| Pfizer's Look at the Future "Beyond #1″ | ||
| The Docket | ||
 |  | Client: Pfizer Inc., New York, NY Consultant: Nature of engagement: |
| Bob Orr Vice President, Organizational Effectiveness, Pfizer | Niko Canner Managing Partner, Katzenbach Partners LLC | |
| In Their Own Words: Pfizer's Bob Orr and Katzenbach's Niko Canner recount the engagement that helped the pharma giant look to the future. Listen to webcast (49:09) > | ||
From the start, the company intended to "engage Katzenbach Partners as a trusted adviser," says Orr. Although Pfizer used the same selection process it would for any major engagement, Katzenbach clearly held the inside track. "We knew that we would be sitting down with over 100 senior executives and talking about closely held beliefs. We needed people we could trust. Katzenbach has an extensive history with Pfizer and had built strong relationships. Katzenbach was like an extension of our team. They had our trust," Orr explains.
Solution Milestones • Two streams. Orr envisioned two main streams to the consulting engagement. One stream would assess Pfizer's external environments and envision how things would look 10 years down the road. The other stream would focus internally and examine the stresses and strains that accompany the kind of growth that the company had experienced. From the start, both threads were intended to be intertwined.• Socratic approach. The strategy was to engage the executives in what amounted to a Socratic dialogue. "We would ask hard questions and let them wrestle with their own vision. This was not about our making recommendations, but to engage the executives in dialogue," says Canner.
• Big questions. The company was not interested in small details. Instead, the dialogues were designed to bring out the really big questions, which would lead to discussions of fundamental issues. Both Pfizer and Katzenbach were feeling their way at this point. "We did not know what the process would look like. There is not expertise in doing this. We invented how to do it together," Canner explains.
#boxred { width: 335px; margin: 0 95px; padding: 1.5em; text-align:center; } • Top-down vs. bottom-up. There were no standard answers. The team debated whether to take a top-down or bottom-up approach. "We went through multiple iterations of the engagement design. We had advocates at both ends: top-down and bottom-up. We decided to let the top-level executives make the call, and we ended up somewhere in the middle," says Orr. However they decided to approach the dialogue, it was imperative to make each conversation different from what senior executives thought and did every day in their jobs.
• Sheer amount of data. Very quickly, the engagement team found itself grappling with a massive amount of qualitative data. To stay on top of the volumes of data they were collecting, the engagement team would "get together and have a synthesis meeting once or twice each week," says Canner. There was no distinct recommendation phase to the engagement. Rather, the synthesis sessions were used to summarize what had been uncovered to date, almost like "a continuous, iterative recommendation phase," he adds. "The challenge was to distill it to the point where senior executives could get a handle on it."
• Entrepreneurial vs. standards. Although Pfizer had a heritage as an entrepreneurial operation, acquisitions had driven the latest spurt of growth. A key issue emerged concerning the trade-offs between the entrepreneurial approach and standardization, between individualization and centralization. "Our role was not to choose sides but to try to reconcile different views," says Canner. What ultimately emerged was the realization that Pfizer could be both, centralized in some places and decentralized elsewhere.
Results The results of all this work culminated in an offsite meeting of the senior leadership in Dublin, Ireland. Although Orr and his boss sat in on every session, Canner and the Katzenbach team remained outside the room as the senior executives were presented with the results of the effort."It was important to remind ourselves what the project was about. It was not about making discrete recommendations. It was about getting the senior management team to look at hard questions and have a dialogue among themselves," says Canner, who admits to disappointment at not having had the chance to observe the proceedings.
Adds Orr: "Only a few firms have that kind of humility, to step out of the spotlight. This differentiates Katzenbach."
A handful of specific initiatives did come out of the Dublin meeting. These ranged from efforts to take billions of dollars out of the cost structure to how the company could best leverage its giant scale.
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