Novo Nordisk CEL

Analysis of Novo Nordisk during fall-term of CEL.

Notes on Presentation

Strategy Perspective

Leadership Perspective

Finance Perspective

Speaker Event Analysis

How do you balance profit and purpose?

What happened here is, Novo focused too much on profit, creating political enemies and harming patients.

What happened was, governments then stepped in, they took their patent, forced competitors to then create them, making Novo lose their market share to the black market.

Profit focus will create political enemies, purpose is sustainable.

To this, let’s look at a basic example. If you seek to maximize profit, you will find a way to limit supply, maximize profit, and maximize cost. But this would incur the wrath of the iron fist of the state. Thus there is a balance, we need to take into account our purpose, and generally staying true to that purpose is sustainable.

Geo-political impacts

Canada has many mechanisms to discipline price for medications or drugs, but not many to actually increase supply. Canada hosts 2% of the worlds pharma industry, that is not a lot. In addition, Canada is very bad at innovating or manufacturing patented protected drugs. We are very good at manufacturing Generic Drugs!

Big debate on Stakeholder Capitalism

Notes to Take

  • The Messy but Essential Pursuit of Purpose - HBR
  • Grow the Pie: Alex Edmans
  • Ed Freeman - What is stakeholder Theory?