Title: Senior Vice President, Head of Clinical Development
Employers: CSL Behring

Working environment

“This is a general note of reference for Olaf van der Linden. Olaf and I were colleagues at Boehringer Ingelheim during my time there from 2015-2017. At that time I was serving as the Therapeutic Area Head for Respiratory Diseases. Olaf was serving in the Sourcing of General Goods & Service group as part of the overall Purchasing organization.

During this time the Respiratory Therapeutic Area decided to do a refresh of our overall Strategy. With Olaf’s help, we agreed internally that we wanted to create a bold and aggressive plan on an aggressive timeline. To do this, we decided to engage an external Consultant group. Mr. van der Linden led that search and evaluation for us. Olaf generated a pool of potential Consultants and organized their capabilities presentations to us. But this part is fairly standard.

What set his help apart are two things. First, he really pushed the agencies to provide really creative proposals for coming to bold and aggressive new strategies. He asked the companies to revise their pitches in very short time to more reflect our ambitions and to staff the proposal with the type of people capable of achieving these goals. And secondly, he challenged and cajoled all the bidders to make creative terms whereby the agencies continued with “”skin in the game”” over the life of the strategy, not just while the work was getting done. These two elements led to overall creation of initial ideas that matched our ambition and terms of a contract that reflected our desire to have more a partnership instead of a transaction. But what the process also revealed was which agency was best and most easily able to think laterally and creatively on the fly, something critical to creating a bold, ambitious, creative strategy in a limited period of time. The end result was a successful partnership and successfully refreshed strategy.