Hi!

I recently came across a line from Microsoft CCO Frank X. Shaw that articulated a challenge we biopharma communicators face every day: The pressure to treat everything like it can’t wait.

In one of his weekly TGIF emails, Shaw wrote:

That idea came up during our most recent Comm Convo panel in March, The Outsider Advantage: Cross-Industry Comms Insights, with Lilian Anekwe (GSK), Alex Engel (Axon), Jason Kravitz (Duke Health), and Kathleen Nunan (ITM). We discussed how different industries define urgency, and why communicators in our industry tend to have a sharper instinct for what actually needs to move fast.

Watch the replay here.

Here are our top 10 takeaways from the conversation:

1. Treat biopharma's regulatory rigor as a portable asset. The discipline of building credibility through proof points travels well, especially into companies where communications infrastructure hasn't caught up to growth.
2. Recognize the generalist range biopharma communicators often underestimate in themselves. Issues management, translating complexity for non-expert audiences, and brand stewardship are highly valued skills outside of biopharma, and what feels like table stakes here can be a genuine differentiator elsewhere.
3. Keep the human story visible at the core of whatever you're communicating. Biopharma communicators are trained to hold patient impact front and center, connecting innovation to what it means for an individual, a discipline that is rarer than it looks across industries.
4. Calibrate what "urgency" means in your specific environment. As one panelist put it, "urgency isn't always about speed — it's about consequence." Moving without clinical or regulatory alignment can erode trust rather than signal competence.
5. Enter new environments with a "kingmaker" posture. One panelist described explicitly framing her role as making the company look good rather than asserting her own expertise, a mindset that defused arrogance assumptions and created the space for her rigor to actually be heard.
6. Make newness a strategic tool with a defined window. The license to ask obvious questions and challenge assumptions has a shelf life, so naming your outside perspective explicitly and moving quickly to create visible experiments makes that window count.
7. Map the informal decision-making structure before the org chart. Identifying who needs to be won over early and letting listening accumulate into influence means that, when you raise your hand with an idea, it lands very differently than it would on day one.
8. Position the communications function upstream. Moving toward a trusted advisor role often starts with a broad internal conversation that surfaces pain points and creates the relationships that make deeper collaboration possible.
9. Anchor a test-and-learn cadence to predictable company moments. Tying experiments to existing milestones builds buy-in incrementally, gives results a fair read, and demonstrates measurable progress without asking organizations to change everything at once.
10. Seek the unexpected edge when building your team. Panelists described looking for complementary skills, intellectual range, and what one called "a little weird," because in a crowded communications landscape, an unexpected perspective tends to get heard.

Even though biopharma operates in a unique regulatory environment, we can gain useful insights when we look beyond our own industry.

Hope you all have a good week ahead!

Lynnea

P.S. - Our April Comm Convo, which will be held on April 28th, has something everyone should find useful! Register for Beyond Self Care to Structural Change here.

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