How do they stay there . You dont feel inadequate being the second wealthiest man in the world . Many of the Worlds Largest pharmaceutical and vaccine manufacturers are racing to find a cure for covid19. One of those companies is glaxosmithkline. Based in england, and also now the largest vaccine manufacturer in the world. Its ceo is emma walmsley. She was trained in the classics in oxford, but now has a test of producing a vaccine that will cure covid19. How many times a day do people ask you when youre vaccine is going to be available . Emma [laughter] that is definitely a very regular question, whether from employees, customers, media or my mother, so very frequently. Obviously, we have all been delighted to see the recent news of the first results coming through on vaccines. Yesterday, i was on a call with 10 of the global pharma ceos who are heavily involved in bringing solutions to covid. We are excited and optimistic to see some of the first data coming through and looking forward to seeing a lot more in the next six months. We have three vaccines in the clinic and two therapeutic treatments. Everyone is understandably very impatient, because i think the imf said every month of the pandemic is 500 billion of value for the world. Right now, we can be increasingly optimistic that science will win. Our industry that has mobilized so fast, will start to bring some scaled solutions. We are going to need more than one. David normally to have a vaccine, it takes four to seven years. Mumps and ebola was seven years. This is basically a year. Is it because you have so many people working on it . Is it less complicated than people originally thought . Emma it remains a complicated effort. When you are facing a Global Crisis of this scale and impact, there are many reasons we have been able to, as an industry, mobilize behind faster solutions. The ways you get to go faster are an incredible partnership with regulators and governments. The fact that we have all been parallel parsing work that you might do sequentially, and that has been putting capital at risk, and that is why many of us signed a commitment around the quality of the work, the scale of the trials and commitment to safety. Wherever the pressure might come from to go faster, we are committed to make sure trust in vaccination is maintained. The world will pay a very big price, not just for covid, but beyond that if we break trust in the quality of vaccination. It has been the biggest contribution to human health since clean water. We need to make sure that is maintained for the future. David some people are not willing to take a vaccination. Some have said in surveys in the united states, only 25 or less want to take this vaccine because they are not sure it is safe, or some people dont like vaccines anyway. Are you worried people wont take the vaccine . Emma yes, of course. We remain concerned about vaccine hesitancy. We also have to be incredibly respectful about why people have these questions. Have we been able to move fast . Have Companies Put in the right processes and scales of trials . What transparency are we going to bring to these processes . What you hear about things being stopped and started . What does all of this mean . Our job is to make the commitments we have, an d we have very publicly alongside manufacturers, but also make sure we share data transparently and partner with governments who ultimately guide to policies and distributions to reassure people. Again, we dont worry about our children dying of measles anymore. Smallpox has been eradicated, polio nearly so. That is because of this incredible contribution to protecting lives. It is always better than intervening at a later stage. David you teamed up for the corona vaccine with sanofi. Which is another large pharmaceutical company. Why did you team up with someone else . You are the biggest manufacturer vaccines. Could you not have done this yourself . Emma it is one of the great things we have seen in Many Industries through the pandemic, is this incredible collaboration against a common competitor, or enemy. When we announced our approaches to Vaccine Development in the beginning of february, we said our best chance of contributing gsks technology and knowhow was to offer our technology which helps make other vaccines more effective. A technology that has been proven in pandemics to any credible partners. We have three vaccines partnered in the clinic with others, including sanofi, because that technology is proven in pandemics to work on older people. It is a more effective way to get to scaled manufacturing, which is the other real challenge. We need to probably provide up to 14 billion doses with two dose vaccines to protect the world. As well as getting to a safe and effective vaccine, we need to get to scale as fast as possible. Our route to that was partnership. David there are two questions people ask about whether vaccines are available, but to whom are the available first . Lets suppose you come up with one. Who gets them first . Private equity professionals . [laughter] and secondly, what is it going to cost . Emma firstly, these are two fundamental questions. Right from the beginning we said our principles were around global access, which is why scale of manufacturing, getting to billions of doses and having multiple Vaccine Solutions matters. Some of the new technologies being distributed have to be distributed at minus 70 degrees, i think, which is not suitable for going into the developing world. We need access and we need responsible pricing, which is why we declared we would not expect to profit from any Covid Vaccine during the pandemic phase. We would reinvest any shortterm profits in pandemic preparedness, donations to the developing world. In terms of who gets it, we are contracted to governments in the u. S. , europe, the u. K. , canada and others. We recently with sanofi committed to 200 million doses particularly supplying to the developing world. You have many vulnerable populations. The first principle should be the people who get it first are the people who need it most. David you are the largest vaccine manufacturer in the world, as i understand it. Some people say vaccines are not the most profitable part of the pharmaceutical