Joshua Boger, the founder of Vertex Pharmaceuticals writes about his mentor Henri Termeer:

“Henri reminded me and challenged me and mentored me in the conviction that making a drug is not enough and building a company is not enough.

Henri foresaw a great threat to patients if mechanisms of innovation were ineffective. That insight inspired a generation of biotech leaders, me among them, to work for both the sustainability and the systemic improvement of the innovation process when building the companies needed to alleviate the burden of human disease.

Henri led with his beliefs and his principles, none more firmly held than the obligation to keep the needs of patients first. His inspirational genius was in the ability to balance proximal concern for the patient today with the long-term benefits of continued innovation for all patients.

This was Henri Termeer’s greatest gift. To these challenges he added, with energy and humility and humour, responsibility for the future of medicine.” — Joshua Boger, Founder of Vertex Pharmaceuticals

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So, imagine you are a biotech company that says “We put the patient first”. What patient? The patient you’re making a drug for? Henri’s patient-centric approach goes far beyond that. It’s ALL patients, and not only the patients of today but also the patients of the future!

In my work, I call it transcendent leadership. The transcendent leader invites people to join a project that promises to leave a mark in the world that will far transcend the organisation and the lives of those who carried it through. That’s why I’m writing this and that’s why you recognised the man in the photo.

When you are a transcendent leader, you’ll be told that you’re out of your mind. Henri was told that multiple times when he wanted to focus on a disease affecting only 5000 patients worldwide and a solution that would require 22,000 placentas per patient per year and would cost $250,000 per patient per year.

But being “Henri crazy” has benefits too:

• You say things like…”The FDA will change. It should change. If this is the right thing for society, if this is the right thing for patients … then there should be a more streamlined basis for approval. We’ll just have to get all the people, all the participants in the system lined up … the patients and the physicians, and explain it to the FDA.” (That was back in the early 1980s when the FDA had very rigid approval processes!)

• When your company is almost bankrupt you bring the mother of the one patient who’s responded to your treatment in a room full of investors and you convince them to give you their money.

• When you go to present to the FDA Advisory Committee you stand up, you go to the microphone at the end of the meeting, you make your pitch, and basically say “Come on guys, approve this drug”, at a meeting at which CEOs don’t speak up!

That was Henri…

The transcendent leader inspires, gives hope, creates community, persuades, innovates and … wins.

I don’t know about you but I believe that being “Henri crazy” works. It works in biotech, it works in business, it works in life.

Picture: Young executive Henri Termeer, around 1985, when he became the CEO of Genzyme. From the book Conscience and Courage.