or 18 weeks, or whatever it was, we go, sit down with someone and hand them a report, and now, via Survey Monkey and a million other things, the ability for the end-user to get in there, grab data, find the answers, and move quickly, is an important component.

Where does that fit within your view of the world, particularly with the idea of time to value?

 

Lisa Courtade: If you can answer a question, using reliable data and do it yourself I think he should. We all have more work, and more business challenges, than any human can answer. So, there’s no end to the amount of things that can be done.  What I would prefer to have happen is that the data that we’ve put into our data libraries, into our portals, and our dashboard, I would like you to go self-serve in those areas.  You don’t need me.  You don’t need one of my team members to tell you what your sales were last year in Zimbabwe. You can look that up.

But if you have a question on, should I be launching this product into a new market, that’s something that’s more strategic that we can help you with, and where we should be putting our brainpower behind.  Our understanding of our customers, our data scientists, our capabilities, and that you’re not going to be able to easily look up in any of the systems.  So, let’s go back to that idea of value.  What has more value in terms of where we put our time in and we invest it?

 

Gregg Archibald: Can you talk a little bit about how you have the insights/ analytics/ assessment?  The team is structured to be able to kind of optimize around ROI, time to value, and make sure that you’re acting as a knowledgeable, integrated part.

 

Lisa Courtade: That’s a really great question.  And there are lots of different structures, centralized, decentralized, that I’ve had an opportunity to work in.  I think one of the most exciting things for me, coming over to Organon, is that some of the silos that existed because of organizational structures in the past are simply gone.

They’re just not even there.  So, we’re starting from a place of saying, how do we work together?  And really focusing on how we can best leverage each other’s individual strengths and talents.  Whether it’s the insights person, the analytics person, the forecasting team, or even somebody sitting in a market, how do we work together? And I’ll put IT in that mix as well.

How do we work together to solve these business challenges, instead of arguing over who owns it?  We own it collectively, and we’re working together, and I think that’s one of the really exciting things about being, in one a smaller company and two in a more agile organization, that from the very beginning, is saying, how can we do this better?  But I think there are some tradeoffs that you make.

I’ve worked in decentralized and centralized organizations, and I think, you know, centralized is great because you can work on your craft, you can really share best practices, build up your functional excellence, but you run the risk of being way too internally focused.  And focus too much on yourselves and not outward-looking enough.

On the other hand, if you completely be centralized and everybody’s sitting in with the business, you lose the career path thing, you lose the opportunity for people to learn from each other.  I’ve seen us lose focus on compliance, and the right ways to do things because we’re serving different masters.

My personal gut feel on this, is that a hybrid model, having lived through multiple models, that one works best, where you’re close to the business, but you’ll also have people who are focused on making sure everyone’s trained, everyone’s current, everyone’s learning, and everybody’s complaint.  At the same time, and you’re doing that, you mentioned data democratization, but you’re doing the sharing and when you have a little mix of both, you can get the best of both worlds.

 

Gregg Archibald: Well, let’s talk about that, because, there’s a hiring profile that works well and is centralized, particularly, people that want to stay in insights and analytics and kind of move that career path.
And there are people that get into it as passing point in their career.  So, you’ve got kind of this hybrid approach that allows both, does it impact the kind of people that you’re looking for to be a part of the organization or the training that you may need to do?

 

Lisa Courtade: I would have given you a different answer 10 years ago, as I think about this.  And I’ve spent a lot of time over the past year, one hiring people and two coaching and helping people find new jobs and new opportunities, at insights associations, around several job fairs and I’ve signed up and done some mentoring and coaching to assist people in their journeys.  I would say in both, the profile is remarkably similar.

In the old days, I would have said, a centralized organization gives you more room to have people who are developing and passing through because you had more senior-level folks to help provide oversight and coach and train and manage them.  And a lot of times, when you’re decentralized, if you’re the only brand, the only researcher insights person on a brand, you need to have some horsepower.  It’s hard to do that and be learning and brand new at it.

