[PRACTICE NOTE] A Founder's Story: An Outsider’s Perspective, Earned from the Inside

[PRACTICE NOTE]  An Outsider’s Perspective, Earned from the Inside

REFERENCE: “The Customer Excellence Enterprise: A Playbook for Creating Customers for Life”

Entering Pharma from the Outside

People often ask how I found my way into what many still describe as the impenetrable world of pharma and life sciences, especially coming from outside the industry.

The honest answer is that I entered as an outsider by design.



After building a career across multiple industries, I had reached a point where familiarity was no longer enough. I was drawn to complexity. To stakes that mattered. To environments where intent alone was insufficient and where rigor, responsibility, and consequence defined daily work. Again and again, trusted peers told me the same thing. If customer experience was ever going to be tested at its limits, it would be in pharma and life sciences.

I stepped into the industry not to disrupt from a distance, but to learn from the inside. To bring an outsider’s lens while deeply respecting the expertise, commitment, and scientific rigor of the people already there. That combination became essential. Novel ideas only become viable when they are co-created with those who understand the terrain.

I remain deeply grateful for how openly the industry welcomed that perspective, and for the rigor of the dialogue that followed.

A Career Built in Complex, Human Systems

I did not arrive at Customer Excellence as a theory. I arrived at it as a practitioner and operator inside complex, high-stakes commercial environments.

Over the course of my career, I worked across nearly every dimension of commercial customer experience in industries including retail, hospitality, financial services, entertainment, and technology. Early in my career, serving in U.S. Army Intelligence was one of several formative chapters, shaping a mindset grounded in disciplined analysis, situational awareness, and decision-making under uncertainty. Later, as a Practice Leader at The Ritz-Carlton Leadership Center, I saw how culture, service standards, and intentional experience design can be operationalized at global scale, not as slogans but as systems.

I also built and led an Inc. 500–recognized company, gaining a founder’s perspective on growth, accountability, and the realities of commercial performance. Across these experiences, a consistent truth emerged. Experience is never incidental. It is either deliberately designed or quietly broken.

Choosing Pharma as the Ultimate Test

After years of leading brand, marketing, digital, and customer experience transformation, I chose to explore what many in my network described as the last frontier of customer experience: pharma and life sciences.

That curiosity led me into global leadership roles at Bayer and Pfizer, where I worked inside some of the most complex, regulated, and scientifically rigorous organizations in the world. At Pfizer, my role evolved from Global Customer Experience Lead to Global Customer Excellence Lead as the work moved into the company’s first Global Chief Marketing Organization, intentionally positioning customer excellence closer to commercial leadership, accountability, and performance.

What followed was, quite candidly, a creative renaissance.

Pharma presented some of the most challenging and meaningful commercial and customer problems I had ever encountered. Problems that required new thinking, deep collaboration, and respect for the constraints that define the industry.

Building What Had Not Existed Before

My time inside Bayer and Pfizer was defined by the opportunity to design and deliver first-of-their-kind, highly commercial adaptations of customer experience aligned to a regulated and global healthcare ecosystem.

This work included creating enterprise-wide customer experience strategies, leading omnichannel listening systems across healthcare professionals and field colleagues, applying journey-based thinking, data, and tools to help turn around stalled or underperforming brands, and deploying large-scale field force journey optimization programs. It also meant building bespoke measurement systems that elevated HCP and colleague sentiment into leading indicators of commercial performance.

Equally important, it meant designing learning journeys to create new customer-centric marketer roles, co-designing and embedding customer-centric culture principles into omnichannel operations, and advising the C-suite on corporate customer advocacy strategy.

None of this work happened in isolation. It was built alongside colleagues whose depth of scientific, regulatory, and commercial expertise made true innovation possible.

The Disconnect That Could Not Be Ignored

Across these experiences, I observed a persistent and increasingly costly disconnect.

Pharma companies competed fiercely on brand and product attributes in a global contest across every therapeutic category. Yet unlike other industries, experience was rarely treated as a designed part of the value proposition or the commercial system. Even as new channels multiplied, there was no shared experiential standard guiding how those channels should feel, behave, or work together. The prevailing assumption seemed to be that experience would either follow scientific and brand excellence on its own, could be addressed later as an adjunct, or did not meaningfully influence prescribing decisions at all.

Reality proved otherwise. Interactions became highly variable in quality and too often poor. In the field, friction compounded. Administrative burden intensified. Engagement declined. Trust, once taken for granted, began to erode.

At the same time, I saw something else with clarity. Pharma already knew how to operate to uncompromising standards. The evidentiary standards of science were nonnegotiable. The precision standards of manufacturing were engineered into the system. The trust standards of brands were carefully governed and protected. Yet there was no equivalent experiential standard guiding commercial engagement. Experience was left to chance, interpretation, and fragmented ownership.

The Consumer-Grade Imperative

What became impossible to ignore was a simple statement of fact.

Healthcare professionals were not evaluating these experiences in a pharmaceutical vacuum. As consumers in their other lives, they were being shaped daily by high-expectation experiences from brands such as Apple, Amazon, The Ritz-Carlton, and Emirates. These brands have mastered clarity, respect, and orchestration at scale. Their experiences are seamless and intuitive, deliberately designed around the customer’s reality rather than internal convenience.

Those expectations did not disappear when a white coat went on. They followed healthcare professionals directly into engagement, prescribing, and advocacy decisions.

This reality became what I call pharma’s new Consumer-Grade Imperative. Not an aspiration to copy consumer brands, but a threshold the industry must meet. One that demands experience be designed with the same rigor as science, the same precision as manufacturing, and the same seriousness as brand trust.

Codifying the Insight and Building What Comes Next

That gap became the catalyst for my work.

To articulate what I had seen from the inside and to propose a different path, I wrote The Customer Excellence Enterprise, published by Wiley. The book translates lived experience into a system-level framework for embedding customer centricity into how organizations operate, not just how they communicate. In parallel, I serve as founding faculty in the Master of Science in Customer Experience Management program at Michigan State University’s Broad College of Business, where I bring real-world transformation experience into the classroom and help shape the next generation of customer-centric leaders.

The Customer Excellence Agency is the next evolution of that work. It exists to help pharma and life sciences leaders close the gap between scientific brilliance and experiential credibility, and to build organizations that are as excellent in how they show up as they are in what they discover.

A Closing Note of Gratitude and Purpose

I remain grateful to the pharma and life sciences community for the openness, intellectual rigor, and spirited debate that continue to shape this work. The challenges are real. The stakes are high. The thinking is demanding.

But the shared purpose is clear.

Advancing human health requires not only scientific excellence, but excellence in how that science is delivered, experienced, and trusted. Contributing to that effort, alongside leaders committed to raising the standard, is work I am proud to do.