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Building resilience into your organization

Resilient Mindset Mini-Series

By Katharina Lange and Tawfik Jelassi

June 2020

The second installment in our Resilient Mindset Mini-Series is focused on how to build resilience into the organizational foundations of your business by considering your leadership, strategic and systemic resilience in the face of pressure from external forces.

In this edition of our short video series, CEO of Zuellig Pharma, John Davison, reflects on how the organization’s resilience and digital transformation were developed. In conversation with Katherina Lange Professor of Leadership at IMD and Tawfik Jelassi, Professor of Strategy & Technology Management also at IMD, he credits that effort as key to Zuellig Pharma’s navigation of the COVID-19 crisis.

Zuellig Pharma’s success during the COVID-19 outbreak has been based on the strength of its Business Continuity Plan (BCP), its supply chain resilience and the organizational commitment of its people to make healthcare accessible. Davison describes the central importance of the BCP and also outlines Zuellig Pharma’s successful transformation from traditional pharmaceutical wholesaler to modern, data driven healthcare service provider.

Other topics raised in the discussion include the reinvention of Zuellig Pharma over the past five years to provide a new foundational support to the business’s ability to not only meet, but to gain momentum through challenging times. By developing new business streams, the company effectively future-proofed itself.

Davison describes Zuellig Pharma’s investment in technology across its business model, the restructuring of the organization to ensure optimal balance between centralized and decentralized decision-making, and the opportunities Zuellig Pharma has been able to seize during the crisis.

“We build resilience into our organization, systems and supply chain because, as a distribution company in the healthcare space, we cannot afford to step down. We have to keep supplying; we have to keep delivering. If we stopped doing that, we would no longer be true to our mission of making healthcare accessible.” – CEO of Zuellig Pharma, John Davison.

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Reference IMD-7-2633

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