I think, more and more, the profile that we need, in all of the roles, no matter what the model is, that people have a learning mindset, and growth, and agility, and the ability to learn and adapt.  You do need some basics. But you are going to get further in either kind of organization, whether you’re there for your career, or you’re there for the learning opportunity in the new near term if you have that, drive, and that learning capability.

 

Gregg Archibald: Having been a hiring manager a few times, I can nod in agreement on several of the things you said, and the fact that their curiosity was my key question or key area that I looked for when I was hiring, was someone was curious?  Looking at the hybrid model what do you see as kind of the key benefits?  But also, the key difficulties that you need to overcome, to run that hybrid model effectively?

 

Lisa Courtade: Well, I think I talked more about the benefits that you have sort of the best of both worlds that you can be close to the business, which I think is incredibly important.  But you can also have someone who is taking care of making sure that the organization is learning.  Learning from each other, learning best practices.   Compliance is really big in the healthcare industry, so, making sure everything is done appropriately.

I think the challenge is that it can become a little confusing about who are you, are you the people on the ground doing the work, or are you the COE? And, when you’re playing both those roles you can have an identity crisis.  And, it can also be, be hard to sell.  Exactly, what do I come to you for?  What role are you playing this hour or this day?

 

Gregg Archibald: Is that the same for all of the team members?  Because you talked about insights, analytics, IT, assessment, forecasting, all trying to work together to solve whatever that business issue is.

Is that consistent, or is that in some way, unique to the insights and analytics component?

 

Lisa Courtade: Hmm, I don’t know if I have an answer for that, because if I think about it, IT organizations have worked in that agile model for a long time.  And in fact, that’s the industry that we borrowed a lot of those concepts from, I think they often play both roles as well.  We like to think we’re special, but I’m not sure we are that special.

 

Gregg Archibald: Ok.  And I agree that’s where we have started figuring out how to work together on projects faster and faster.   Traditionally, there’s been some budget ownership at the beginning of the year, and you start working on your budgets in October, or whatever that may be.

And you have a planning cycle, and maybe a learning agenda for the year.  In this model, does that kind of structure still hold, or is it more adaptive to the needs of the business, from April to May, to June, to July?

 

Lisa Courtade: I haven’t seen the budgeting process change.  And maybe it will, but typically, there’s a plan.  The interesting thing about our industry is that there are no guarantees.  And I think, anybody who’s been watching the development of vaccines and therapies for covid over the past year has seen that.  That, you know, you have a plan.  You’re going to bring a product to market.  And maybe it accelerates, or maybe it fails to deliver the endpoints you were hoping for.  And everything changes.  And, so, there’s always been some flexibility in that, that you have the strategic plan.

You have, in mind the projects that you’re going to do, the budget that you’re going to spend, then something happens.  And if we even just think about, you know, last year, there were plans, there were promotional plans, there were Congress plans, there are activities that were going to happen with the sales team.  All of that had to change, and it had to change pretty quickly.  So, there’s always both the plan and how you modify as you’re running.

 

Gregg Archibald
As someone said, plans are nothing, planning is everything.

 

Lisa Courtade: Absolutely.

 

Gregg Archibald: And I want to talk a little bit about the relationship between the organization and research suppliers, because we all know, and I had a brief conversation, on this the other day, there’s data, and there’s tools and there’s full service, and there’s data integration and there’s consulting companies, all trying to help move things forward and help you move things forward, can you talk a little bit about how you view the relationships and how you work with outside partners?

 

Lisa Courtade: It’s complicated but it’s also very simple.  We need partners, and we need good partners.  No one has enough time, people, money, expertise to do everything that they need to do. No internal team, no matter how big or how small, can do it all.  And we talk about and use the word ‘partners’, and I think that’s a telling word.  Because your agencies and the best ones are partners.  They’re helping you address business challenges, they are bringing to bear their expertise, their tools, their capabilities to help you solve, and part of that is taking on the risk and the reward with you on that journey.

 

Gregg Archibald: So, to be a good partner on your side, on the brand side of the organization, what do you need to do differently with a partner than you do with the supplier?

