Fred Hassan, former CEO of Schering Plough

Fred Hassan is the former CEO of Schering Plough. Fred was CEO of three global pharmaceutical companies and was previously named CEO of the Year by the Financial Times. He is currently Chairman of the Caret Group and works with Warburg Pincus.

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What is the resilient mindset required to execute a turnaround?

Being resilient means being strong on the inside. If you know that you are trying to do the right thing, that you're open, that you're listening, that you're testing ideas, building a team of people around you, who you can really trust, that's very important. Having that group makes a big difference. And then driving execution, just being relentless, not giving up, even if there's a product launch failure or there's an R&D failure, or there's a GMP problem in the manufacturing plants. That's okay. Just understand it. Be honest about it. And go after it. Once the culture starts working for you, it's amazing how much power can be unleashed.

How did Fred use purpose to drive organizational change?

So we talked a little bit more about the good things that we do together as a team, we help each other, we learn, we grow. Continuous learning is a joy in life. And then also out of the work that we were able to do, some new drugs came along. And I used to have a thing called "talking about our business" that would be an email blast that would go out to the 60,000 employees around the world and we would celebrate victories every time good things happen. We came up with a great drug for brain cancer, and we tried to describe in some detail what it feels like to be a brain cancer patient. It's just horrible. And here we could do something.

What were the common archetypes of successful rising leaders?

The three things that separate people out and they're character traits in many ways. Number one is humility because, with humility, you have self-awareness. You have awareness of your environment. The second is empathy, and that goes very closely with humility, but understanding the effect you have on people and especially the knowledge of customer behavior, consumer behavior. That's also empathy. And the third is this curiosity, the custom continuous learning, getting better, always learning, never accepting what you know as being good enough

What was Fred's motivating sense of purpose?

Yeah, this is a very good question. I think my biggest purpose is to do good things. I just enjoyed that. It makes me feel good about it. I'm not particularly religious, but I do take a lot of interest in humanity. I want to see people do well around me. If I make a little bit of a difference, whether I teach somebody, mentor somebody, or if I build a team or if I give an idea to somebody that might ultimately lead to something, I feel very, very good about that.

What advice does he have for rising leaders?

Sometimes people may have unbridled ambition or ambition where they're wearing their ambition on their sleeves, and people, the organization works against you at that stage. They're not going to help you. I've seen very good people do very well because they remained humble, they remained affable. They helped other people very easily. They were authentic, and it's amazing how much help and support they got from the organization.

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