Conventional wisdom says that big ideas usually come from brilliant minds working alone. That never made a lot of sense to Don deBethizy.

As an executive at a staid Fortune 500 company back in the 1990s, he surprised colleagues by taking his team to a screening of "Apollo 13," the story of an extraordinary group effort to salvage a crippled lunar mission.

"Nobody could believe I would take people away from work to show them a movie," he recalls. But what better way to highlight that it takes a well-functioning team, rather than a loose collection of solitary geniuses, to succeed in high-pressure situations?
Quantcast

Don deBethizy, CEO of Targacept in Winston-Salem, a Winston-Salem biotechnology firm, has led his biotechnology company deep into development of a promising treatment for depression.

A deal with AstraZeneca on the drug has pushed Targacept's stock price, which not long ago lingered around from $5, past $25. And the company is developing a pipeline of other drugs that could help alleviate ADHD, schizophrenia and chronic inflammation in patients whom existing medications don't help.

Pharmaceutical research and development is expensive, drawn out over years or even decades and typified by colossal failure. More than 90 percent of efforts to develop new drugs don't work.

In the high-stakes environment of pharmaceutical research, companies need good ideas, persistence and continual innovation to thrive. The same could be said of North Carolina's economy as we strive to create good jobs and groundbreaking products that change people's lives for the better. Targacept's entrepreneurial, collaborative model offers valuable lessons - not only in the pharmaceutical industry, which has been a cornerstone of the Triangle's growth and a coveted employer throughout the state, but for organizations of all kinds.

In Winston-Salem, the town that tobacco built, Targacept, spun off 10 years ago by R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., is a crown jewel of efforts to revitalize downtown and diversify the city's economy with a top-notch biomedical research park. As it explores the potential of nicotine-based compounds in treating disease, Targacept, which has about 130 employees, offers good evidence that the Piedmont's beleaguered manufacturing economy can shift toward higher-value R&D.

But what will it take to sustain Targacept's success? Or to replicate it in startups or existing companies across the state that want to reinvent themselves? In an insightful Harvard Business Review article, former GlaxoSmithKline CEO Jean-Pierre Garnier declared his belief "that only when the right leaders are in place will the right culture emerge" in pharmaceutical firms. Lasting success starts with a strong leadership culture - and that's an insight deBethizy intuited long before Garnier's piece hit newsstands in 2008.

Cultivating innovation

DeBethizy, who started his career as a toxicologist, made dietary fiber and colon cancer the focus of his Ph.D. dissertation at Utah State. But his passion for leadership and communication helped set him apart from the average bench scientist. When he co-founded Targacept in 1997, he was determined to instill a robust approach to leadership that was team-based, systematic and exercised at every level of the company.

So innovation at Targacept is cultivated. Targacept identifies the leadership strengths of each employee with formal assessments. Then it puts together project teams whose diverse sets of skills and knowledge are more likely to generate cutting-edge ideas.

"The goal," deBethizy says, "is to manage your weaknesses with other people's strengths."

These cross-functional teams build ties across the company and help Targacept avoid a common trap in its industry - the temptation to disappear into performance-killing silos and bureaucracy. There are scientists who want to tinker with experiments, sometimes endlessly. There are development and finance teams that want to move drugs into the trial stage, sometimes too quickly. There are shareholders who want development deals now with Big Pharma that drive profits, sometimes at the expense of bigger, future payoffs.

"You want to create an environment where people can follow their nose," deBethizy says. "But it's fragile, and it can all get away from you in a heartbeat." That makes truth-telling, accountability and bold objectives crucial.

Brainstorming sessions

Targacept hopes to gain federal approval for its depression medication in a few years. Its next big idea won't be an accident; it will come from carefully nurturing creativity and collaboration in service of its culture.

The company makes time for freewheeling brainstorming sessions, regularly celebrates innovation at company events and sets clear interim goals to keep staff focused on projects that might not bear fruit for 20 years, if ever.

"You have to imagine and decide you're going to be innovative," deBethizy says. "You do become what you intend to become."
Christopher Gergen is founding executive director of Bull City Forward and on the faculty of the Hart Leadership Program at Duke University. Stephen Martin, a former business and education journalist, is a speechwriter at the nonprofit Center for Creative Leadership. They can be reached at authors@bullcityforward.org.

Read more: http://www.newsobserver.com/2011/01/16/921397/culture-can-carve-leaders.html#ixzz1BBfytUjC

Comments

Search RSS

All rights reserved."