industry, because as i understand it, with a regular drug, people might take it once a week or once a month. But vaccines, you take it once or twice and you are done. Some may say the pharmaceutical industry does not care about vaccines as much as they should. Is that fair . Is it profitable to be in the vaccine business . Emma everyone in the world every family, community and country cares more about vaccines and is looking at it more now than perhaps two years or a year ago. We are the largest manufacturer. We have more than 30 vaccines. We ship 2 million vaccines a day. I think we vaccinate 40 of the worlds children. It is a profitable business, but it comes with responsibility around access too. David why do you think it is that pharmaceutical companies you are one of the largest from pharmaceutical companies in the world generally the public says you are making too much money and your image is not as good as you would like it to be. Why do you think that has happened . Is there anything the industry can do to improve its image with the public . Emma this is a fundamental question for our industry. You just need to look this year at how mobilized we have been, what a difference we can make, and how much for Health Care Resilience globally our contribution is required. I am really proud of my company, but our industry for the way we tried to collaborate. The fact remains that we are still turning up in movies as the industry that people have criticisms of, and fundamentally you can understand why there is this when people, not just in developing countries, but the most powerful countries in the world are still fighting for access to health care, and there is this tension between the human right to access to health care and profits in big corporates. Frankly, i think the industry hasnt always historically helped itself, either because a small number of egregious acts on pricing or not enough transparency about how we do what we do and why it matters. I think what we can do about that is to do a better job of fulfilling our purpose to protect health, find new solutions to fight new diseases responsibly. Partnering with governments to help address outofpocket challenges, to bring more transparency and stability to how people can engage with health care, to champion access across the world, to be responsible always in our pricing, to bring transparency to the way we work, but also do a better job of showing why it matters to everybody that we do that profitably. One in two of us gets cancer. It does not matter how successful are the people you interview we dont have treatments for dementia and alzheimers. We need to keep fighting and investing to solve these problems for the future. David is it cheaper or easier for a company like gsk to buy somebody who has made a product and put it into your system rather than develop it yourself . I realize it takes 10 years or more to develop a product. Is it easier to buy something . How do you see the tradeoffs between the two . Emma we are all what we are all working hard to do is get to a better quality pipeline. It would be in credibly arrogant to think all the worlds best scientists sit in your company, which is why Business Development and m a is so common in our industry. The other thing to remember is because of the pattern cliff model in pharma and it is another reason why we have to do it profitably you are having to reinvent your portfolio on a rolling decade basis. We invest in the innovation. We build that drug. And then rightly it comes off patent, it can be genericized and the sales are lost very quickly. David you are a member of the microsoft board, so i assume you have a fair amount of background in technology. How have you been able to apply that to gsk . Emma i would never describe myself as having a background in technology and i. T. I am absolutely sure that is not why i was brought onto the microsoft board, but it is an Extraordinary Company doing extraordinary things in a responsible way at a time when technology is changing the world. An industry that i believe can be an incredible force for good. It will be interesting to see what we look back on the 2020s standing for. No doubt people will be writing books about the covid crisis. Most of us believe there will be other huge, global issues that we will have to address like Climate Change and economic recovery, etc. I also believe Health Resilience will be on the agenda. The advances that the world has seen in biology, all of the genetics and genomics data coming through at the same time the advances the world has seen in ai and machine learning, combined together, have a real shot over the next decade to improve the productivity of r d and science in my industry incredibly. It is hard to discover new drugs and vaccines. 90 of them fail. It takes a long time. Obviously, the world is mobilized right now to get to faster solutions. I hope we learn lessons to permanently accelerate some of these processes. The opportunity to use technology to identify and the enormous amounts of data to identify better quality targets so we have a higher probability of success of developing better medicines faster for these enormous unmet needs in the world will be defining for the next decade. David when you were in oxford, what was your Career Ambition . Emma it would be fair to say i spent most of my time looking at latin poetry, which is not an obvious path towards this destiny so far. David do you think in the future when the vaccines have taken effect and people are not worried about covid, that you will work differently . Will people work remotely to some extent in the future, and you need all the office space you already have . Emma there are a lot of things we want to gather for, but the flexibility and efficiency we can bring from allowing people to live their complete lives i think we will see more of a hybrid. I want gsk to be one of the worlds most modern employers in terms of supporting people to deliver their best whilst delivering performance to the company. David what have you learned about your company that surprised you during this period, and what did you learn about how you operate a company . Have you learned things you thought were surprising or interesting . Emma we are 