The Elevate Podcast: What Fourteen Conversations With Women in Pharma Have in Common

When you record a podcast, you're always inside one conversation. You're listening for the next question, watching the clock, noticing when a guest says something worth returning to. What you're not doing is comparing them to anyone else.

Elevate ran that way for its whole first run. One guest, one career, one episode. Each conversation was edited and published on its own terms, and each was interesting on its own terms.

Reading fourteen transcripts at once is a different exercise entirely.

Fourteen conversations, recorded one at a time

The guests across the series lead across CDMOs and CROs, from VP level through to CEO. They work in different countries, at companies of very different sizes, in commercial, technical, quality and general management roles. Most of them have never met each other.

We recorded them over a long enough stretch that the early episodes and the late ones belong to different phases of the business. There was no shared question list, no attempt to steer anyone towards a theme, and no expectation that the conversations would line up.

What we expected to find

Variety, mostly. Fourteen careers taking fourteen different routes, with the useful bit being the range rather than any single lesson.

We also assumed the recurring answers would be the obvious ones. Working hard. Being technically excellent. Timing that happened to fall the right way. Those came up, and every guest acknowledged them, but they weren't what anyone dwelled on when asked what actually made the difference.

What actually came up

Three subjects, in almost every conversation, arrived at independently.

They're not the subjects a job description covers, and none of them are taught on the way into the industry. Two of them are things most people would say they already know and haven't acted on. The third tends to come as a surprise, including to the people describing it.

What made the pattern worth writing up was the disagreement inside the agreement. The guests converge on the same three subjects and then approach them from angles that don't match at all. One guest talks about confidence as something you find in yourself. Another only talks about it as something you build in other people, which nobody else in the series raises. Both are describing the same problem from opposite ends.

The finding we didn't expect

Almost nothing any of them described paid off quickly.

Every guest who talked about the thing that eventually moved their career forward was describing something they'd started years earlier, usually without a specific outcome in mind, and often without noticing at the time that it mattered. One describes a conversation that only became relevant three years later. Another traces something back two decades.

That's the hardest part of the series to act on, because there's no visible return at the point you'd have to start.

Innovating Confidence

We've brought all fourteen conversations together in one document, Innovating Confidence: Women in Pharma's Secrets to Success. It sets the transcripts against each other, names the three subjects, and works through what each guest said about them.

The guests

Christiane Bardroff, Chief Business Officer, FUJIFILM Biotechnologies

Debra Bruneau, Chief People Officer, KBI Biopharma

Eleonora Casucci, Vice President, ProPharma

Susan D'Costa, Chief Technical and Commercial Officer, Genezen

Maria Ebro Andreasen, Chief People Officer, Avid Bioservices

Jenny Gattari, Global Business Development Lead, Pfizer CentreOne

Audrey Greenberg, Chief Executive Officer, AmlysBio

Jonina Gudmundsdottir, Chief Executive Officer, Coripharma

Elizabeth Hickman, Chief Executive Officer, AustinPx

Demetria Johnson, Talent Acquisition & People Experience Consultant

Grace Kim, Senior Vice President, Minaris Advanced Therapies

Oksana Lukash, Vice President, People Culture You

Maja Pedersen, President and Chief Operating Officer, FUJIFILM Biotechnologies

Henny Zijlstra, Chief Commercial Officer, Ardena

Roles are correct as at the time of recording.

Download your copy