When a Leader Combines Sportsmanship and Scientific Thinking

What’s a man without a mission? Tim Mikhelashvili is a man with a passion and a mission. He is a Doctor of Pharmacy and a senior thought leader, writer, and speaker in the pharmaceutical industry driven by innovation and competition throughout his life and career.

Embarking on his career in the pharma industry, Tim had witnessed many popular medications being recalled from the market after being approved which angered him as he considered it unacceptable. So he set the goal of improving the quality of healthcare in his career through his work and education because he felt that the public should be more concerned about how much benefit they will receive from a medication when they receive a prescription from their doctor, rather than be reluctant to use it because of its risk or actually suffer from serious adverse effects after taking them.?

Who is Tim Mikhelashvili?

Tim describes himself as a new age humanist, someone who wants to leave a legacy on the next generation by accelerating innovation and purpose. He recalls being restless at night and not sleeping, growing up in his native Tbilisi in the Republic of Georgia, worrying about the threat of a nuclear war and wondering what the future would hold during the global tension and Cold War in the 1980s.?

He illustrates his vision by stating that “when you look into the eyes of children, you see eternity, and everyone wants children to live 150 years and even longer” so he hopes innovation in healthcare can increase longevity and life expectancy for the next generation. Tim says that we ourselves are responsible for our future and that our ideas create the future. As a Doctor of Pharmacy with a Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Medical education and Scientific Publications, Tim has now worked in the pharmaceutical industry for over 18 years.?

Looking back at his career, he considers himself fortunate to have worked with some of the leading scientists in medicine across the globe and some of the most successful and talented leaders in the areas of Research and Development, Sales and Marketing. He combines healthcare with business and innovation and feels that his experience working in the Medical division of his industry enables him to communicate medical information during the Age of Information, which requires new norms of communication and social corporate responsibility which the pharmaceutical industry must take on to ensure patients, physicians, and everyone in the healthcare continuum receives the best quality information in a way they can understand and relate to their life.?

In order to fulfill this mission, Tim helps organizations in life sciences combine two mindsets, i.e. sportsmanship and scientific thinking, which he argues are the most productive in any organization regardless of the role, any prior training and interests of employees in sports or science. He has become a senior thought leader in his industry, having led company-wide culture initiatives and transformed them with new evidence generation and research. His deep reflection on his experiences in the corporate environment throughout his career, character, and independent thinking led him to receive his MIT certification in Leading Organizational Change and host the @Alloutcoach leadership and company culture podcast in which he regularly speaks to Top Fortune 100 and 500 Business Executives, leading organizational change researchers, best-selling prize-winning authors, Olympians, regular Forbes, Harvard Business Review, and Nature journal contributors, leaders and mentors in pharmaceuticals and beyond to help people transcend their differences and extend the boundaries of their responsibilities.?

It was his unique sports and science philosophy that led to becoming CEO and Co-Founder of Amedea Pharma, an analytics and organizational change consulting company. His agency incorporates data science principles with modern organizational research, enabling life science companies in the pharma and medical device industry to express their value using words and numbers that people can translate and touch rather than pictures alone that leave too much for interpretation. Thus, he has found a unique “DeepMetrics” scientific method to combine and quantify both performance and behavior, weighing each equally at 50% in his proprietary Medical Productivity Index (MPI) to distribute accountability more evenly. Thus Tim considers his company unique because it combines analytics with management consulting to not only measure but to inspire stronger performance and engagement, two areas in highest demand today, ultimately leading to more predictable strategy and accurate forecasting.

We stand on the shoulders of our predecessors

If you would have asked Tim at 18 what he would do in his life, he probably would have predicted correctly what he ended up becoming. Tim always believed he needed to be involved in the world of science in the medical field.?

His parents and family would describe him as persevering, as someone of character. As evidence, Tim says he learned Italian by listening to Italian music, translating the lyrics, and watching Italian films. He would often pause the movie, look up words in the dictionary, write them down, and keep notebooks of translations. One of his biggest accomplishments, according to him, is breaking down boundaries between people from diverse cultures. He recalls convincing his friends to watch subtitled Italian movies with him even though they did not speak the language, explaining to them not only the action in the movie but the background stories behind the directors, actors, and culture. And over time, Tim introduced his native Georgian culture, or his admiration for Italian films, music, and culture, and connected his American, Georgian, Italian friends and those of other nationalities to each other as well as to the new culture by transmitting his passion for his own interests. ? ?

This attitude of self-directed metamorphosis has remained constant throughout Tim's later career. As a student in pharmacy school in New Orleans, he knew that there were not that many opportunities to work in as a pharmacist in the industry.?

