Podcast S9E5 | Leading with Integrity in Pharma and at Home: Kim Jablonski

TRANSCRIPT

Kimberley Cole 0:01
This is Risky Women Radio, a show that connects, celebrates and champions women in risk regulation and compliance. We’re here to share the insights on the biggest issues in our industry and hear inspiring journeys from our global members. Sign up to our newsletter at riskywomen.org. I’m Kimberley Cole, your Chief Risky Woman.

Lucy Pearman 0:22
Hi, welcome to Risky Women podcast. I’m really excited to have Kim Jablonski with us in today’s conversation. Kim is a chief compliance and ethics officer from Bristol Myers Squibb with an amazing journey, she’s going to take us through her career today. So Kim, welcome to the risky women podcast. Take us on your career journey and share some of your highlights to date.

Kim Jablonski 0:44
Hi, Lucy, yeah, thanks so much for having me on it’s great to be here. I would say I’m really fortunate. I’ve been at Bristol Myers Squibb, which is a US based global pharmaceutical company nearly my whole career, I’ve had various legal roles, most recently, as you noted, serving as chief compliance and ethics officer, and I’ll try to give you the quick story. So after getting my undergraduate law school and public health degrees at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I spent two years at the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, where I met my husband and we moved together to Washington, DC, to work at law firms. And on the Monday that I returned to work after our honeymoon, only six months into my law firm job, the partner said, we’re going to send you up to BMS as a secundi, so you’ll be there three days a week, but you’ll be doing their work basically full time. And I said to them, I don’t recommend this, but I said something to the effect of, you all know that I don’t know what I’m doing yet right? And they said something to the effect of, don’t worry, we’ll support you, and we don’t have anyone else to do it. So I spent the first year and a half of my marriage traveling every week from Washington to New Jersey to do work for BMS, and after what I call my year and a half job interview, I accepted an offer from BMS to come in house full time, so my husband I moved to New Jersey, which turned out to be a great place to have three kids and raise them in a small town close to everything that the big cities of Philadelphia and New York have to offer two of those kids are now in college, which I truly cannot believe. Professionally, I’ve had the opportunity to work for a company that’s focused on discovering, developing and delivering life saving medicines to patients, something I didn’t know I could do when I was in school trying to figure out my path. So it’s been great. After about 25 years here, I’ve had a number of different regulatory law roles at the company. And for your listeners who aren’t as familiar with pharma companies, I first supported our commercialisation team, which this includes the marketers who think about how we can promote our products. It includes our sales representatives and our field medical team who speak with doctors about our products and about the evolving science, and our access teams who speak with payers and institutions about providing coverage for our products. We’re a highly regulated industry for very good reason that comes as it should, with the privilege of impacting patients lives in the ways that we do, and my job has been to help our teams meet those very heavy responsibilities. And as I’ve grown in my career, I’ve gotten to work on multiple different therapeutic areas, cardiovascular, immunology, oncology and in different areas the company, including research and development. And one of the greatest learning opportunities was spending two years as the corporate secretary and leading our corporate governance and securities team. I also had a very challenging role, helping to lead our recovery during the global covid 19 pandemic, which is a business role, not a legal one, and in that role, helped the company make the best decisions about how to protect our employees who had to work on site like our manufacturing team, our lab based scientists, and when and how to return our remote workers to our sites and then into the role that I have now.

Lucy Pearman 4:11
So that’s a super journey that you’ve been on, Kim. How do you create the impact in your role? There’s obvious, serious consequences if it’s not followed through, how do you create that impact in your role and make sure that the employees and the patients that you’re ultimately responsible for get the care that they need?

Kim Jablonski 4:33
Yeah, absolutely. And I guess I should first talk a little bit about the compliance and ethics role that I have now. So it’s a global team of people. Our job is really to enable our culture of integrity and support well informed, risk based decisions that will get more medicines, support more patients faster. It’s that obligation, that responsibility, that I talked about earlier, and we have designed our compliance program to have that impact. To support our global business no matter where you sit. So we have policies, we have education and culture support, we have processes, but we try not to get too bureaucratic. We want processes only that are needed to manage our risk or to make us more efficient as a big organisation, we help people with risk assessment and mitigation monitoring and oversight. We have an integrity line that helps team members to raise concerns, and then we have efficient and fair investigations we do when we receive those concerns. And we try to make it as easy as we possibly can for our people to choose the right path. We have to keep in mind that our work is so complex, it’s very easy to say do the right thing, but we know it’s not easy to know what that is, and we have to understand that, and the way we do that is through building a, I’ve built a great team, and work with a great team, and I rely very heavily on them. I’ve had the pleasure of working with the same compliance and ethics leadership team for the two years that I’ve been in this role, and they’re one of the most selfless, cooperative, team focused groups that I’ve ever worked with. I’ve been spoiled, really. And when you have that, you can have great impact. The other key for me is having BMS employees hear more about our culture of integrity from their business leaders and from their peers than they do from the compliance and ethics team. That’s what makes it clear that it’s part of our culture as a company and a core expectation of their job and our compliance and ethics business partners have done a lovely job of building a network of what we call integrity champions throughout our business units, and these are people who are not part of compliance and ethics technically, but who really expand our reach to their peers. And it’s been really fun to see the passion and the creativity they bring to their work. And we support our business leaders in messaging that they can provide in their team meetings about the importance of making good decisions.

