Editors’ Note

Prior to joining Pfizer in April 2001, Robert Mallett served as Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Commerce, where he oversaw the administrative and policy operations of a number of key federal agencies. By appointment of the President, he served on the board of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation and was a member of the federal Steel Loan Guarantee Board. Prior to his federal executive service, Mallett was a shareholder and associate attorney of major Washington, DC-based law firms. He has also served as City Administrator and Deputy Mayor for the District of Columbia and legal counsel to former U.S. Senator Lloyd Bentsen. He was an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University’s Law Center and a Visiting Professor at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Among his numerous professional affiliations, Mallett is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, an elected Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, and Chairman of the International Trachoma Initiative and was Chairman of the U.S.-South Africa Business Council.

Company Brief

New York-based Pfizer Inc. (www.pfizer.com) became the world’s largest pharmaceutical enterprise in 1999, just before its acquisition of Warner-Lambert Company in 2000. In 2003, Pfizer acquired Pharmacia. The company markets or copromotes various prescription drugs including; Celebrex, Chantix, Lipitor, Norvasc, Neurontin, Sutent, Viagra, Xalatan, and Zithromax. With more than 86,000 employees on six continents and 33 major products in 10 therapeutic areas, Pfizer is also one of the world’s largest developers and marketers of vaccines and medicines for livestock and companion animals.

How important are corporate responsibility and community involvement to the culture of Pfizer?

Corporate responsibility is the coin of the realm in multinational corporations today. Stakeholder engagement, community involvement, and customers’ opinions are critical to business success. No company today – whether it’s a business-to-business company or a consumer-driven company – can afford not to understand the criticality of corporate responsibility to its business operations. We are certainly committed to it at Pfizer.

With so much need out there, how do you focus your corporate resources for the greatest impact?

No one company has the monopoly on its capacity to make community engagement contributions. We’re certainly one company that is signed on, fired up, and ready to go in this space. Given our size, our scale, our expertise, our presence in so many countries around the world, and our relationships with key stakeholders and policy makers, we can actually make a very positive contribution to society, well beyond the most fundamental contribution we make, which is developing innovative medicines.

We want to invest fully through what I have termed here at Pfizer “a full asset model for engagement.” That is, deploying the company’s resources – which are its people and their skills and expertise – so that we don’t give just money and medicine as part of our philanthropy. For instance, in the past four years we’ve deployed about 155 Global Health Fellows, working in some 29 different local partner organizations in 31 countries around the world. This fits in any part of the world, whether you’re in a developing country or the United States or Japan.

We try to coordinate our activities and our investments in health in four different ways. We call it Teach, Treat, Build, and Serve. Teach involves patient education and health care worker training, while Treat looks at disease prevention programs and different treatment options. Through Build we are trying to strengthen the capacity of health care systems and organizations. Serve involves advocacy and sharing best practices to improve health care. The idea is to operate on multiple levels, and we try to do that.

When it comes to corporate responsibility programs, how important is it to have metrics to gauge results and impact?

Although traditional metrics may not always be appropriate, this is still one of my pet peeves. First, in the space in which I live at Pfizer, metrics are critically important. Any program that we’re involved in, that we sponsor, needs to have very clear objectives and clear measures of achievement. It’s also critical to have a third-party validator to look at what we say we’re doing and then tell us how well we’re doing. So it’s very critical to measure everything we do, including our philanthropic efforts, to see whether we achieve what we say we’re going to achieve.

Does it ever frustrate you that the message about all the good Pfizer is doing doesn’t seem to get across to the public?

I’m not sure I get quite as frustrated about that as I use to. I now understand that people don’t congratulate you on the things they think you ought to do. The pharmaceutical industry is simply held to a higher standard than perhaps other sectors. What I get frustrated about is that we have the capacity to do so much more with partners. If we could just link arms a little better, do a little better planning, and give each other the benefit of the doubt, the impact that we could have could grow exponentially. I get frustrated about that. But like anything else, these things grow – they evolve, they change. I think this area is growing and is becoming increasingly more important to companies. Senior leaders are understanding CR’s impact and its potential.

What are some of the key areas of focus for Pfizer for the coming years?

The first and most enduring focus is discovering and developing innovative cures for treatment. It’s the most important contribution that we can make to society, and we’re committed to it. Second, it seems to me that to do our core business well, and to do so many other components of our business well, stakeholder engagement is essential. So we need to talk to people so that we understand what their needs are. Third, we will continue to invest in health, and I mean “invest” in the broadest possible way. Going back to our Teach, Treat, Build, and Serve platform I mentioned earlier, we want to expand access to quality treatments, expand people’s access to the health care system in general. And here’s a big, big, big, big, important corporate responsibility item: strengthening patient safety. As a company, safety is first – and that’s “safety” in its broadest sense too. I mean product safety and also the health and safety of our own employees. Finally, we will continue to make Pfizer a leading company when it comes to reducing the impact on our environment. Fortunately, ours is a relatively clean industry. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t things we can do to keep improving.