Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla says he used extreme team-motivating tactics to meet seemingly impossible deadlines during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In a conversation with Fortune editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell for the Titans and Disruptors of Industry podcast, Bourla admitted to using what he called “emotional blackmail” in order to create and deliver vaccines faster.
Specifically, his team was tasked with creating a vaccine to combat the new illness from scratch. Once it was created, Pfizer needed to far exceed prior shipping and supply-chain constraints; at one point, it even had to produce its own dry ice because not enough was available externally. Prior to COVID, Pfizer had been producing only 200 million vaccine doses per year. That needed to scale quickly to 3 billion doses.
“I found that when you ask people to do things they perceive as difficult or impossible, the first thing they do is to use all their brain power to develop the arguments about why it can’t be made,” Bourla said. “If you resist the temptation that, rationally, it cannot be made, and you move the goalpost instead to, ‘That’s what the world needs,’ then it can be done.”
All around the office, Bourla put up signs that read, “Time is life.” On several occasions, employees came to him to say there would need to be a delay of several weeks in meeting deadlines. In response, Bourla asked them to calculate how many people would die during the additional weeks they requested.
In April 2020, that would have meant about 1,800 Americans dying per day; any longer delay could mean tens of thousands of lives.
“If you say, ‘Go and figure it out,’ then within a week, they stopped worrying about how to convince you that it cannot be done, and they started worrying how they can find ways to overcome the obstacles and make it happen,” Bourla said. “And this is when they can come and surprise you with how much they can achieve when they are focusing on how to resolve issues.”
Bourla’s leadership paid off
In the end, Pfizer delivered. Bourla’s team worked around the clock to develop products to combat the crisis; Pfizer collaborated with startup BioNTech to bring the first FDA-approved COVID-19 vaccine to market, and also introduced Paxlovid, the first antiviral medicine customized to fight COVID.
“I still believe it was an emotional blackmail, because I was asking them to do something impossible,” Bourla said. “And then I was putting on their shoulders the weight that if they don’t make it, people will die.”
He said he feels “a little bit” guilty about putting that much pressure on his workers. But he argues it was necessary, not only to save the “world, the economy, and society, but make them feel like the most important people on earth, those that were able to deliver.”
“They will never forget,” Bourla added.
In normal times, leaders might hesitate to impose that kind of moral weight on employees already living through the hardships of a global crisis. But the pandemic was a time when all the pressures of sustaining life and livelihood in America fell on top of our complex, notoriously bureaucratic health care system, including drug manufacturing. It was a time for miracles and miracle-talk, Bourla said.
“The things that happened during that period of time were magical,” Bourla said. “Magical in the way that we were able to achieve things that we didn’t think that we could,” because of a “fantastic collaboration between the public and private sector.”
Watch the full episode on YouTube. The episode transcript can be found here.