 

Lisa Courtade: It’s around the level of involvement and transparency.  Most research people will tell you they don’t like to be order takers.  Well, I can tell you, agencies don’t like to be order takers either.

If I’m just giving you a brief, and I’m asking you to fill in order, you’re going to deliver on that order, whether it makes sense or not.  A partner is someone that you bring in, and you say, here’s the business challenge we’re trying to solve, work with me to solve it, what’s the best way that we can do this?  What are the tools that capabilities?  How are we going to overcome these challenges?

I was doing a study last May and, oh gosh.  Was it nine countries with seven different stakeholder groups?  It was really in the worst part of the pandemic, worldwide. But we had a deadline that was being driven by some powers, greater than any of us, and so my question was, how?  How can we accomplish this goal?  What are the things that we can do?  Who, and what?  What’s absolutely unrealistic?  What would we have to change about what we’re asking for to make this happen?

And a partner comes to you and says, what’s feasible, what’s not feasible, what they can do, what you should be doing, what we can change, that would make it possible to again, deliver that value within the timeframe that you have to do it in.  Sometimes deadlines don’t change, just because you have a pandemic.

 

Gregg Archibald: But so a lot of them obviously didn’t change.  The last thing I want to talk to you about, and this may be a little bit different.  Given that you’re designing the organization from the ground up right now is where things are headed next.

If you think about three years out, four years out, what do you hope to be able to achieve with the insights, analytics, and assessment team that may be different than what you’re able to today?

 

Lisa Courtade: I don’t think my vision or desires have changed just because my seat, my title, my company changed.   In the last year at Merck and in this first year, with Organon, I’m still focused on ‘how can we deliver more foresights?’   As insights professionals, we’ve done a good job of measuring the past.  So, hindsight, we’ve done a good job of saying, ‘hey, this is all the stuff that’s going on right now.’   Which is insight.

The big question that has increasingly come up with, with the pandemic and honestly, we’re finally able to get really good traction with is that foresight, the predictive part of it, both in understanding how the market and our customers are going to evolve and how we as an organization should evolve.  I think that’s a key component, tearing down walls.

I had mentioned that before.  My definition of insights has never been, and I often start presentations this way, I’m like, insights is not studies.  It’s not a stack of reports or tabs. Insights is methodologically agnostic.

So, we might be, we might be doing primary market research surveys.  We might be doing social listening.  We may be doing meta-analysis of data.  There are any number of things that we might be doing to answer and deliver insights to the company.  And I think we have a real opportunity in this new organization, to realize that by working collectively, across functional areas, instead of in our little silos, each trying to do that.

My objective, has always been, how do you make that umbrella bigger?  And how do we really change that equation around time to value and maximizing our investment of resources, time, people, money?  How can we increase our impact from that?

 

Gregg Archibald: You’ve got an organization now that’s set up designed from the very beginning to tear down walls.  If you had to tear down those walls in an existing organization, where those walls do exist is there a piece of advice that you can share, that will help someone identify ‘that’s a wall I can tear down’ or this is going to be ‘we’re going to take 2 or 3 people to tear down this other wall.’  Is there some advice you can give us?

 

Lisa Courtade: You’re describing the last decade of my life.  And truthfully, it’s about being a good partner yourself and being willing to share and give up for the greater good.  I think the minute you go into it, saying, ‘I’m doing this for the glory of my department’, or to get credit, you’ve lost.

I think when you go into it sincerely, to say, how can we work together to deliver for the patients we serve for the business that we work for, this organization as a whole, amazing things can happen.  But you have to be willing to do that outreach and be that partner, and actually live that way.  So, if you go forward and you have a large achievement, or you win an award, you share that with everybody who’s been a part of that. And you go on that journey together, and the amazing thing that happens is if you are a good partner, people will come to you to partner.
It doesn’t matter what your org structure is, or how large it is, or how long it’s been in front.

 

Gregg Archibald: That’s fantastic, and just what you described as leading by example.  So, Lisa, I want to thank you for your time today.  This has been fantastic as always, and enlightening and enjoyable.  Thanks for being a part of this.

 

Lisa Courtade: Thank you.