The founder and former CEO of Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Joshua Boger, was once asked: “What does it take to be a good leader in a pharmaceutical company?”

Boger said, “Pharmaceutical discovery and development is the most complicated activity that humans do.

Going to Mars is easy, going to Mars is engineering! I mean, I’m not an engineer but if you give me a hundred billion dollars, I guarantee you I can put you on Mars. There’s nothing stopping me except organisational momentum and money.

But if you give me a hundred billion dollars and say, in five years or ten years you have to cure Alzheimer’s disease… I’ll say… I’ll give it a go but I have no idea whether I could do it!

Drug discovery and development is just an insanely complicated activity to do that you need to keep teams of people together for a very long time.

And this is what distinguishes it from most of the high-tech, i.e. I have a high-tech idea, I should be shipping it in 18 months. If I have a pharmaceutical idea I may be shipping it in 18 years!

So I need to keep a team of people together on the discovery and development side for 12 to 15 years on average.

The most important thing is understanding team dynamics and the difference in personalities that are necessary to build a team and hold it together. To do that, you the leader have to be incredibly passionate about what you’re trying to do. It’s a combination of empathy and passion…

And you have to lead by example. Very often I was the last person to cut the lights out at midnight or 1 am. And it’s not just the number of hours… the people who report to you can see you, and they can tell whether or not you’re thinking about the mission all the time…”