Shoot for the Stars and You’ll Get to the Moon

Each of us has the power to make a difference through our actions as employees, consumers, parents, and members of our communities. How do we make a difference? How do we contribute and create sustainable value for all our stakeholders? What I’ve learned on this journey is that each of us has choices to make in order to balance our personal and professional lives; oftentimes, the two intersect.

In my career, I’ve chosen to work for companies that have missions that add value to communities. I look for companies that are going to make a difference in the world and ignite transformational change, particularly in the health care sector. That’s why I’m so proud to serve as the Executive Sponsor of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) at Alexion. Our mission as a biotech pharma company is to bring hope to the global community living with rare diseases. Our CSR platform dovetails with that mission by ensuring we create value for all our stakeholders through our decisions, from patients to their caregivers and health care providers to our community and collaborators.

By approaching the development of our CSR strategy through a lens of sustainable business operations and shared value, we believe we’ve established a program focused on long-term solutions instead of short-term fixes. Now, Alexion’s CSR platform is the foundation upon which we do business. The choices we make as a corporate citizen matter and they are reflected in four pillars:

Serve Communities and Sustain Our Planet: We invest in our communities and shared planet in support of those who depend on us today and for the generations that follow.

Transform Patient Lives: We urgently seek to understand patient journeys, find answers, and collaborate to deliver access to therapies that change lives.

Advance Our People and Our Company: We aspire to become the most rewarding company to work for, embracing belonging, and governing and managing our business to return value to our stakeholders.

Redefine What It Means to Live With a Rare Disease: We pioneered complement biology, spurring new treatments for devastating disorders. We work to advance health care through innovative diagnostics and proactive transparency.

At the core of these focus areas is an unwavering commitment to ethics and compliance. We act with integrity in all that we do as an organization. What’s also important to me is that this program is not a bolt-on to others, but rather a framework that truly defines how we approach the business decisions we make as an organization.

Five, ten, twenty years ago, we knew so much less about rare disease blood disorders such as myasthenia gravis (MG) and paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria (PNH). Today, because of an unwavering commitment to transforming patients’ lives, all of us at Alexion seek to understand patient journeys, find answers, and collaborate to deliver access to therapies that change lives for the better. That’s CSR in action. I’m reminded of a saying my mother had, inspired by Oscar Wilde: “Shoot for the stars and you’ll get to the moon.” Dream big—set big goals and work towards achieving them.  Our CSR program will enable us to get to the moon and maybe even a bit farther one day.

This is a pivotal year for our CSR platform. We spent 2018 defining it, building it, and getting ready for this moment! As Alex Schuman, our head of CSR, says, “2018 was about getting to the starting line. 2019 is the year the flag drops and we go!” I’m proud of this moment and Alexion’s progress on such critical work.