How - Dov Seidman [93]
As Mike Fricklas’s wife reminds him, it’s a long, hard fall off the ladder of trust. Trust is destroyed by the suspicion that any person, group of people, or organization is acting in its own narrow interests without regard for mutuality and mutual advantage. The choices you make, as an individual or an organization, send strong messages to the marketplace, and the marketplace responds in countless ways, both easily quantifiable and more ephemeral. Mike also shared with me that he has made it a fundamental part of his professional approach to get to know and build trust with the general counsels of the other big media companies. “Through those relationships,” he said, “we’ve both resolved amicably differences of view that had come up between our companies and been successful promoting issues where there is a commonality of interest across our industry, like antipiracy efforts or new compensation rules.”
TRUST IS THE DRUG
In mid-2006, Jeffrey B. Kindler was named chief executive officer and then later chairman of the board of pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc. after several years in which the company experienced subpar performance in rapidly changing market conditions. It’s fair to say he inherited a company operating in a low-trust environment, with the popular public perception of “Big Pharma” linked almost entirely to “big profits.” “I was at a play recently, and there was a line that got great laughs about people going to a charity function to provide philanthropy for a disease invented by the pharmaceutical industry,” Jeff told me. “I mean, when you get to the point where popular humor and popular culture accept the premise that we actually sit around trying to invent diseases so that we can then invent treatments for those diseases and make money, you know, it is appalling.”13
Kindler has long been recognized not only for his business acumen, but also for his leadership in the areas of pro bono legal services, diversity, and corporate social responsibility during his tenure at General Electric and McDonald’s. The board’s selection expressed a conviction that he could take the company in a new direction, make it more nimble, less bureaucratic, and more responsive to the needs of the market. In a sense they were looking for someone to restore the trust necessary to launch Pfizer on a TRIP. To his credit, Jeff has tackled this challenge head-on. In his first public communication upon taking over the company, he promised Pfizer would do nothing less than “transform virtually every aspect of how we do business.”14
When we spoke, I asked Jeff how he was approaching the monumental task of restoring trust with Pfizer’s stakeholders and the public at large. “The first step is to listen to people,” he said. “I have spent an enormous proportion of my time since I got this job listening to employees, listening to customers, listening to investors, listening to analysts, even listening to the media. My first objective is to find out what is on their minds, what bothers them about the industry, what bothers them about the company, what is frustrating them, and whether we are serving appropriate objectives. I’m trying to fully understand the source of the mistrust. Then I am trying with my team to build into our plans, our activities, and our decision making ways in which we can be responsive to those concerns, large and small. How are we going to be more customer focused? How are we going to not just tell patients that we care about them, but demonstrate that we care about them in actions that they will find credible?”
Though Jeff’s challenge is to turn around a very large ship sailing in stormy seas, his journey is similar to the challenge any team of any size faces when trying to get a TRIP going, and it begins by knowing who you are and where you want to go. Listening—the first crucial step toward gaining trust—helped