[ABOUT] Advancing Human Health through The Pursuit of Excellence in Service of Science™

Breakthrough Science Alone Does Not Determine Impact

Breakthrough science alone does not determine impact. What determines reach, trust, and sustained value is the system that carries that science into the real lives, decisions, and contexts of customers. In an era defined by consumer grade expectations, experiential commerce, and relentless comparison, pharma and life sciences organizations are no longer judged only by what they discover or manufacture, but by how consistently and credibly they show up across every interaction.

This belief did not emerge in abstraction. It was forged through lived experience.

Forged in High Stakes Environments

My path to this conviction was not linear, but it has always been anchored in the same truth. That outcomes are determined by discipline, systems, and how people operate under pressure. Eight years in U.S. Army intelligence instilled a mission first mindset, rigorous execution, and an intolerance for ambiguity. In environments where stakes were high and margin for error was nonexistent, I learned that excellence is not optional and not theoretical. It is structural. It is procedural. It is how work gets done when it matters most.

This was not philosophy. It was performance under consequence. It was the early formation of a belief that systems, not slogans, determine outcomes.

Where Excellence Became Structural and Scalable

That conviction was later sharpened through work at The Ritz-Carlton Leadership Center, where I saw that excellence is not only philosophical and not only competitive. It can be designed. It can be taught. It can be operationalized. It can scale.

Ritz-Carlton does not rely on heroic individuals or exceptional moments. It relies on institutionalized standards, codified values, daily rituals, and operational discipline. It relies on systems that make excellence the default, not the exception.

The Gold Standards are not posters on a wall. They are a governing system. The Credo. The Motto. The Three Steps of Service. The Service Values. The Employee Promise. They define how decisions are made, how people are hired, how performance is managed, and how service is delivered. They are reinforced every day, in every property, in every role.

The mythical Green Book makes this tangible. Sitting alongside the brand design system, the Green Book defines in precise detail the underlying elements of the Experience Delivery System that make the brand real in the lives of guests. It codifies not just what the brand stands for, but how it is delivered. How moments are orchestrated. How decisions are made. How standards are upheld. How exceptions are handled. How recovery happens when things go wrong.

It is not a symbol. It is infrastructure. It provides a shared language for excellence and a practical guide for action. It removes ambiguity. It reduces variation. It protects the brand promise by embedding it into daily behavior. It also creates the foundation for continuous improvement, allowing the experience to evolve without losing its soul.

I saw how service excellence could be embedded into culture, governance, training, decision rights, and frontline behavior in a way that held across geographies, languages, and decades. Excellence was not left to interpretation. It was architected. Protected. Reinforced. Measured. Lived.

That experience mattered. It demonstrated that excellence can be made repeatable. That it can be engineered into the fabric of an organization. That it does not have to erode as scale increases. It can strengthen.

It also made something else clear. If hospitality could operationalize excellence at global scale, then regulated, mission driven industries had no excuse for treating experience as soft, secondary, or discretionary.

The Philosophical Roots of the Conviction

The intellectual roots of this conviction run even deeper and they come from two very different, but deeply aligned sources. Aristotle and Vince Lombardi.

Aristotle is an inspiration for thoughtful provocation. He was not a passive philosopher and not a collector of abstract ideas. He challenged inherited assumptions. He questioned accepted norms. He refused to accept tradition when it no longer explained lived reality. His insistence that excellence is not an act, but a habit was not a motivational phrase. It was a provocation. A demand to reframe how progress itself is understood.

In Aristotle’s view, excellence had to be practiced, embedded, and repeated until it became the default way of operating. Truth, virtue, and advancement were not matters of aspiration. They were the result of disciplined systems of thought and behavior that could endure over time and under pressure. He forced a shift from what we claim to value to what we actually do.

Vince Lombardi is an inspiration for winning. He took that same philosophical backbone and translated it into competitive reality. His conviction that excellence is not a singular act but a habit reinforced the idea that greatness is not created in moments of intensity, but in the accumulation of disciplined behaviors over time. He believed that winning was not an event. It was a byproduct of standards, preparation, and relentless execution.

Lombardi did not tolerate ambiguity. He did not romanticize potential. He built systems. He demanded precision. He insisted on consistency. He created environments where excellence was not optional and not occasional. It was expected.

Together, Aristotle and Lombardi represent the two sides of the same discipline. Thoughtful provocation and competitive execution. The courage to challenge the frame and the discipline to win within it.

These were not abstract influences. They became the mental model. The standard. The lens through which I evaluated performance, leadership, and outcomes.

Where the Language Was Forged

That lens was brought into sharp focus during my time inside pharma at Pfizer.

The Science Will Win™ mantra resonated because of its gravity and its clarity. It expressed a belief in rigor, evidence, persistence, and purpose applied at scale. It reflected the understanding that breakthroughs are not moments of inspiration, but the outcome of disciplined ways of working governed by standards, systems, and an uncompromising commitment to results that matter.

For me, it was not the creation of a belief. It was confirmation.

It was a living example of what it looks like when excellence is treated as infrastructure, not aspiration. When rigor is cultural, not episodic. When discipline is systemic, not symbolic.

I wanted to follow that with something of equal weight. Something that carried the same seriousness, responsibility, and moral gravity, but spoke to the layer that determines whether science ever truly reaches the people it is meant to serve.

That is where The Pursuit of Excellence in Service of Science™ was born.