Kimberley Cole 7:04
This episode is brought to you by Kroll. Stay ahead with Kroll. As the leading independent provider of financial and Risk Advisory solutions, Kroll leverages their unique insights, data and technology to help clients stay ahead of complex demands.

Lucy Pearman 7:22
So it sounds like you’ve built yourself as a strong leader, a really powerful and impactful team. What is it that you’re most passionate about in your current role?

Kim Jablonski 7:32
Yeah, the thing that really crosses over everything we do is good decision making and trying to figure out what drives a great decision, and how you help others make great decisions. In doing that, we try to help whoever’s making the decision focus on the decision making process and not the outcome, because you can’t always control the outcome, even if you’ve got a great process. You’ve got to make sure you’ve gathered and considered all the available information to support the best decision, whether it’s good reasons to do it or reasons not to do it. And to do that, you’ve got to have an environment where the people who actually have the expertise, who are closest to the work are comfortable putting up their hand and saying, what is on their mind, what only they know in order to support that great decision. And then once the leader’s made the decision, they need to commit to it, and by committing to it, I mean, you don’t ruminate over whether you should have made a different decision. Of course you can, and you should, at least, for the big decisions, have an exit strategy and think about what might cause you to change course based on that new information, but you should be able to feel confident that you chose your course based on the best information available to you at the time, and then just recognise sometimes well made decisions don’t turn out the way you wanted them to, and sometimes poorly made decisions actually turn out okay, But the well made decision based on the best information available to you at the time sets you up with the highest likelihood of success. And that’s what we try to reinforce.

Lucy Pearman 9:08
Absolutely. That’s incredible. What are the biggest risks that you’ve taken in your career, Kim? You’ve had a very tumultuous start, I would suggest to your career, biggest risk that you’ve taken, and did they pay off?

Kim Jablonski 9:21
Yeah, I know you all have spoken with previous guests about the risk of staying with the same company as long as as they have and as long as I have almost 25 years. And that might have been a risk, but I’ve had so many different experiences during that time. It really hasn’t felt that risky. Two things stand out in that time, though. One is that decision to come in house so early in my career when I really didn’t feel ready, the traditional path in house is getting probably five or more, probably closer to 10, years of law firm training. So I felt like I was jumping the gun a little bit, but I had really fantastic managers at BMS who never stopped teaching, and as a result, I feel really lucky to have had that opportunity when I did. The other big risk was taking the Corporate Secretary role, because I hadn’t worked in that space before, but fortunately, the General Counsel at that time had been the Corporate Secretary before her current job, so I was able to learn so much from her as I went and to your question, I think both those risks paid off. Of course, I’m glad I joined BMS in the first place, because I’ve been able to stay and grow with so many opportunities since then. And the Secretary job was just this great opportunity to work directly with the board of directors to get a view on how we set company strategy to be on the front row for the biggest decisions the company made during that time, it was a truly valuable 360 degree view of what it takes to run a fortune 500 company. And I’m really grateful for that.

Lucy Pearman 10:48
It’s amazing. It’s a fantastic experience, if you can get that in your career, isn’t it? It shapes your thinking in a very different way. So you mentioned that you’ve been at BMS for your entire career, and possibly seen that as a risk? What was the light bulb moment that you’ve had through your time at BMS that shaped the choices that you’ve made in your career within BMS?

Kim Jablonski 11:09
That’s a great question. One that really stands out is early on, when I was coming in and learning and had finally gotten comfortable with the clients that I was working with and with the product that I was working on and one of the greatest managers I’ve ever had said, you need to move elsewhere. Try something different. I said, Nope, I’m comfortable here. I like this. I finally feel like I know what I’m doing. And he looked at me and he said, Kim, when you want to keep what you have, you get to keep what you have. And he looked at me, and he waited for it to click that I wasn’t going to be able to learn and grow new things until I forced myself to step out of my comfort zone. And that’s been the approach BMS takes to talent development, really, fortunately for me, supports that. So here, if you’ve got an interest in learning new things and you’ve got an ability to develop new skills and capabilities. They don’t require you to demonstrate that you’ve done the thing before they give you the opportunity to try the thing. And so that’s how I got to move to research and development, certainly the corporate secretary job, and to the other best growth opportunity that I never would have chosen, which was helping to lead our pandemic recovery. So I’m really grateful for that.