Inspired by the school's dean at the time who had shared his own experiences in the pharmaceuticals, Tim decided he wanted to work in pharma, and the Dean created a first-ever 2 month industry rotation to accommodate Tim’s passion. Deliberate and persistent, that was the first sign Tim began to create his own momentum as the rotation helped him find his first full-time assignment in the pharmaceutical industry at a large global company, Sanofi (Aventis at the time).? As a PharmD post-doctoral fellow working in Medical Education and Scientific Publications, his first project was one he is proud of to this day, during which he lead a company-wide root cause analysis of thousands of medication errors and their consequences conducted by a multi-disciplinary team of physicians, nurses, pharmacists?he led with whom he published his first ever research in a scientific journal in 2007.

Tim's background also helped shape his career path. He comes from a family of teachers, doctors, healthcare professionals and entrepreneurs. Looking back at his career, Tim takes great pride in collaborating with some of the leading scientists in medicine including Nobel prize laureates even though he did not receive formal basic science research training because he feels he is contributing to improving the quality of healthcare.???

As a result, in many groups in which he found himself, he realized that his unique background, multicultural and multilingual upbringing,? and perceptions of his experiences often led him to see reality and the future from a completely different perspective from many of his peers. His experience and training in business, marketing, along with his initial studies in pharmacy, placed him at the crossroads of disciplines that allowed him to see and influence his industry merging both analytical and creative skills or areas of the brain.?

Tim’s journey illustrates that we are shaped by our background, our personal drive, and the efforts to build upon that create our own path.

“You're just a fellow”

Some words people tell us can leave a lifelong impact on our lives. Tim recounts one of the moments that defined not only his life, but also manifested his mindset at the same time. In his first full-time contract role in pharma, his global company was being acquired in a hostile takeover by another giant in the industry. Though only a Post-Doctoral PharmD Fellow contractor at the company and a “rookie”, Tim considered himself a member of the team and would stand up for his boss and team in their absence despite the uncertainty and tension throughout the takeover at critical business meetings which he was not even required to attend. In fact, though unsure of his own future at the time, Tim remembers his proactive approach to hiring the next fellow to replace him, spending hours after work convincing the next incoming contractor fellow to choose his company over other offers received from others despite the acquisition because of the tremendous amount of learning and valuable experience he had obtained, which he wanted this candidate he considered a star to also enjoy. This talented candidate would later become an executive in large pharma companies.?

Meanwhile, Tim himself began to search for his next role himself and he approached his manager and mentor whom he looked up to as a respected thought leader in the industry about the best path to finding his next role. "You are just a fellow," the manager said, estimating that the chances were slim based on the merger that Tim would be able to remain at the company and that he liked to but could not help him. Tim remembers this phrase well, as well as his response, saying at that point, "well, first of all, I'm a grown man” and asking his manager for a few days off to attend a career networking event. His manager would offer to write a recommendation for his next role, which Tim did not take. Within less than a month, Tim would receive three different offers all of them because of the mentors and friends who believed in him as well as his initiative to make the decision to attend the career conference for current and aspiring Medical Science Liaisons (MSL). The MSL position would be the first role he would fill at a large global company, AstraZeneca. In retrospect, he had made a critical life decision and invested what to him was a substantial amount of money at the time to attend this professional seminar as he was also working all weekends part-time at a local pharmacy to help pay off his large student loans. Yet Tim was able to create new opportunities for himself. He had learned a lot with his current manager, but it was now time to move on again. When his mentor heard about the MSL role offer, Tim recalls the evident surprise in his manager’s expression of his success. He’d speak to his manager years later, reconnect, and ask for his recommendations in future roles, as Tim has remained grateful for the passion and contacts his mentor had transmitted to him in his first year of his career.

Ultimately, his first experience in pharma taught Tim how to create his own momentum despite adversity and it would only be the first of many turning points later in his career when he would later master this ability, and even start coaching it to others in the industry.?

You Can Create Your Own Momentum

This experience and the lessons learned early were invaluable and trained Tim to master creating momentum for himself as well as for his teams. Before Tim founded his current company, Amedea Pharma, he worked in a start-up. Although the company had a next-generation product which only had one adverse event listed in its prescription label, it was competing against a long-standing market leading product from a much larger global company with more resources. While Tim led the company-wide Culture and Values initiative for his Medical Team, he also convinced the entire company to conduct a bold, head-to-head study against its global competitor which reinvigorated the entire Sales force, and increased the company evaluation after years of frustration, while adding access to this novel product for patients across the U.S. Regardless, the start-up itself ended up failing, yet its lead product now in the hands of a different company, continues to generate over 136 million dollars in revenue to this day without any promotion whatsoever.? Paradoxically, this experience was both his career high and low at the same time due to his personal investments into the company. One of the executives in the company gave him the message that he was on his own, and that he needed to find his own solution. At the time, that was the best advice Tim could get.

