At Vanguard, we unite business leaders, industry experts and cutting-edge innovators to share their insights, challenges and triumphs regarding critical topics. Explore below for a taste of our high-profile participants and the wisdom they share.

LEADERSHIP INSIGHTS

When it comes to improving corporate Diversity, Equality and Inclusion, changes in hiring and culture can pay dividends in different ways.

That was one of the big takeaways from a recent Vanguard General Counsel forum devoted to DEI, featuring a slew of legal leaders, including Datavant senior managing counsel Bob Bailey, Western Union chief legal officer Caroline Tsai, Debevoise and Plimpton partner Joe Hamid, Dentons’ Mary Ann Hynes, and Tom Sabatino, the former GC of Walgreens, Aetna, United Airlines and Tenneco.

Awareness has many payoffs, Tsai said, noting the importance of avoiding an “environment where other stakeholders feel like the conversation is chilled because the executive team and or the board is there.”

But diversity and inclusion awareness is beneficial, she says. “When we lead DEI initiatives, and the employees see the difference we're making, not only in our law departments but more broadly to drive it within our companies, and then the impact we make from an outside perspective. We're finding as GCs that it really motivates and inspires our employees.”

Meanwhile, Bob Bailey points out that hiring to improve diversity can actually benefit the corporation in ways that he says should be obvious. “When we try cases defending our companies, often having someone who is, just to be very clear, not a white male, defending the company in front of a jury is more advantageous to the company. So we as lawyers, and as general counsels can make decisions that favor diversity and inclusion that are in are in fact, significantly advantageous to the company and the way it presents itself in court.”
00:00 / 17:01

What do the billion-dollar industries of erectile dysfunction treatments, genetically modified foods, and artificial intelligence engines have in common?

For Dr. Arthur Caplan, professor of bioethics at New York University Langone Medical Center, who has advised DuPont, Pfizer, and other companies, these sectors offer products that pose potentially alarming morality problems for the general public.

"Each one of these big companies encountered tough ethical choices," Caplan told Vanguard's Ken Stone in a C-Suite Confidential interview, noting that GMO foods posed many ethical questions.

"One was, should they label their products? Legally, they didn't have to. Because, in fact, the FDA had recognized their products as safe. But should they say, 'This contains GMOs on it anyway?"

The answer was yes. "People want to know what's in their food. And they have a right to know what's in their food. And morally, it's very important to do that… But what DuPont did was say we're going to institute two things: regular ethical training for our C-suite people. And we're also going to make sure that somebody's in charge of anticipating ethical challenges that our products might raise, whether they're pollution, safety, or misunderstanding what the safety is."

Some ethical issues can be confronted – and solved – with proactive communications and marketing. That was the case when Pfizer approached Caplan, saying, "We wanted to develop a drug for low blood pressure. But it turns out, it raises something else."

The drug in question was Viagra, and Caplan had to think through "every single ethics problem" that might emerge, from sexual assaults to accusations of promoting irresponsible sexuality.

"My job there was to take on the role of not letting this thing hit a pothole. And we got it into the culture through, if you will, ethics discussion,

And indirectly, I invented or gave them Bob Dole in their early commercials, because he was a conservative who was willing to admit he had a problem. His wife also came on. He toned down all the criticism from social conservatives and some theological groups by saying, in essence, this is a pill for married couples, and it's to restore your sex life and to make your marriage closer. That was a very important message in the early days of launching Viagra."

The AI industry needs to get ahead of the ethics curve, given the public's fear of the technology, said Caplan. "The leadership in that industry, whether it's Elon Musk or the heads of other major AI companies or startups, really have to get involved beyond what's going on inside the company. People are wondering about their technology, nervous about their technology. It reminds me a lot of GMO where somebody might act, sadly, erroneously to choke off valuable technology out of fear."
00:00 / 14:40

For many C-Suite leaders, landing a seat on a Board of Directors is an important career milestone.

