Susan Desmond-Hellmann
speaker
362 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Susan Desmond-Hellmann’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And the challenge for me was Bill's endless appetite for things like learning things, driving things, funding things, and me feeling like I could get my hands around a strategic plan. It was a little bit like, okay, this staff would be like, Bill's going to love this. Let's present that, you know, it was that kind of feeling and lots of money.
So I kept trying to get my hands around like, okay, what should we do? So it's just a little more orderly and we get a great return on our investment. That was the most important focus. I feel good about that. The funny thing was I sent the finance team to Genentech, and we had this really great portfolio management process that we put in place when I was there, and they still use it apparently.
And because I recommended to Bill, we just have a portfolio management process. Pretty simple. Everybody knows how you make decisions, what money's up, what we'll do, and we can use that here. Doesn't need to be bureaucratic. So we don't need it. It's all in my head. I remember that conversation. And I thought, if it wasn't you, I would think that was a smart ass thing to say.
But I actually think you're just being honest. So I encouraged him to understand that just because it was in his head didn't mean that the rest of us were there. We had a little more ability to make things orderly, I'd say. It was a wild ride. It was six years of a wild ride.
I would say far the opposite. The things that I felt like I knew about, I felt like really good about. The TB stuff, there's a HIV cure program now that I'm really psyched about. Technically, I felt really good. Probably the hardest thing for me was the people side of things. I have a very strong sense of how people should treat each other and the competencies that managers should have.
And I'm not willing to move on that because you're a technical expert. And I found that if you do move on that, it just changes the culture. And I struggle with that.
No, I think it's because Bill really likes technical experts. And if he likes a technical expert, he doesn't want the CEO to come and say anything. But yes, they are very smart.
They were, yeah.
No, there's a global health person, there's a global development person, there's an ag person.
Yeah. It's the biggest P&L. And then U.S. education is a pretty big job too.
Yeah. The one that has been ag is now ag financial services for the poor. So it's a pretty broad group.
So much money. It's amazing.
Oh, gosh. I think more the people side of things. I remember there was an employee who was really struggling at Genentech. And her boss, I was his boss. And he kept talking to me about how she was struggling, how she was struggling. Could we do this? Did we need to give her fewer reports, more reports, make her job harder, make her job? We couldn't figure it out. Couldn't figure it out.
And just not acting like she had been. We just couldn't figure it out. And finally, one day she said, oh, I'm getting a divorce. And after a little while, things got better. And I thought, you know, not everything's work. Not everything's work. So I think as a manager, I really care about people thriving at work. I really care about it.
And when I went to Gates Foundation, I think I understood better, given Genentech and UCSF, that a very important principle, work never fills in for home. Ever. It never makes up for bad home. So if somebody needs a timeout, I always think, how can I improve work?
And sometimes it's good to just understand that that's not always the case, especially if you're working in global health or global development. You might be in South Africa. You might be in China. It's rough. So just thinking a little bit about how people can show up in ways, it's $8 billion. How do they maximize the benefit of that $8 billion? And what can I do to enable that?
Yes and no. One thing about traveling a lot, you have big events or things like that, is you meet people on trips. And that's different people throughout the organization. So I think there are opportunities. I also set up meetings when people would have a grant that needed to be signed. The business process was it would show up on my computer. So I changed the business process.
So I got the group that could fit around the table in my office and we would talk about the grant. So I could interact with more people that weren't my reports, which I really liked. So I do think it is mostly through your reports, but I think there are ways that at a senior level, you can interact with people culture-wise.
So for me, I define culture in a really specific way that when you come to work, you feel like the atmosphere, the surround sound brings out the best in you and that you have some ownership of tweaking it if it doesn't. So that's something that you feel like you can control.
Because if you're in thousands of people or hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of people and you're the CEO, you're not going to do that. but that you set up that culture. One of my favorite stories from Genentech was being at a product development meeting that my successor as medical officer, Hal Barron, was running.
Showing 281–300 of 362 · page 15 of 19
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