Tim took his fate into his own hands and once again created his own momentum. Again, he took a renowned course, Leading Organizational Change at MIT, where he sat among many company founders and other CEOs with tremendous resumes and incredible experience, some of whom became his advisors, as well as mentors he would later interview on his own leadership podcast. This became the basis for the new turn in his career.

Many people had to leave the company in which Tim had also invested his own resources. He then made the decision to help people create their own momentum as he had done years before in the hostile takeover of his company.? He started the podcast @Alloutcoach and founded a company called “Amedea Pharma,” which helps pharmaceutical companies become more productive with a proprietary method combining scientific thinking and sportsmanship.?

What Tim learned and wants to teach others is that innovation is not only based on information, but that “the best results are obtained when, in addition to words or information alone, employees share emotions”. He says, “When people feel it’s safe to share emotions, only then can you create the learning culture that is so critical for innovation”.

Based on this, Tim wrote articles and as a result he attracted the attention of other leaders. In his podcast, he has since interviewed many Top 100 Fortune Business executives, organizational change experts, researchers, innovators, Forbes, Harvard Business Review, and Nature Journal regular contributors, and best-selling award-winning authors, and leaders across pharma and other industries.

In doing so, Tim went far beyond his familiar world of pharma. Here he cites the Japanese physician, Prof. Tonegawa who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1987, and said that “to increase your creativity, you must combine knowledge in at least two different fields where people don’t interact”.

Tim considers an important driver of his own personal growth that he can teach and inspire others with what he himself learned.

Passion is great, but you must avoid illusion

Tim speaks with great passion, and when I ask about the role of passion in business, he indicates that passion plays a very important role, but that there is also a danger in overemphasizing passion. Very quickly, he learned that passion without the other critical elements such as scientific thinking and sportsmanship could lead to illusions.?

Passion should come naturally in an ideal world. It is important to shape ideas, to motivate and inspire others, “to animate and give more color to ideas”, he says. Combined with other elements, it is very powerful, but passion alone can be unpredictable, irrational, lead to favoritism, and blur critical thinking or decision-making.

Passion is especially an accelerator in communication. Tim cites George Bernard Shaw’s quote that “the greatest mistake of communication is the illusion that it occurred”. Passion can make communication much more effective. But Tim reminds us that ultimately it is the essence of the content and ideas themselves that make the difference regardless of their delivery.

If passion is deep, it is also a driving force to keep learning and getting better at a particular field or topic. Sometimes, people neglect their own potential by dismissing passion as something very few people have. Yet Tim argues that passion does not suddenly appear as an epiphany or an episode to some of us.?

Passion develops over time among all of us by studying or practicing something, becoming more and more interested in that given subject and simply dedicating more time to it to become an expert.?

But at the same time, you must keep asking yourself questions about the assumptions you make. If for the sake of passion you have certain beliefs that you continue to hold on to, then passion can quickly become an illusion tool. Yet Tim reminds us that If you combine passion with sportsmanship and scientific thinking, then you will make better decisions.

Temper your passion with reality.

He believes that one way to prevent passion from becoming an illusion is to take inspiration from very diverse people. It is important that the people around us have the courage to give us feedback, even if we are sometimes upset by it. Tim says that the people that are closest to us who love us the most are often the ones that make us most upset yet provide us with some of the most honest and valuable feedback.

Creating your own momentum is critical, but adding and maintaining enthusiasm regardless of the environment or adversity may ultimately make the difference, Tim says as he references Winston Churchill, who said that “success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm”. If passion turns into blind spots or failures, you should temper your enthusiasm; on the other hand, you must guard that the failures do not shut down your momentum. The balance may not be easy to maintain, but Tim is challenging all of us to keep generating momentum that after a series of events in succession throughout our life can knock down any hurdle or barrier, break new ground and reach new heights we previously thought were impossible.

This was a great inspirational talk with Tim which I am grateful for. If you want to know more about Tim and his undertakings, please check following links:

His LinkedIn page: https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/timerius/

Tim’s Analytics and Organizational Change Consulting agency:

https://amedeapharma.com/?

Tim’s Alloutcoach podcast https://anchor.fm/alloutcoach

https://medicalaffairs.org/?

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