But candidates should be aware that not all boards are created equal, according to Mark Pfister, author of Across The Board: The Modern Architecture Behind an Effective Board of Directors.

Landing on the right board should be every candidate's ultimate goal, stresses Pfister, a board consultant who heads the M.A. Pfister Strategy Group.

“The dance of a board candidate should be a two-way street in terms of both parties interviewing and feeling out each other to make sure it's a fit. You're not doing yourself any favors by making that a one-sided conversation. You'll know in about three to four months after you join that board if you didn't do your homework properly, because you'll be miserable.”

In a recent Vanguard Forum, Pfister shared warning signs that candidates can look out for, including how “board members are communicating to one another. Is there someone who's dominant? That's not allowing other board members to talk? Do you sense areas of disrespect that are happening there? Are they even saying the same thing?”

Board diversity is another critical issue to gauge your fit. “There's a much bigger picture to board diversity than just the nationality or color of skin. What you're looking for in a board in terms of diversity is diversity of perspective, which leads to diversity of thought for the entire board, and then leads to better outcomes. Dedication is another observable, what does this board expect in terms of their time dedication. There is a direct correlation to the success of a board relating back to what the expectation of time commitment is. A board that understands the time commitments and is agreed fully is a big deal…

“The learning environment is another area that can be an indicator for you early on. Do they think that their learning has stopped? Do they think that they've reached the epitome of their career? This is quite common. You'll see folks that the minute they get appointed a board seat, they feel like they know everything that they need to know. It's extremely dangerous.”
00:00 / 10:30

In the pantheon of looming CEO nightmares — missed earning calls, viral social media backlashes, a lack of support from the Board — ransomware attacks now rank high on the list. And with good reason: A crippling attack can detonate all those aforementioned headaches — and tons more.

Crisis planning beforehand is essential for CEOs who want to mitigate the damage of a ransomware attack, says Avi Gesser, co-chair of the Data Strategy & Security Group at Debevoise & Plimpton.

“You'll have a very short window of time to make some very key executive decisions,” says Gesser, who often advises clients under attack. “There's going to be a lot of IT decisions, and legal decisions, but there's a lot of executive decisions. Do we engage the attacker? Do we make a public statement? Should we pay the ransom? Those are key executive decisions. And they're almost always made by the CEO and sometimes made by the board as well.”

Gesser and his co-chair Luke Dembosky believe proactive planning before any breach occurs is a new C-level best practice. Executives who initiate ransomware response planning are likely to have better outcomes. “When the incident happens, you're not thinking through these difficult issues. If you have like a ransomware playbook that you've developed, or at least you've run some exercises, and therefore you've simulated a ransomware attack, then there'll be lots of people already doing what they're supposed to be doing.”
00:00 / 15:05

As executive titles go, it’s fair to say Senior Vice President of Psychographics is something of a rarity. For the man who holds that actual title, Casey Albertson of Cincinnati's Upfront Healthcare, the position is critical to any business looking to change hearts and minds.

Albertson maps the psychology of consumers, analyzing their responses to products and services and the ways to change those responses. He participated in a recent dialogue with Sherry Fox of Global Vaccination Advisors, a partner in the Vanguard Vaccination Project, and shared psychological drivers that determine the likelihood of a person getting vaccinated. He also delved into the five basic groups of consumers – self achievers, balance-seekers, priority-jugglers, direction-takers, and willful endurers – and what he’s learned about attitudes regarding Covid-19 vaccinations.

Among the biggest take-aways? His research identified the groups most likely to vaccinate – self-achievers and direction-takers – who share an ”affinity for and trust in the physician. These groups both have a lot of PCP (primary care provider) visits. They tend to have more disease, etc. And so they tend to be more likely to vaccinate.” The least likely to vaccinate groups were balance-seekers, who are independent thinkers, and the willful endurers, who are highly reactive. “The two things that these groups have in common is they don't go to the doctor as much, and they are institutionally suspicious.”

