The Organizational Network Fieldbook: Best Practices, Techniques, and Exercises to Drive Organizational Innovation and Performance

22.1. The Challenges at a Pharmaceutical Company

The organization, a U.S.-based global pharmaceutical company, faced numerous challenges, including a situation involving one of its most crucial external stakeholders: the World Health Organization (WHO). As European governments tried to contain health care costs by cutting reimbursement for medicines, some governments had started using a WHO metric as a benchmark to establish a pricing cap. The pharmaceutical industry objected to this use of the metric, which had been designed to serve a purely scientific purpose—the gathering of comparative data for epidemiological studies. When a new drug came on the market, a panel of WHO experts—mostly pharmacologists and physicians—would assign it a metric ...