Teva Case Study
Case Study: Teva Pharmaceuticals Identifying Critical Questions and Improving Decision-Making Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. is a global pharmaceutical company specializing in the development, production and marketing of generic and proprietary branded pharmaceuticals and active pharmaceutical ingredients. Teva is among the top 20 pharmaceutical companies and among the largest generic pharmaceutical companies in the world. Teva asked Customized Improvement Strategies (CIS) to help it determine how the company could make better, faster drug development decisions and improve decision-making overall. “The biggest issue in drug development today,” Dave Zuckerman, CIS President, says, “is whether or not a company has the ability to make effective drug development decisions quickly. If a trial does not end with a clear, unambiguous result, there is inevitably a lot of soul searching: Is this a bad drug or did we make errors in the design of the trial or development program? Could a betterdesigned protocol have yielded a better result? If a company cannot answer these questions adequately, it has no basis for deciding whether to kill a drug candidate or proceed with further development. So it’s critical to do the appropriate planning, and ask the right questions, up front in order to make good decisions at the end.” CIS spent time interviewing Teva employees at all levels of the organization to determine how decisions were made and how planning worked, and found there were multiple decision pathways in the company. It also found that five strong aspects of the company culture worked against decision-making in some instances: • • • • • A bias for action: people wanted to get started even if appropriate planning was incomplete. A strong belief that individuals can make big differences, resulting in a lack of team emphasis. Expertise is highly valued: employees would seize opportunities for showcasing their own expertise even if inappropriate to the situation or