As for how to influence the population and convince more people to vaccinate, Albertson has developed heat maps that pre-segment the population into these five categories. ”I can go into any community, any neighborhood, and I can tell you the density level of each of these five segments on any block group. So I can go to any neighborhood and tell you who lives there, as a percentage. What I would probably be doing as a community leader, is ask, ‘Where are my biggest pockets of self-achievers, because that's where I'm going to be able to win the fastest and move the needle the fastest.’”

“Then I’d be looking for my pockets of willful-endurers, because that's the group that can be influenced, because everything we see is they're just not getting the right information. I would put my vaccination centers there.”

Psychographics, then, is a way to refine and optimize marketing. And Albertson had a definition for that, too — it’s “just the right message to the right person in the right place the right way.”
00:00 / 18:46

It’s easy to think of biopharmaceutical behemoths solely as researchers and manufacturers. But for Dr. Julie Gerberding, who spoke at a recent Vanguard Group forum for Healthcare and Life Science Leaders as an Executive Vice President and Chief Patent Officer of Merck, customer care was the center of the business.

“There are four main buckets that we’ve tried to focus on,” said Gerberding, listing gathering patient insights and needs on Merck products; understanding the patient experience, including access to product information or clinical trials; advocacy, and “affordable access and uptake of medicines and vaccines where they’re needed, especially in the disenfranchised populations of people who need them most.”

Gerberding, the first woman to serve as Director of the CDC, has a history of embracing this last point. She helped run San Francisco General Hospital in the early days of the AIDS crisis and still recognizes biopharmaceutical companies need to promote equal access to health care and resources.

“It’s one thing to be able to bring powerful medicines and treatments and vaccines to people. It’s another thing to work hard to make sure that they are equitably available,” says Gerberding, who spends a good deal of time thinking about Environment, Social, and Governance issues and the benchmarks of corporate commitment to responsible sustainability and ethical behavior.

“In my world, the “S” in the ESG is primarily focused on health equity and health impact. So, one of our signature initiatives is. of course, Merck for Mothers, which is a 500-plus million dollar engagement over a long time to try to eliminate preventable maternal deaths. But that leads to a whole set of other issues in the ESG continuum because that involves inclusion – the diversity of the people that are doing the work, the diversity of the people who are supplying the materials and the supply chains that are necessary to accomplish these kinds of activities. And certainly, a sensibility about environmental sustainability and how what we’re doing really does impact our communities and the planet.”

Working on these patient-focused initiatives with an ESG framework inspired Gerberding. “When you can find a place where you’re bringing them all together, it’s exciting, and I think, a really important part of the value we can create for our business and the society in which we work.”
00:00 / 12:13

As corporate General Counsels didn't have enough to do, a new legal strategy to pressure boards, penalize corporations and promote accountability and consistency has surfaced – forcing GCs to be hyper-aware of public statements, according to one of America's top corporate litigation veterans.

"I think the role of the GC has become much, much, much harder," Beth Boland, a partner in the Boston office of Foley and Lardner, told Vanguard's Ken Banta in a wide-ranging interview.

While noting CEOs, CFOs and board members have all seen increased roles, Boland says a spate of lawsuits means the modern GC has to adopt a 360-degree view of all corporate statements and messaging.

"We're seeing lawsuits that are being launched against corporations and against boards on issues that we never would have seen five years ago. For example, there are a plethora of suits that have been filed against a bunch of big-name corporations, saying, 'You have talked about diversity in your SEC filings, and you say that you're committed to it. But look at your board numbers, look at your senior management numbers. And so you have been touting your commitment publicly in these actionable ways, because they're in SEC filings, and yet the reality is different.'"

Boland says such lawsuits would never have seen the light of day ten years ago.

"I can't say that any of those lawsuits will gain any traction other than simply being filed for publicity purposes. Nonetheless, the issue of legal risk has totally expanded."