Lucy Pearman 12:23
It sounds like you’ve certainly had some strong advice through your career. It’s helped shape some of your choices, which is fantastic, if you can be in a nurturing environment with that strong leadership, it enables you to flourish, doesn’t it?

Kim Jablonski 12:36
Yes, absolutely.

Lucy Pearman 12:37
So thank you for taking us through your career journey. It’s very, very impressive, even though you feel you’ve taken a risk by staying in BMS, it’s a very impressive career, and you’ve clearly embraced every opportunity that’s put in front of you. Let’s move over to your expert opinion, your specialist topic. So what are the biggest challenges that are faced in biopharma today?

Kim Jablonski 13:01
Yes, I mean, there are quite a few, obviously, but probably the biggest challenge for us on a macro level is that 90% of our clinical drug candidates fail. There is a tremendous amount of investment required to fill our pipeline of potential future products, and great risk you have to take on in order to find the ones that work. And at BMS, we’ve taken on some really challenging diseases to treat, going back decades, with HIV, and more recently with cancer, and even more recently, getting back into neuroscience. And we do that over and over again. The work we do isn’t easy, the progress we make is often incremental, and scientists work in the lab for years to deliver on the promise of these therapies, and hundreds of 1000s of potential targets get narrowed down to a dozen potential drug candidates, and only a fraction of those actually make it to the clinic to be tested in human trials, and even then, nine out of 10 of those drug candidates fail. So we are absolutely doing what we can to shift that incremental progress to hopefully exponential one day. And although failure is inevitable in our industry, we’re trying to fail smarter, so to speak. So we’re super lucky to live in an era of unprecedented scientific and technological advances, of course, artificial intelligence, and we see the potential for that to change and even revolutionise just about every part of that biopharma chain. We’re starting to see it already in the impact in drug discovery, where we identify potential candidates for new drugs, in the way that we design and run clinical trials, in the way we manufacture and deliver our products, and in how we get information about our products to healthcare professionals, to payers, to policymakers, to patients. And I’m super excited to see how far this can take us, how much better it can make us and our entire industry at delivering on. In this collective mission to help patients.

Lucy Pearman 15:02
Yeah, that’s an alarming number, 90% of developments failing. What’s the reason for that, Kim? What should that be normalised to?

Kim Jablonski 15:09
Well, of course, we’d love to see everything, but I think it’s the variety of patients we’re trying to treat. So we’ll find something that is take immunotherapy for cancer, which is a revolution in the last 20 years or so where we’ve as an industry, figured out how to take the patient’s immune system and have it fight cancer, and it works incredibly well, but for a small number of patients. So the idea is, what about it makes it work for that small number of patients? How can we expand that and make it work for the other patients it’s not helping. Or how do we find new treatments that will help fill in those gaps? It’s just the every patient is different. The diseases are so different, it just takes a lot of work, a lot of investment, a lot of risk, and as technology improves, we’re much better able to predict what will work for particular patients. So how do we scale that up? It’s a challenge we’ve accepted, and we’re totally energised by.

Lucy Pearman 16:05
A challenge yet fascinating all at once, right? Which kind of is the motivation? I guess you speak to? Yes. So what insights did you glean from your legal career at the fortune 500 biopharma company and as a working mom that are relevant to any great women in compliance who are grappling with risk, integration and innovation?

