PHARMA FOR ALL AbbVie’s James Feliciano on building a strong and innovative corporate culture By C Bryan Jones
When AbbVie G.K. President and American Chamber of Commerce in Japan (ACCJ) Governor James Feliciano took the reins of the young pharmaceutical company in 2016, he set into motion a 5-Year Focus that would help guide growth at a crucial time. The results speak for themselves. Today, AbbVie is among the world’s leading players in pharma and has steadily climbed the ladder of great places to work. One year after The ACCJ Journal sat down with Feliciano to learn about the initiative, we catch up with him again as the 5-Year Focus winds down—amid the coronavirus pandemic—to find out what the company has learned and where the path to 2025 is leading. Tell me about the 5-Year Focus. This strategic plan, which we launched in 2016, has been all about how you bring together existing initiatives and priorities to create a framework that allows people to understand what the com pany is aiming for and around which we can communicate. Often, you’re having tremendous success and moving forward as an organization, but you don’t have the framework to track and record that success. The 5-Year Focus allowed us to decide what our priorities were going to be and to track our progress towards those goals.
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OCTOBER 2020
We had two pillars: ■ ■
Business growth Employee engagement
A lot of the business growth focus was around internally improving our capabilities and the processes, frameworks, and systems we were using to capture and record information. Also how we set key performance indicators and create brand teams—all the nuts and bolts of being a successful business. We knew that we were going to be launching multiple prod ucts every year, so we needed better processes for taking the learnings from previous launches and applying those so that we don’t keep reinventing the wheel every time. Employee engagement was about building the culture to do this. As a new company—we were spun off from Abbott Laboratories in 2013—how do we build the culture and grow very rapidly at the same time? In 2016, we had a team of about 1,000. Now, we’re well over 1,250 and, if you include contractors, who I consider part of the team, the number is much bigger. How do you grow so quickly while still building that culture and sense that we’re creating something together? Over the course of five years, we have launched many new products and businesses—including our oncology business— and our sales have increased by 50 percent over that period. We had a goal of being a top-20 pharma company by 2020, but we achieved that in 2018. At one point, we had the numberone-selling pharmaceutical drug in Japan for the full year. It was the first time for the organization—and for me professionally— to achieve that. It shows how we’re really having an amazing impact on patients’ lives.