Meanwhile, the old way of dealing with complicated legal challenges won't work.

"Clients used to say, if there is a public issue, or especially if there is litigation, 'Sorry, there's litigation, we can't comment," recounts Boland, who was named among 2023's "Most Influential Bostonians" by Boston Magazine. "That doesn't fly because the court of public opinion will act much more quickly than any other court, and you have to deal with that, first and foremost. Eventually, you will have that reckoning or that reckoning on either side in the judicial court. But at the moment, we have to deal with the court of public opinion because that will either make or break your business long before a judge ever signs an opinion on a piece of paper."
00:00 / 13:34

Stability – staying the course – is often inherently risky for leaders, according to Dr. Lloyd Sederer, even when they are enjoying success.

Sederer, who led the transformation of Harvard’s McLean Hospital, likes to borrow a quote from Will Rogers: “Even if you're doing the right thing, if you just sit there, you'll get run over by the train.” Then he points to companies like Blockbuster and IBM as examples of falling prey to inertia.

But initiating radical change is one of the most difficult things a leader can do, especially when an enterprise is entrenched in its ways.

Sederer, who went on to be the Chief Medical Officer for the NYS Office of Mental Health, and is currently an Adjunct Professor at Columbia’s School of Public Health, talked to Vanguard’s Ken Stone about the leadership challenges he encountered fixing Harvard’s famed but faltering psychiatric teaching hospital – the subject of his forthcoming 2024 book, Caught in the Crosshairs of American Healthcare.

“We hemorrhaged money for over four years, millions of dollars every year,” Sederer recalls.

Stopping the bleeding by changing the model was no easy feat. “Every change is hard. And radical change, turning a place inside out, changing the ideology and the culture of an iconic Harvard hospital. That's a big deal. And these were people who essentially believed they made it that way, or they kept it that way. And they were dead wrong.”

Noting authority has to be earned, Sederer recalls an early medical lesson when he first worked in a hospital and discovered “that nurses run hospitals, not doctors. If I was going to accomplish what was required of me, namely, to have good care and have people have the right medicines and disposition and whatnot, I had to enlist and engage these people. They didn't think that they had to do it for me, but I knew that they had to do it in order for us to succeed.”

For the changes at McLean, which led to rampant rumors and smears, Sederer did what he advocates leaders do when implementing a new, culture-changing plan: he persevered.
00:00 / 08:38

Warning: Focusing solely on high performance may be detrimental to your career.

HR departments and C-Suite executives are understandably drawn to employees who land in the “High Performance/High Potential” quadrant of a talent matrix. But Gorick Ng, the author of The Unspoken Rules: Secrets to Starting Your Career Off Right, says focusing on doing a great job may hinder your chances for success.

“Putting your head down and letting your good work speak for itself will only get you so far,” says Ng, a career advisor at Harvard who also teaches at UC Berkeley. “High performers don’t necessarily get promoted – they get asked to train other people, or they get asked to retain their current position.”

Showing your potential involves being dynamic and conspicuous, says Ng, who spoke at a recent Vanguard dialogue with Vanguard’s Ken Banta and Ken Stone. “You need to have a point of view. You need to show up with solutions. You need to anticipate problems and look around corners. You need to manage up, manage down, and manage stakeholders all around. You need to see the big picture and think strategically about the work rather than just put your head down and assume that someone else has thought about these things for you.”

Such savvy may come more naturally to some people than others. And some may not realize that going above and beyond a job description or being a super team player can play into climbing the promotion ladder.

Ironically, says Ng, leaders who expect such dynamism may be to blame.

“They start wondering, ‘Well, why is it that this person isn’t taking the initiative? Why is this person not going above and beyond? Why are they not coming to the happy hour? Why are they not speaking up in meetings?’ It might just be that those expectations weren’t set clearly upfront.”
00:00 / 12:58