Your Strategy Needs a Strategy

CHAPTER 4

VISIONARY

Be First

Quintiles: Building a Vision

Dennis Gillings was a thirty-year-old professor of biostatistics at the University of North Carolina when he first started helping pharmaceutical companies analyze data from their clinical trials. “Back then,” he recalled, “I felt there was an opportunity to build a business that . . . would complement my activities as a professor and enable a small consulting income.” But the more consulting he did, the more he realized that there was an opportunity to build something bigger. “What I noticed as I was consulting was that things were a bit inefficient. I remember going inside a pharma company and thinking, ‘Wow, it doesn’t need to cost all this money.’”¹

In 1982, he cofounded Quintiles ...