Kim Jablonski 16:27
So many things when the list is forever long, I’ll try to narrow it down. I’ll talk about three things. One, around assessing risk. Two, adopting new technologies, and third, how we look at change and challenge. So first getting into assessing risk. So one of the most basic things we have to do as lawyers and compliance professionals is also one of the hardest to do effectively, and that’s to accurately assess the level of risk involved in any given situation and then effectively communicate it to decision makers. So at BMS, we always start with our values and the question of what’s right for our patients, for our healthcare professional customers, for our employees and with the compliance team, we’ve tried to build systems, data sources, analytics tools to help make that risk assessment more tangible for our clients, easier to understand. We try to show them trends over time, to help them understand how their teams are doing. And if I know how my team is executing, I can assess whether I want to take on more risk or less risk as a result, and it will help our business leaders understand when they need to course correct. And to your point about at home, we’re using similar concepts, although with varying degrees of success. So we try to encourage our children to be confident and independent by giving them opportunities to try things on their own. I love sleep away camp for building their confidence that they can be away from us at a young age. We talk about preparing for what we can prepare for. I usually travel with close to an entire pharmacy, because you will never know what you need. And most importantly, making sure our children feel safe in bringing things up to us that they truly believe any topic is safe for them to discuss. I’ll admit we still have work to do in this space, but we’re always trying to get better. The second area I’ll raise is safe adoption of new technologies. So at BMS, we’ve identified artificial intelligence as a double sided risk. So it’s a huge risk if we don’t take full advantage of its capabilities. But as I said, we believe it has the ability to truly transform how we identify and deliver new drugs, but it’s also a big risk if we don’t do it responsibly. So early on, other companies were blocking access to AI tools. At that point, we adopted a set of principles, of things that we absolutely had to get right. We put the accountability on those using the AI tools to make sure they’re acting consistent with those principles, and we’re always working to get better at governance over the use of those tools, so that our teams feel empowered to use them to make us better and also to feel the deep responsibility that comes along with that. And at home, same, along with every other parent, we’re trying to figure out how to give our kids access to the technologies that kids in their generation are using. I’m also reminding them that what you see is not always true, and to make sure they’re getting enough live connections and activity that does not involve technology. We love to travel together, spend time outside, and you always need to work towards that right balance. And that third thing I’ve learned a lot about how to view change and challenge. The this industry, the one my colleagues and I have chosen, we constantly have to reinvent ourselves because our products lose patent protection after only a few years. It’s a feature of our industry, and it means you got to have a little bit of a strong stomach for uncertainty until you know that you’ve got the next product to fill that gap that’s left by the last one, and for me, the privilege of getting to change patients lives in the ways we do, it’s absolutely worth that challenge and that uncertainty, and I’m actually energised by it. And I’ll say at home, we have a child who has one of the chronic diseases that my company’s working every day to fight and trying to get them diagnosed and properly treated was one of the biggest challenges that our family has faced. Fortunately, they’re now well controlled, leading a very normal life, and of course, I’d rather we never had to go through that, but I think it’s given my child a perspective and a confidence that will allow them to face just about anything else, and I’m super proud of them for that. Also watching our pipeline at BMS very closely, hoping that should they ever need to move on to a new treatment, that we have one available. And I don’t think I could ever find a greater motivation to go to work every day than that.

Lucy Pearman 20:55
And it’s fantastic, Kim, you really embrace the positive leadership at home and at work, around creating safe, nurturing environments where people can be vulnerable, which is where people learn and grow. And, you know, have that natural, inquisitive mindset that we need as we embrace AI and the critical thinking that is absolutely prerequisite to adopting any type of new technology. We mustn’t lose sight of that, and it sounds like you embrace that in all areas of your life. You’re a huge inspiration. So thank you for sharing all of that.

Kim Jablonski 21:28
Thank you.

Lucy Pearman 21:29
As we wrap up this conversation with you, I wanted to ask you three different questions. What’s the change that you would like to see? You’re obviously a huge component of driving change with everything you’ve shared with us today. What would you like to see in addition to everything else that you’re doing?

Kim Jablonski 21:45
Well, I’ll aim high with this one. I wish we were all better to see and to try to understand the challenges others are facing, and then when we’ve got the ability and means to try to make things better for them, I think that’s so important for us in the compliance and ethics space. Again, as I said, like it’s easy to say, do the right thing, but we can’t assume people know what that is. We need to be understanding and help them when they’re facing those difficult choices, and help them feel like they made the best call that they possibly could.

Lucy Pearman 22:15
And what’s the next innovation or positive change that you see coming in your industry?

Kim Jablonski 22:21
Yeah, related to what I said before, we’ve had this amazing breakthrough in the recent past, figuring out how to use the body’s own immune system to fight cancer. My hope is, and we’re moving in this direction, that the next innovation is our ability to expand that approach to treat other diseases like autoimmune conditions. There’s great promise there, and I’m watching that with great anticipation.

Lucy Pearman 22:45
Yeah, that sounds huge. It’s fascinating. I’m hugely envious of the space that you’re working in. It sounds inspirational. And finally, what’s a book that you would recommend to read or something to watch, or a podcast?

Kim Jablonski 23:00
Oh, sure. I recently finished a book called the Culture Map by Erin Meyer. She’s a business school professor at INSEAD, and she does this amazing job of helping you fight the tendency to think that cultural differences are inappropriate stereotypes and generalisations, and instead, she traces the historical and other reasons why it’s important to think about the relative differences in culture as a helpful tool in managing and working with global teams. I wish I had read it years ago.

Lucy Pearman 23:30
Sounds absolutely fascinating, something I’ll pick up, and I’m sure our listeners will as well, Kim. So thank you very much for taking the time. You’ve got an inspirational career and an inspirational mindset to the way you adopt your ethics at home and in your workplace. So thank you very much for taking the time to join us.

Kim Jablonski 23:50
Thank you so much for having me, Lucy. It was a pleasure.

Kimberley Cole 23:54
Thank you for listening to this episode of Risky Women Radio, be part of the ongoing conversation and learn more about our events and other programs at riskywomen.org