"When Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla asked his employees to compress years of vaccine development and manufacturing into months, he knew the first reaction would be resistance. Faced with a task that seemed unrealistic, even impossible, teams would do what large organizations often do best: marshal their intelligence to explain why it can't be done. Before Covid, Pfizer produced roughly 200 million vaccine doses a year. At the height of the pandemic, production had to surge to roughly 3 billion doses annually."
"When you ask people to do things that they perceive to be difficult or impossible, the first thing that they do is to use all their brainpower to develop the arguments about why it cannot be made," Bourla told Fortune editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell. Rather than debate feasibility, he reframed the challenge in moral terms. Speed was not a business metric. It was a matter of life and death."
"Bourla lined Pfizer offices with signs that read, "Time is life," a constant reminder that delays carried real human consequences. When leaders warned that a process would take three weeks longer than planned, he asked them to calculate the number of lives lost in that time. He describes the tactic, bluntly, as necessary "emotional blackmail," uncomfortable but effective in forcing teams to stop defending constraints and start focusing on solutions."
Albert Bourla asked employees to compress years of vaccine development and manufacturing into months and anticipated resistance. Pfizer scaled annual vaccine production from roughly 200 million doses to about 3 billion doses during the pandemic. Bourla reframed speed as a moral imperative, saying that delays cost lives and urging leaders to quantify lives lost from schedule slips. Offices displayed signs reading "Time is life" to reinforce urgency. He called the tactic "emotional blackmail," acknowledging discomfort but asserting its necessity to stop defense of constraints and to motivate teams to find rapid solutions. Manufacturing sites then executed extraordinary, unprecedented production efforts.
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