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Case Study

STADA: Sustaining agility and entrepreneurship in a fast-growing pharma company

By John R. Weeks and Martin Králik

24 pages

February 2024

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Reference: IMD-7-2453

Peter Goldschmidt became the CEO of pharmaceuticals company STADA in 2018. He was a firm believer in culture as a driving force – and a predictor – of organizational performance and competitiveness. A year earlier, two private equity funds had become majority owners of the “old” STADA – essentially a loose, decentralized network of country operations. After taking the helm, Goldschmidt made building a growth culture one of the strategic pillars aimed at transforming the company into a leader in consumer health, global generics and specialty pharma. As a major lever to achieve that vision, the CEO put forward four core values to define the new, aspirational brand of STADA’s culture: agility, entrepreneurship, integrity and “one STADA.” In its quest for agility, resilience and speed, STADA’s leadership recognized the need for an ambitious transformation that would improve collaboration to leverage learning, talent and technology, while centralizing some processes and reducing duplication and waste. Amid the Covid pandemic, in March 2020, STADA reported the highest production output in the group’s 125-year history. By 2022, the company was well on its way to achieving the owners’ growth objectives of becoming a strong, well-run organization. In a short span of five years, between 2018 and 2023, STADA built a platform that should allow the business to scale to five times its current size.

Learning Objective

Examine the tensions, choices and trade-offs that STADA’s executives had to navigate in areas such as growth, product focus, talent and local operations.
Appreciate the links between strategic differentiation and higher complexity: Whereas Big Pharma has significant resources to address this complexity, mid-sized firms need strategies that develop and draw on entrepreneurial, startup-like qualities to succeed.
Recognize the trade-offs that leaders of agile, fast-growing businesses need to make between pursuing an ambitious growth strategy and building the capabilities and breadth of talent that such a strategy demands.
Draw out the competing objectives and priorities that are inherent in the dual imperatives of achieving global centralization, synergy and scale vs. strengthening local, on-the-ground autonomy and empowerment.

Keywords

Organizational Behavior, Entrepreneurship, Human Resources, Leadership, Fast Growth, Culture, Core Value, Agility

Settings

World/global, Germany
Stada Arzneimittel, Healthcare, Pharmaceuticals
2017-2023

Type

Field Research

Available Languages

English

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