Four moments that helped me keep perspective in 2021

Leading a health company through the pandemic has profoundly shaped my perspective and leadership. 2021 was a challenging year to maintain energy in the face of the challenges the pandemic presented. Two concepts that helped me personally come from Eastern philosophy. The first is impermanence, the idea that things are everchanging, and the second is interconnectedness, or the ways events can often be related in surprising ways.?

Reflecting on these two principles helps me keep perspective as COVID waves rattle the world and in our digital age, in which we intake curated news feeds and can easily get wrapped up in singular moments. The power of perspective allows us to stay grounded, optimistic, and determined to improve the world around us while navigating the short- and mid-term challenges that come with leading a global business. Personally, I stay focused on the long-term goal of reimagining medicine—the extraordinary biological complexity there is to unravel and the resilience it takes to push beyond the boundaries of human understanding and scientific possibility.

With that in mind, each year I take time to reflect on what I’ve learned from significant experiences. Here are four things that helped me keep perspective and stay inspired last year.

Getting vaccinated and the power of science

I consider vaccines one of the greatest advances our species has made on the journey of human progress. As a former vaccine developer and public health physician, I’ve seen firsthand the difference they can make for people across continents—especially for children.

I was grateful to be vaccinated for COVID-19. Vaccines are the reason I could travel to see my parents again, the reason my boys could hug their grandparents for the first time in many months. They’ve enabled a cautious return to a semblance of normality so we can figure out new ways of working and living. And with care disrupted across all areas of health, they’ve helped patients get back to the doctor’s office to begin or resume care.

A vaccine for COVID-19 was not an inevitable outcome. Those we have today were brought to fruition thanks to decades of investment in scientific research. While there’s work to be done, including on the access front, I believe our industry’s response to the pandemic will be looked back on as one of the great success stories of modern medicine.

A range of treatments will be needed, and in addition to co-manufacturing mRNA vaccines to boost global supply, Novartis is proud to have helped develop a potential new treatment for the rapidly evolving pandemic—a multi-specific DARPin (Designed Ankyrin Repeat Protein) specifically designed to bind to the spike protein in three places to inhibit viral action.

The scale and speed of the scientific response are nothing short of historic. They are a reminder that science-based progress, in our time and across decades, has come to the rescue when humanity was most in need. This is a time for the world to dramatically increase investment in scientific research and incentivize groundbreaking pursuits of truly novel innovation—not scale back or chip away at the edges.

A 1 billion milestone

Early in my career, I worked with malaria patients and healthcare workers in Tanzania, among other places. Day after day, we were confronted with loss on an unimaginable scale. Malaria was claiming the lives of countless patients, and many children, simply because there wasn’t enough highly effective medicine available.

This year I had what felt like a full-circle moment, as Novartis reached the milestone of delivering a staggering 1 billion courses of malaria treatment to people in low-income countries, 450 million of those doses designed for children. To put the scale of that impact into perspective, if you lined up the pills from those courses in a straight line, they could circle Earth’s equator three times.

Few companies impact human health at such a significant scale across generations. I couldn’t be prouder of the work Novartis has done in the face of what has been a great human scourge since biblical times.

It reminds me that while progress can sometimes strike like a lightning bolt, slow and steady efforts over time can make a longstanding difference for the world, especially when it comes to our longest-standing health challenges. ?

We will keep at it while working to chart the next frontier—to tackle some of the greatest killers and non-communicable diseases across low- and middle-income countries, like cardiovascular disease and cancer, with next-generation technologies in medicine, such as siRNA therapies. That chapter in the future of health could open a whole new era of progress for low- and middle-income countries.

Being with our people again

At certain points in the year, with great caution, I was able to begin visiting teams in person again. After months of working from home or staying local, it brought me so much energy to see our people and hear their perspectives on the world, their fresh ideas about our contributions to human health, and more.

While much work can be done virtually these days, some things are harder to do through a screen, such as communicating empathy. Even before the pandemic, I said that to reimagine medicine we have to reimagine Novartis, and we’ll continue finding the right balance for ourselves and with our teams.

There’s a lot of talk these days about new ways of working, lots of talk about perfect formulas for how many days should be spent at home or in the office. Here’s my latest perspective: no perfect formula exists. It will be different for every sector, every team, every person...and in our increasingly complex world, we will need to experiment and adapt on a regular basis.

The wonders of our natural world

Human health and planetary health are inextricably interlinked. A warming climate directly increases the toll taken by respiratory and tropical diseases, among others. And as a drug developer, I think about how the natural world remains an important and irreplaceable source of medicines, as it has since ancient times. The malaria medicine I mentioned earlier is derived from a sweet wormwood called Artemisia Annua.

Among other efforts at Novartis and beyond, I’m on the board of African Parks, an extraordinary organization that works with governments across Africa to preserve national parks, increase biodiversity, and support local communities. Recently, for example, they worked to translocate 30 white rhinos to Rwanda’s Akagera National Park, where rhinos once thrived and will soon thrive again—and through work like this, we see both the challenges of preserving biodiversity but also the kind of collective action and bold thinking required to make real gains.

More broadly, as health impacts due to climate continue taking hold, most harshly in low- and middle-income countries, we must bolster the collective approach across industry and especially government. Among many other climate-related efforts, Novartis is investing in the exploration of the impact of climate on health equity across communities of color.

In closing...

I’m approaching 2022 the same way I approached 2021—expecting uncertainty, hopeful that this pandemic will come to an end, clear-eyed about the challenges that remain on the path to a healthier future for all, and as optimistic as ever that we will keep learning and progressing.

More than anything, my belief that science-based progress is our best means of protecting and advancing human life has only been fortified. It’s why I’m proud to lead a company committed to making real that very promise, and it’s what gives me tremendous energy for continuing the journey of reimagining medicine in 2022.?