At a time when most executives are ready to work on their golf game, Kevin Sharer, who recently stepped down as CEO of Amgen, is taking up a new challenge as a professor at the Harvard Business School. His move offers several lessons in risk-taking.
A successful career in business, capped by 12 years as chief executive of a multi-billion global company wasn’t enough of a challenge for Kevin Sharer. The former Amgen CEO, who will also step down from the board at the end of the month, has taken a post as professor of corporate strategy at the Harvard Business School. So instead of facing demanding investors and regulators, he’ll square off with demanding, sharp-minded students.
In an interview with the Financial Times, he explained that risk-taking was important to his success:
“Mr. Sharer attributes his successes to good luck, taking risks and an ability to change course if needed. ‘Seizing the opportunity always involves risk. You’ve got to have courage,’ he says.”
Three things stand out about his experiences:
1. Risk-taking is appropriate at any stage of a career. Sharer’s turn to Harvard was simply the latest in a long line of challenges. Beginning with his early military service, risk-taking became a habit, a way of approaching work, which continued as he moved up the corporate chain at McKinsey and GE. When he became CEO of Amgen in 2000, he was ready to handle risks associated with managing a growing global company:
“Mr Sharer quickly shook things up, recruiting a new leadership team and moving much of the company’s manufacturing operations to Puerto Rico. ‘That was a big risk,’ he says. “A good way to lose a biotech company is to have manufacturing [fail].’
“Within two years, he had led Amgen’s 2002 acquisition of Seattle-based Immunex, which manufactured Enbrel, the strong-selling arthritis drug, for $16bn. He also led the development of Denosumab, the blockbuster osteoporosis drug.”
2. Accumulated skills are the source of success. Risk-taking is extremely challenging, and success is often a matter of drawing on a range of skills. For Sharer, the new environment at Harvard parallels his early days at Amgen:
“As Mr Sharer starts his new professorial role at Harvard, the challenge is not unlike when he started at Amgen and plunged into biology after a lifetime as an engineer and businessman.
“It was critical for him as a non-scientist CEO to make sure he learnt enough about the science of the biotech industry to be credible, while also maintaining the mindset of a manager. It required tutors, textbooks and years of perseverance to learn to think differently so that he could make decisions about investment and research and earn the respect of the company’s scientists.”
3. The biggest challenges are emotional. Successful risk-taking is not simply a matter of getting the technical skills right. It’s about having the emotional skills and maturity to cope with a demanding environment. At Amgen, Sharer learned to listen more, trust experienced colleagues and shed the need to be the “smartest person in the room:”
“The experience helped Mr Sharer leave behind much of his earlier impatience and arrogance and develop as a leader, he says, as he learnt to trust colleagues with deeper experience in drug development. Finally at the top, he became a better listener and ceased trying to be the smartest person in a room.
“I realised that being in the moment meant giving the person you were with your full attention and that’s the best way to convey respect, and listen for comprehension,” he says. “As I became more comfortable as chief executive, I didn’t have to worry that I was going to impress.”
That’s good advice for risk-takers everywhere.