As a new CEO, Thomas Schinicker, who took over Roche Diagnostics Centralized Point of Care Solutions (CPS) in early 2018, he faced a dilemma. HIs executive team had already engaged in a lengthy one-year strategy development process in 2017 mapping out the scenarios for the future and defining where Roche Diagnostics should play and how it should win. All they needed was his sign-off to go ahead and announce the new strategy. What should he do?

The CEO decided to hold off on announcing anything before including everyone, all 1600 employees in Roche Diagnostics, in engaging in the strategy development process, in getting their views on where the company should play and how it should win in the future. Frank Desiere, VP Strategy and Business Development, Roche Diagnostics CPS now faced a dilemma. After all of the discussions and decisions made in 2017 based on the approach he facilitated, how was he going to engage 1600 people in developing the strategy, when the strategy had already been developed?

Frank Desiere, VP Strategy and Business Development, Roche Diagnostics CPS and his team including Guido Bartalena, Head of Strategy, Roche Diagnostics CPS had together created a 6 months journey called BOOST or Building our Organization's Strategy Together of engaging 50% of the organization (through volunteer sign-ups). BOOST comprised 58 interactive workshops that ran between February and June 2018 across all CPS's main sites and several additional locations. The workshops were facilitated by 72 senior leaders from across the organization and 803 employees took part in the sessions, both from within CPS and from other Roche Diagnostics business areas. Over 11,300 ideas were generated during the program and Bartalena's team qualified and clustered all of them, to ensure that every contribution was considered. However Bartalena was now faced with a critical fork in the road. How was he going to incorporate these ideas into the overall strategy, and how would it be communicated back to the community?

The pharmaceutical industry was under siege, with regular price rollbacks and the powerful advance of generics frequently making news headlines. Many of the industry's leading companies, including Novartis, were cutting their sales forces, while sales representatives who still had jobs felt increasingly disengaged. David Epstein, the head of Novartis's Pharmaceuticals division, bucked the trend. He introduced a strategic initiative that aimed to fundamentally transform Novartis' selling model. Epstein committed to an aspirational goal of equipping 80% of the company's field forces worldwide with the latest iPad technology by the end of 2012, in just 15 months. A few months later, he set his teams an even more ambitious challenge: to equip 100% of the sales force by the end of 2013, which meant rolling out 25,000 new devices across the globe within a two-year period. Novartis was about to embark on a digital transformation journey, with the ultimate goal of providing the right drug to the right patient at the right time.