Shared Purpose Builds Resilience And Drives Innovation In Crisis

Throughout this COVID-19 pandemic, we are seeing high levels of collaboration and innovation in service of the greater good. Achievements that were considered impossible before are happening around us every day. 

Uniting around a single shared purpose generates an incredible amount of passion, energy, and drive. We believe that being fundamentally purpose-driven is accelerating progress for organizations through this crisis, and opening up new paths for future growth. 

Here is just a glimpse at a few of the exciting developments we have seen so far: 

Employees Rally to Speed Solutions Like Never Before

Medical and biotech organizations are delivering COVID-19 tests, vaccines, treatments, and personal protective equipment in unprecedented timeframes, in large part, due to employees who are committed to their organizational purpose and have a strong desire to help.

Quest Diagnostics quickly engaged its team to create a test for COVID-19 and ramped up production in days, with employees working around the clock to make that possible. To date, Quest has performed approximately one million molecular tests and has begun to perform blood-based antibody testing, a tool that should help public health experts understand who has been exposed to the virus and who may have immunity. 

Corporations Reach Across Boundaries to Help

BD, Henry Schein, and many others are working diligently to advance new solutions quickly and to ensure the supply chain holds. This requires working with industry associations, supply chain partners, competitors, the FDA, and other agencies and government leaders. 

BD sees great collaboration across the government and the private sector to come up with solutions. Competitors in the industry are coming together and aligning quickly, setting aside individual business interests. BD is working with competitors to come up with collective testing protocols, dividing up the steps that needed to be completed to get to solutions as rapidly as possible. 

According to CEO Tom Polen, BD has been collaborating with the government, key associations, and nonprofits to develop a rapid point of care test that could deliver a result in about 10 minutes. “Through the work on these collaborations and the fact that the walls are down, we expect to get things done in weeks and months that would have taken years.”

In Europe, Getinge CEO Mattias Perjos has seen the medical device industry has come together through its industry association, meeting weekly and having daily conversations with the federal administration task force. Based in Sweden, Getinge produces ICU ventilators and ECMO therapy critical for the treatment of COVID-19. Perjos reports that companies have been able to share their knowledge of the industry with government leaders across the EU to focus action on solutions that will work in these critical manufacturing areas, keeping the interests of patients at the forefront.  

A multitude of manufacturing companies has rapidly retooled their plants to produce personal protective equipment (PPE) and testing supplies for healthcare providers on the front lines.  Automakers are producing masks and ventilators, brewers and distillers have reprogrammed production lines to make hand sanitizer. Companies with sewing capacity, from Herman Miller to Chanel, have redeployed production to make masks and gowns.

 What comes next?

In times of crisis, organizations show their true colors. These stories demonstrate how leading with a higher ambition brings humanity to our work, and that doing business in a way that supports our communities is going to ultimately sustain our organizations in the long term. 

As Harvard Business School Professor Rebecca Henderson (author of the new book Reimagining Capitalism in a World On Fire) said on a recent call with Higher Ambition Leadership Alliance members, “As difficult and tough that this is going to be, it’s very encouraging to see how firms are responding and coming together collaboratively. I hope this is the beginning of seeing higher ambition at scale.”

We expect to see these companies advance with more progressive collaborations and more innovation in the future, building on the paths blazed so quickly during this pandemic.

"We are learning a lot from our organization and our people as this thing moves ahead,” said BD Executive Chairman of the Board and former CEO Vince Forlenza recently. “What's going to be really exciting is to see how they have thrown out the old playbook and have created a new and more agile one. How do we take advantage of that?"