Winner
Sam Pearce
Summary of work
Celgene is the third pharmaceutical company Sam has worked for and her first as General Manager. One of her motivations for joining the company was to be in a position to offer leadership within the industry not just within the company.
In previous roles, Sam focused her attention on improving the way in which pharmaceutical products make it to market, building them into brands that deliver value to various stakeholders. This has been her passion throughout her career, starting with DuPont Pharmaceuticals in 1993 and during the seven years she spent at AstraZenca. She has achieved her goal through a combination of tactical execution as a product manager and strategic marketing as a brand leader, and through implementing broader organisational marketing capability development programmes as sales and marketing director.
At Celgene, Sam has drawn on all her previous organisational, technical, leadership and people-focused experiences. The challenge over the past 18 months since joining Celgene has been to take a rapidly growing but immature business, harness the potential of a unique and promising portfolio and build an organisation that will maximise the potential its products while creating a unique culture.
To do this Sam has focused on four key imperatives:
1. Ensuring patients can access our products
2. Building organisational capability
3. Building a people-focused organisation
4. Achieving all commercial goals.
Sam’s credentials as a leader are very much centered around her drive to transform an organisation. Her focus so far has been on internal capability development, building high-performing teams and an engaged and motivated workforce.
An unintended but welcome consequence of this is the leadership role Celgene is now playing within the industry in relation to innovative market access schemes, orphan drug policy, external partnerships and the focus on delivering value.
Judges’ comments
“Sam is clearly making an impact at Celgene, which is showing organisational growth and renewal, and making the public case for access to medicines. Sam deserves recognition for this and is truly an up and coming industry player and leader.”
