Too Much Talk About Technology

By Ben Comer, Chief Editor, Life Science Leader

This month’s cover story focuses on Margo Georgiadis, cofounder and CEO of Montai Health (A Flagship Pioneering company), and how she is implementing an organizational strategy and method gained from computer science. As a former commercial operations and advertising leader at Google, Georgiadis saw firsthand how marketers at other companies prided themselves on judgment, creativity, and the artisanal crafting of brands (and print ads), and how they responded to the emergence of a data-driven, computational environment for engaging their customers. “People always said ‘50% of advertising doesn’t work; we just don’t know which half.’ But then we started to know which half … and could systemically prove it.” Google knew what consumers were watching, and to a growing degree, what they valued, based on clicks and online behavior. “You had all of this data, this new information, coming into an ecosystem that was not data-driven.” In the early days, says Georgiadis, people wouldn’t adopt digital advertising because they didn’t know how to manage it, or didn’t know how to explain it to their bosses.

There is a corollary to the more recent progress being made in generative AI and deep-learning models, and how today’s biopharmaceutical leaders are responding. Drug discovery, too, is historically an artisanal process, relying on judgment and creativity from dedicated scientists. For some of the scientists on Georgiadis’ team, it was extremely uncomfortable to imagine that the prosecution of every new target was going to be optimized in a certain way; at first those scientists felt it as a restraint, or a loss of autonomy. Too much emphasis on technology itself can create a false either/or perceptual dichotomy. “As leaders, we’ve spent way too much time talking about the power of technology,” says Georgiadis. “We don’t spend enough time talking about how we blend the best of the new with the best of today … how to imbed technology in a company so that we can ask different questions.”

New technologies including AI are simply tools; what ultimately matters is what gets built on top. Having gone through the cycle of new technology implementation numerous times in her professional career, Georgiadis says the key is building empathy for the specific challenges a new technology presents to colleagues, and breaking down problems in ways that can be shared, and where everyone can feel comfortable learning. Leaders must be willing to regularly engage colleagues on the front lines by having conversations to understand the disconnects associated with a new technology, the discomfort people feel, and the areas where additional clarity is needed. Iteration between leaders and employees is required for success. “Working at Google, I learned that if you want to see the future, you fundamentally have to put your stake out there, and then reimagine how everything works to make that possible.”