Your Science Is Exceptional — Is Your Strategy?
For founder-led biotech and pharma companies making the hardest transition in the industry — from a great discovery to a commercial organization that can carry it.
The Situation
Most biotech companies that attempt to become generational companies fail at the same point: commercialization.
Not because the science was wrong. Because the organization that discovered the molecule was never designed to sell one.
The leadership team is brilliant and scientifically trained. The founder-CEO built the company on rigor, precision, and personal review of everything that matters. That instinct produced the asset. It also produces a company where decisions bottleneck, where a single slide can absorb three weeks, and where the discipline that made the science excellent becomes the friction that slows the business.
Then the first commercial leaders arrive, and the questions get harder. What does commercial actually mean here? What does strategy mean? If you asked every member of the leadership team to name the company’s top three goals, would you get the same three?
How Many of These Sound Familiar?
- “If I asked ten people in the organization what our strategy is, I’d get ten different answers.”
- “We don’t have decision rights. Nobody knows who owns what, so everything escalates.”
- “Our leadership team makes decisions in a small room, and the rest of the organization never learns the reasoning.”
- “We’re entering a market against companies with fifty times our resources, and our plan is essentially to compete head-on.”
- “Our board is scientifically brilliant and doesn’t have a framework for evaluating a commercial plan.”
- “We have meetings, but no one designed them. We’re not sure which ones produce decisions.”
- “Our people are doing excellent work — but not necessarily the work that moves us toward the same place.”
- “We’re about to decide whether to commercialize on our own or partner, and we don’t have a rigorous way to make that call.”
If more than two of those landed, the constraint isn’t commitment. It’s architecture.
Why Scientific Organizations Struggle With
Strategy (and Why They Don’t Have To)
Business strategy is often introduced to scientific leadership teams as a foreign commercial language — a vocabulary of positioning and segmentation that feels imprecise next to the standards these leaders hold themselves to. That framing fails.
Every scientist in the building already practices the core discipline strategy requires: the rigorous generation of insight. Discovery is insight applied to science. Strategy is the same method applied to a market, a customer, a competitor, and the company. Same rigor, same evidentiary standard, different object of study.
Once a scientific leadership team sees strategy that way, it stops being someone else’s discipline and becomes a familiar one on unfamiliar terrain. That reframing is where this work starts — and it’s why it lands with teams that have politely dismissed generic strategy consultants before.
What Is Strategic Advisory?
Three tracks, engaged individually or together.
The work product. A durable architecture for how the company develops strategy, makes decisions, allocates resources, and runs its meetings.
Delivered as a set of one-page visual artifacts, not a document that gets filed:
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Strategy Charter
What strategy means here, in plain language, with the common vocabulary the whole company uses.
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Strategy Calendar
The annual rhythm. When insight is generated, when choices are made, when the plan is written, when performance is reviewed, and how it all feeds the board cycle.
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Decision Rights Map
Which decisions belong to whom, with escalation thresholds by value and risk. This is what allows a founder to delegate, because delegation becomes a documented system rather than an act of faith.
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Resource Allocation Protocol
How capital and people get allocated and reallocated, with explicit trade-off and kill criteria.
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Meeting Governance Grid
Every recurring meeting’s purpose, cadence, attendees, inputs, outputs, and decision authority. Meetings that fail the test are eliminated.
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Coaching Guide
The materials leaders use to carry direction and reasoning to their own teams.
Built early, before habits harden, this is the difference between a company that scales and one that improvises at scale.
The Challenger Question
Smaller companies competing against dominant incumbents face a specific strategic problem, and most get it wrong in the same way: They attempt to compete directly, at a scale the balance sheet can’t support.
The historical record is clear. Over the past two centuries, when one side held a ten-to-one advantage in resources, it won roughly 70% of the time — but over the past hundred years, it’s closer to 50/50. Smaller forces win by refusing the direct contest and finding the ground the stronger side doesn’t want to or can’t hold.
The commercial translation: Identify the beachhead where you can win, establish it decisively, and map the three to four stepping stones that follow. Success is not taking half the market. It’s owning the segment where your economics work and theirs don’t.
This is an active area of my research and the subject of my forthcoming ninth book. For companies entering categories dominated by far larger players, it is frequently the most consequential conversation we have.
The Process
Discover
Understanding your business, your people, and your goals through interviews, the Strategy Survey, and direct observation.
Dialogue
Open, candid conversation about the real issues, without an internal agenda shaping what gets said.
Develop
Building strategic capability through frameworks, exercises, plan reviews, and insight exchange.
Direction
Converting insight into confident strategic direction the organization can act on.
Engagements typically run six to twelve months and are designed around how your leadership team likes to work.
