The New Nature of Business

Introduction

It was a rainy afternoon back in 2003, when I got the phone call that could have been the beginning of the end of my family's then 107-year-old company. “You must come to Basel immediately,” the man on the other side of the line said. “Come to my private home.”

Alarmed, I got into my car, typed in the address in what was then still a brand-new technology—the GPS navigation system—and … almost got lost. (GPS navigation wasn't as smooth and reliable as it is today!) The device instructed me from my home through the forested back roads of Switzerland to the northern border city of Basel, just as a heavy rain poured down. It was like being in a movie.

When I finally got to my destination, I got the news. “We have just received a call from Novartis,” Fritz Gerber, the then-chairman of our family company, Roche, and a confidant of my family, told me. “They are interested in acquiring the family shares.”

I hadn't been expecting that message. Over the course of more than 100 years, my great-grandfather Fritz Hoffmann and his descendants helped grow Roche from an experimental pharmaceutical start-up into the global pharma leader it was when I joined the board in the mid-1990s. Roche had been among the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world for most of its existence. It certainly was one of the world's largest family-controlled companies. And it had never been any generation's intention to change that legacy.

We had seen ups and downs, both in the company's fate and ...