Thanks to Outsourced Pharma chief editor Louis Garguilo taking the lead on serving as host of Life Science Leader magazine’s annual CMO Leadership Awards celebration and reception in New York City, my time was suddenly freed up to explore for new educational opportunities. And while I will admit to being biased as to the quality of educational opportunities offered by our own Outsourced Pharma conferences, I recently got back from an event best described as one of the best pharmaceutical manufacturing educational conferences you have probably never heard of.

PhRMA held its 2016 annual meeting March 9 and 10 in Washington, D.C. This was the first annual meeting held under the new leadership regime of Stephen Ubl. Having spent more than 10 years as the president and CEO of the Advanced Medical Technology Association (AdvaMed), Ubl took the PhRMA helm just three days after former Turing Pharmaceutical CEO Martin Shkreli made national headlines with his drug-price increase antics.

Life Science Leader magazine and CNBC were the only two members of the media invited to attend the 6^th Annual R&D Leadership (RDL) Summit (I will explain why this is significant in a moment). Produced by the Conference Forum with support from PRA Health Sciences, the event provides an extremely intimate opportunity for R&D executives to network and openly discuss some of the biopharmaceutical industry’s most controversial issues (e.g., drug pricing).

If as adults we could invisibly walk on school playgrounds during recess, we might hear the stock response recited when encountering a bully — ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”

For biopharma companies that have succeeded, shouldn’t we be trying to provide more incentives for them to stay rather than creating further disincentives to prevent their leaving?

Do you remember your first job? How about your first boss?
Peter Hecht, Ph.D., sure does. “I worked at a grocery store in high school,” recalls the cofounder of Ironwood Pharmaceuticals. From this early formative experience he learned something very valuable about himself. “I’m a pretty bad employee,” he laughingly attests. “I’m always challenging the status quo, asking questions, wanting to see if we can figure out how to do things better.”

During this year’s BIO CEO Conference (partially covered here), much of my time was spent in the educational sessions, which I would rank as some of the best I have seen at any conference — ever. For example ...

Sometimes it is worthwhile to stop and consider the value of your time, not from a financial perspective, but rather how much you’ve used and how much you have left. If you did, you might be much more discriminating in where you would choose to spend it. Consider this: the average U.S. male’s life expectancy is 76. This means that in less than 14,600 hours my time fuel tank will be exactly one-third full, or depending on your disposition, two-thirds empty. Knowing that time is our most precious, limited, and nonrenewable resource, when it comes to picking which biopharmaceutical industry conferences to attend, I have always tried to be highly selective. To those who perceive the annual BIO CEO Investor Conference as a poor man’s J.P. Morgan, they most likely have not been there — at least not lately.

In November 2015, the Harvard Business Review (HBR) announced the top 100 CEOs in the world. Though the list included household names like Starbucks (12), Nike (21), and Amazon (87), what is even more interesting than the fact that Novo Nordisk’s Lars Rebien Sørensen was ranked number one, was the healthcare industry as a whole had 13 CEOs in the top 100 — tying it for first with financial service (see Table 1). But if you dig even deeper, prepare for another surprise.