Proof
Case Study: Building Strategic Capabilities and Facilitating the Business Strategy Process
The challenge. Genzyme Diagnostics’ executive leadership team (ELT) possessed a wealth of clinical expertise and was looking to increase their business acumen to create competitive advantage by developing global strategies to win in key markets.
The Needs.
- Create a common language and understanding of strategy.
- Develop the ELT’s strategic thinking and planning capabilities.
- Design and facilitate a simple yet comprehensive strategy development process resulting in a concise strategic plan to create unified strategic direction.
The work. Individual interviews with executive leaders. The Strategy Survey, compiled and circulated so the team could review each other’s thinking before meeting. Pre-work including a written primer and video. A two-day off-site building strategic capability while working through the key business issues. Three additional offsite meetings of two days each were held for the next tier of leaders at their site locations in the U.S., U.K., and Germany. Conducted a one-day follow-up session with the CEO and COO to finalize global strategic direction and language around the goals, objectives, strategies, and tactics for the company. Customized the two-page StrategyPrint (strategic action plan) template to use the terminology that worked best for the group and consulted with leaders individually to review their plans and provide feedback. Then monthly individual development work with each ELT member — decision-making and delegation, meeting governance, prioritization, board interaction, succession planning, competitive strategy.
The results. The year following the engagement, the organization realized a double-digit increase in revenue due to the creation of innovative strategies. The company also realized a double-digit reduction in costs due to increased discipline in making strategic trade-offs with their resources. 100% of executive leadership team members renewed their individual coaching engagements after the first year.
What Leaders Say
“I appreciated your ability to teach/facilitate/moderate and move us through the strategy development process in a productive fashion. Your modular and highly tailored approach of the process to our business fits our needs nicely. Thank you for your preparation and hard work in navigating our executive team and next level leaders through these strategy sessions. One year later, I can say that your work had a dramatically positive impact on our business. In addition to the strong strategic plan we developed, you infused a new mind set into our organization that has created the strategic discipline to make important trade-offs and has unleashed a powerful energy of confidence. You’ve truly made a difference to our business.”
Don Pogorzelski, President, Genzyme Diagnostics
“You did an excellent job assisting individuals throughout the various levels of the organization to understand that while strategy is a somewhat abstract and intangible concept, there are a variety of tools and methods available to guide teams through a definable process that leads to a well-structured and focused strategy development effort. Your materials are thoughtfully constructed, understandable, and useful in leading a group through a comprehensive and objective analysis of their business that ultimately results in action plans focused on differentiating themselves from the competition. Your grasp of the topic of strategy along with a comfortable and upbeat presentation style is effective in facilitating the overall strategic thinking effort.”
Jerry Casey, Senior Vice President, Genzyme Diagnostics
“Rich’s skill in facilitation and leading teams is key in delivering his concepts on strategic thinking. He is creative in the approach and development of thinking tools but not intrusive. He encourages his clients to build the strategic process themselves, draw their own conclusions consistent with their business, and follows up to make sure they are ‘living the process.’ I would recommend Rich to leaders who want to build strategy and want value for their investment.”
Norman Tashash, VP of Sales & Marketing, Genzyme Diagnostics
Why Rich Horwath?
Rich Horwath is the CEO of the Strategic Thinking Institute, a former Chief Strategy Officer and professor of strategy, and the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of eight books on strategy. He has helped more than one million leaders develop their strategic thinking, planning, and execution capabilities in pursuit of his vision to teach the world to be strategic.
He has worked with 36 life sciences organizations — pharmaceutical, biotech, diagnostics, and medical device — alongside leaders from other world-class companies including Intel, Google, FedEx, and Lockheed Martin.
World-class CEOs including Steve Jobs, Sara Blakely, Alan Mulally, Eric Schmidt, and Meg Whitman all worked with an external advisor. The pattern is not coincidental.
See what other leaders say about the value of engaging with Rich.
Is This Right for You?
This is a strong fit if:
- You’re a founder-led or science-led organization moving toward commercialization
- Your leadership team is scientifically excellent and strategically uneven
- You’re building governance, decision rights, and process for the first time — or rebuilding them
- You’re competing against substantially larger players and need a challenger strategy
- Your board needs to increase its strategic capabilities as well
This is NOT the right fit if:
- You’re looking for a market research vendor or an outsourced strategy department
- You want someone to write the strategy for you rather than build your team’s capacity to write it
- Leadership isn’t prepared to have candid conversations about trade-offs
Frequently Asked Questions
The window to build strategic capability closes faster than you think.
Every quarter that passes without defined strategy, decision rights, and governance is a quarter in which improvised habits become permanent ones. The companies that make this transition successfully start before the pressure of failure arrives.
Contact us today about your needs and let’s build your strategic game plan together.