IT STARTS AT HOME

Cultural and economic differences between the US and UK were reflected in the tones as well as the outcomes of their discussions. Whether it was owing to the country’s ‘dog-eat-dog’ free market, political polarisation or something else entirely, the former fostered less collaboration than the latter, where free-flowing discussion echoed the lower stakes of a society less directly impacted by its economy. Spurred by the belief that open dialogue is the path to real change, both conversations – with all their comparisons and conflicts – are equally illuminating for One Question’s longterm agenda. Is education the answer? As both talks demonstrated, learning has to happen internally before it can be turned outwards.

“I thought about what a great tragedy it would be to have a vaccine that the public didn’t have confidence to take, so I did a lot of things differently. I embedded a film crew with us through the whole project. We invited journalists from the Wall Street Journal to be with us, so the day we learned that the vaccine was effective, the Journal dropped a four or five page piece under the headline

“Pfizer’s Vaccine: Crazy Deadlines And A Pushy CEO.” How we run clinical trials is some of our greatest intellectual property, and we put the trial protocol up on our website so everyone could read it for themselves. This radical transparency changed everything.”

Sally Susman, Pfizer

The capacity for genuine learning within businesses themselves is invaluable. Corporate image and a desire to project something like unimpeachability is unfortunately as common as it is ultimately lethal – so what does internal education look like in practice? Sometimes it takes extraordinary circumstances to jolt individuals and organisations alike towards growth – reaching for change when stasis is no longer an option. The pandemic was such a moment for all of us, but few more so than Pfizer who developed one of the first vaccines against coronavirus. Their approach to education hinged on radical transparency, something fundamentally at odds with business’s inherently competitive culture.