UNLEASH America preview: Novartis’ Rene Gessenich

It’s going to be one of the many great sessions at the show – for those of you who got tickets, see you in Vegas. If you’re looking to purchase tickets, this is the link you need.

Watch the video or read the transcript beneath, which has been edited for clarity.

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Jon Kennard: I’m delighted to be joined by Rene Gessenich from Novartis, we’re going to be talking about your session at our upcoming UNLEASH America show, which we’re all very excited about. Without giving too much away Rene, give me a flavor of what you’re going to be revealing, discussing, and working through in your session at UNLEASH America.

Rene Gessenich: First of all, super excited Jon to join UNLEASH, and be able to share some of the work we’re doing at Novartis. What I’m going to be sharing is our work around trying to predict the skills we need at Novartis to be successful in the future to reimagine medicine. The pharmaceutical industry at large is facing tremendous change, it has huge opportunities to really be able to treat diseases like never before. But it’s also transforming radically.

And I think that’s really something where we try to understand – how can we prepare our talent and our people? How can we up and reskill our people at scale?

And for that, of course, to upskill and reskill, you need to be able to understand what for, and I will be discussing, first of all, how do we try to predict the skills needed in the future? And second of all, how do we actually build them an end-to-end skill system that you can not only predict and plan and say these are the skills you need, but you’re also able to seamlessly connect different talent solutions, like a talent marketplace, or a learning experience platform into that. So you really are able to also up and reskill at scale, based on the needs that you’ve identified as a company.

JK: An element that I pulled out from the synopsis of your talk, which I thought was really interesting, was the idea that predicting talent and skills needed to build – it says ‘build/buy/borrow for the future’. So the ‘borrow’ element really interested me. Do you think there’s going to be reskilling from different teams in organizations?

Or are we going to be looking at bringing people in, you’re going to get discrete skill sets for certain projects from outside, or is there a more gig economy-based idea for pharma? What’s the Novartis perspective on that?

RN: So I mean, in essence, when you think about the whole topic around becoming a more skill-centric organization, it’s all about breaking down jobs into smaller tasks and activities. And then, just like you talked about the gig economy, are we able to find people that have the skill, have the ability to perform a certain task? And obviously, we’ve launched the talent marketplace, so we’re trying to create that gig economy internally.

So you borrow talent for a short term project, someone from another place of the organization that is able to help you fulfill your task. And it’s also, of course, something that helps the development of that individual. But obviously, when you’re talking about ‘borrow’, there’s an element where you might not only borrow from within your organization, but of course, you extend that and really also see how we can work much more flexibly outside, I guess, the borders of your internal organization and are more flexibly able to pull in external work as needed.

JK: Thanks, Rene. I’ve only got one last question. This is just a little preview of the event, but I’m keen to understand – we’ve obviously been through a huge change across the world, not least in pharma for very obvious reasons. And the projects that certain companies have had to take on and shifting their perspective, pivoting to certain different industries, how much of your role and in the wider organization as well, is about change management? Because we can’t deny that similar things might happen again, and obviously, it’s a very unpredictable area that we’re dealing with in terms of global public health. So how much do you have to deal with change management across Novartis?

RN: I mean, tremendously, right? I mean, if you think about planning and transforming your organization, of course, planning is one bit, then you’ll need to execute on what you think the future will be. And you need to change organization.

And I think we’ve been doing tremendous work for example, with our culture, where we really want to lay the grounds of having an organization, and a culture, that is able to nurture talent that is able to more flexibly adjust to the requirements of the future.

We’re implementing things like a talent marketplace, learning experience platform, that help to foster that agility to be more flexibly able to respond to changing needs. But of course, all these different things need to fall in place and need to be working together in order for you as an organization actually, to change and reimagine medicine. So I think that that’s usually important because I think the planning and the strategy is one part but then of course, you need to have the organization that is able to actually pick it up and change accordingly. And therefore it’s a huge part of everything we do, and of course, also a huge part of my role as well.

JK: Thank you, we’re going to leave it there because we don’t want to reveal everything about what you’re going to be talking about but it’s really great to get some of your time and really looking forward to see you in Vegas.

RN: Thank you so much Jon. Yeah same here – very much looking forward to a great event.

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For the full conversation – watch above…

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