A declaration that if science is pursued with rigor and discipline, then everything that carries that science into the world must be held to the same standard. Leadership. Culture. Operating models. Experiences. Systems. Behaviors.

It was a way of naming what I had long believed and what I had now seen proven in multiple domains. That excellence can be philosophical. That it can be competitive. That it can be structural. That it can scale.

Where Thinking Was Sharpened Through Teaching

Teaching as founding faculty for North America’s first master’s degree in Customer Experience Management in the Department of Marketing at the Eli Broad College of Business at Michigan State University sharpened that thinking and stress tested it in practice. It forced the discipline of explanation. It exposed the gaps between theory and reality. It reinforced the need for systems, not slogans.

It also reinforced the responsibility. The obligation to move beyond language and into architecture. Beyond intent and into design.

The Experiential Standard the Industry Has Not Yet Claimed

Pharma and life sciences operate under some of the most demanding standards in the world. The evidentiary standard of science. The regulatory compliance standard that governs safety and ethics. The precision standard of manufacturing. The trust standard of global brands.

Each of these standards exists for a reason. Each protects human life. Each reflects the seriousness of the work. Each demands discipline, rigor, and accountability.

Yet one standard remains conspicuously underdeveloped. The experiential standard.

The standard that governs how people are treated. How easily they can engage. How clearly they are guided. How respectfully their time is handled. How compassionately their realities are acknowledged. How consistently the organization shows up when it matters.

This is not a soft dimension. It is a human one. It is where science meets life. It is where protocols meet people. It is where discovery meets diagnosis. It is where brands are tested in moments of vulnerability.

Advancing Human Health through The Pursuit of Excellence in Service of Science™ asserts that the experiential standard must be held to the same level of rigor as the scientific, regulatory, manufacturing, and brand standards that already define the industry.

Not as an aspiration. As an obligation.

If science is governed by evidence, and manufacturing by precision, and compliance by ethics, and brands by trust, then experience must be governed by dignity, empathy, and respect.

This is where The Customer’s Right to Reverence moves from principle to practice. It demands that experiences be designed with the same care as molecules. That journeys be engineered with the same discipline as trials. That interactions be treated with the same seriousness as safety.

This is not about hospitality. It is about humanity. This is what it means to match the rigor of the science with the rigor of the experience.

The Absence That Reveals the Opportunity

There is a reason pharma companies do not appear on lists of the world’s best customer experiences. Not because they lack purpose. Not because they lack intelligence. Not because they lack resources.

They are absent because experience has never been treated as a primary design requirement. It has been treated as a downstream effect. An output. A byproduct.

In a consumer grade world, that is no longer tenable.

Healthcare professionals and patients do not benchmark their experiences against other pharma companies. They benchmark against Amazon, Apple, Emirates, Ritz-Carlton, and the brands that shape their everyday lives. They carry those expectations into the clinic, the hospital, the pharmacy, and the patient journey.

The gap is visible. The opportunity is enormous. This is where provocateurs matter.

Not rebels for the sake of rebellion. Leaders willing to challenge inherited models. Leaders willing to question why experience has remained secondary. Leaders willing to reframe what excellence must mean in a human health context.

The Customer Excellence Agency exists to serve those provocateurs.

The leaders who are not satisfied with incremental improvement. The leaders who recognize that the customer is changing faster than the organization. The leaders who understand that scientific advantage alone is no longer enough. The leaders who are willing to build what does not yet exist.

A Philosophy with a Human Obligation

Advancing Human Health through The Pursuit of Excellence in Service of Science™ is not a slogan. It is a standard.

It is grounded in a deeper moral conviction articulated in The Customer Excellence Enterprise. The Customer’s Right to Reverence.

This principle holds that people do not engage with organizations as transactions. They engage as human beings with lives, pressures, fears, hopes, and responsibilities. In healthcare, those realities are amplified. Behind every prescription, every protocol, every diagnosis is a human story. A patient. A family. A clinician carrying weight.

The Customer’s Right to Reverence asserts that customers deserve to be treated with dignity, empathy, and respect, not because it is good for business, but because it is right. It demands that organizations honor the humanity of the people they serve in how they design journeys, orchestrate interactions, resolve problems, and make decisions.

This is not soft. It is exacting. It raises the standard. It requires organizations to earn trust through behavior, not messaging. To demonstrate care through systems, not slogans. To design experiences that respect time, context, emotion, and consequence.

This is where Customer Excellence becomes more than a commercial discipline. It becomes a moral obligation.

This is about more than performance. It is about stewardship. About honoring the trust placed in science by the people whose lives depend on it. About recognizing that advancing human health is not only a scientific pursuit. It is a human one.

From Lab Excellence to Enterprise Excellence

In a consumer grade future, excellence can no longer be confined to the lab, the trial, or the manufacturing line. It must be lived across the enterprise. Embedded into how organizations think, decide, and show up for the people who rely on their science in service of patients.

The same standards applied to molecules must be applied to moments. The same rigor applied to trials must be applied to touchpoints. The same discipline applied to manufacturing must be applied to experiences.

This is not provocation for its own sake. It is principled challenge in service of progress. It is not excellence as aspiration. It is excellence as habit. This is not science in isolation. It is science delivered through experiences worthy of its promise.

This Is the Purposeful Pursuit

That is Advancing Human Health through The Pursuit of Excellence in Service of Science™.