100,000 people in 100 countries with a big and complicated multinational. One of the things i loved most was the removal of hierarchy in some ways. We are all the same sized little square on a teams call. The opportunity i had to connect with our people in a way that i perhaps wouldnt normally do, with a lot less formality, no more ceo entourage, but listening to what people in our warehouses were trying to do. I think it was a massive reinforcement of the importance of purpose, on the importance of people, the extraordinary things they are capable of and incredible respect for the frontline of the organization. They are true heroes through this. David when you grew up, you went to oxford and majored in modern languages and classics. As a general rule of thumb, most people running pharmaceutical companies are not majors in classics or romance languages. In oxford, what was your Career Ambition . Emma it would be fair to say i spent most of my time in my masters looking at latin poetry, which is not an obvious path toward this destiny so far. Honestly, i am probably the person you interviewed who has the least strategic career plan ever. My entire Work Experience up until i left my studies was waitressing. I never had any kind of internship. I went into consultancy for a few years because i needed to pay off my debt. Because i spoke french, i was in charge of benchmarking loreal. I just got super curious about that industry and took a pay cut to be the assistant product manager on a home haircolor, then spent 17 years going around the world, living and working in paris, in new york for five years, then in china, and never thought i would leave. Had one of those accidental meetings at the time in shanghai with the thenceo of gsk, who explained and convinced me i should move into the consumer business at gsk. I couldnt resist the chance to pursue i thought a business with an incredibly important and impactful purpose, which is health, and the chance to run a global division. I had no idea that would lead to this. It has been exciting so far. David what did your family say when you said i am going to be in the Health Care Business . Emma my family i have four children, and we were living in shanghai and china i said guess what, weve ive got a new idea. They are not completely thrilled at the idea of restarting. My father was in the navy his whole career. I grew up in a military family where there was a tremendous sense of duty and responsibility. They were incredibly proud when we eventually came back to the u. K. After being out for 10 years. Excited to see the work we have been doing since. David you are a Consumer Health Care Specialist in addition to being a classics person and a modern language person. You joint ventured your consumer Health Care Business. Did you ever expect when you came to gsk that you would be doing the traditional pharmaceutical health care . Emma the short answer is no, but i am incredibly excited to see the creation of two world leading businesses. In Consumer Health, we built the joint venture with pfizer and declared at the time of the deal we would, be mid2022, separate the company to be an independent company. It is the only standalone dedicated Consumer Products company in the world. It has positions in leading markets in leading categories. Frankly, having it inside as a slightly invisible division, a Much Bigger Company whose number one priority is to invest in the biopharma pipeline, around the science of immunology and genetics and prioritized that, we decided the right thing to do create shareholder value, reset the capital structure for both companies and free them to have longterm returns. David when you are in the pharmaceutical industry, like many other large industries, they are not run as much by women as they should be. Do you get asked what is it like to be a woman running a Major Pharmaceutical Company . Im not sure there are any other women running major pharmaceutical companies. How tired do you get of that question . Emma like many of the Women Leaders that you meet, i try not to define my work by my gender, but i recognize the responsibility i have to show whats possible. I spent pretty much all of my career being a minority in the room, mainly for my gender. I do believe that the question of diversity and inclusion lets face it, we have all rightly woken up to in a humbly and shocking way, particularly on race and ethnicity this year, is something that all responsible Companies Need to take really seriously. The data just shows more diverse leadership delivers better results. David if a young woman is watching and says i want to be emma walmsley, i want to be the ceo of a Major Company and overcome prejudices. What would you say to her . What leadership traits do you think got you to the top . Emma dont aspire to be emma walmsley. Aspire to be the most exciting version of yourself. Never think of it as some end state. It is a constantly evolving learning journey. In my experience, and my experience wont be the same for you, what drove me was doing work that i love, working incredibly hard. I had a strong sense of responsibility. Probably a good fear of failure kept me going along the way and wanting to have some impact. And taking on loads of jobs along the way that werent perhaps obvious at the time, but make a lot of sense looking back. Particularly moving from new york to shanghai, or taking a pay cut to work on haircolor. As long as you are doing things you can be curious about and you love, then success can follow. Businesses today are looking to tomorrow. Adapting. Innovating. Setting the course. But new ways of working demand a new type of network. One thats more than just fast. You need flexibility to work from anywhere. And manage from everywhere. Advanced technology. With serious security. And reliable coverage, nationwide. Forwardthinking enterprises, deserve forwardthinking solutions. And thats what we deliver. So bounce forward, with comcast business. [cars honking] our world is changing. Every day it changes a little faster. Some changes are too small to see. Others are too big to handle. Sometimes change feels slow. So slow we dont notice. Other times it happens all at once. 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