by Kelly Tzvia Washburn, Managing Editor

Rebecca Cotton is Deputy Director Enterprise Data Warehouse for Bayer HealthCare, North America. Marc recently sat down with Rebecca and asked her about the best coaching and advice she’s received in her professional journey.

When Rebecca arrived at Bayer in 2008, she faced a sprawling network of legacy systems, with 155 different data sets from a dozen internal and external data sources for 15 pharmaceutical brands. Data was running through the legacy reporting system too slowly to give optimal feedback for business-critical decision making.

Rebecca was charged with building a new system to serve all operations for Bayer in North America. Within a few years, not only is the new system, ABBI (A Better Business Intelligence), a huge success, improving the business bottom line, but it won the CIO 100 Award in 2011. (Full disclosure: Marc and his team are proud to have worked with Rebecca and Bayer HealthCare throughout this project.) Among other improvements were comprehensive data integration and quality control, a reduction for data reporting from 10-12 days to two, improved insight into patient usage trends (an important medical and marketing metric), reduction of committed capital by 80% and an approximate $60 million in cost avoidance. All with application of a leading edge, cloud-based, outsourced business model for deploying and delivering service.

“You are Not the Project”

Marc: “What coaching contributed to your success?”

Rebecca: “Well, since you’re asking, I have to start with something you told me [laughs]. When I first arrived at Bayer, and was receiving so many complaints about the data quality and the whole system, I felt personally responsible for resolving them all. In other words, my personal satisfaction and happiness was greatly impacted by these complaints. When you gave me the coaching that ‘You are not the project’ it totally shifted my perspective.

It allowed me some distance. It helped me to manage the project more rationally and less emotionally. Of course, I understood that it was my responsibility to make the project successful. But, in order to do that, I needed to realize that, ‘I am not the project.’ I’m not saying it was always easy to do. But I always try to step back and take an objective view of what can and cannot be accomplished in the time and budget allocated and make decisions from there. And it also puts the emphasis back on the team needed for success, not just individual effort. I know this piece of coaching is from your book 11 Secrets. How did I do explaining it?”

Marc: “That’s perfect. Better than I could have said it myself. I’ve heard you give some advice to others involving an elephant. Would you share it?”

“Get in front of the elephant, because nothing good ever happens behind it.”

Rebecca: “When I was at ImpactRx, Bob Caprara, my boss, used to say “Get in front of the elephant, because nothing good ever happens behind it.” In other words, when something seems large, complex and out of control, jump to the front and start working on it. If you don’t, you’ll be at the back, cleaning up, or worse. For example, I was on one team of a multi-team project. One guy on my team looked at the enormity of the project and hit the panic button from day one. He pushed the pedal all the way to the floor. We, truthfully, thought he was going a bit overboard. Down the road, it turned out he was absolutely right. Because he pushed us all from the beginning, when problems cropped up, as they do, we were ahead of schedule and had a little breathing room to resolve the issues. The other teams were only then starting to go all out, and had a hard time dealing with a curve ball.”

Marc: “What else would you like to pass along?”

“If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.”

Rebecca: “I didn’t hear this directly from the source, but it really spoke to me. General Eric Shinseki, Chief of Staff of the Army, said, ‘If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.’

Especially in today’s workforce, you’re asked to change so often. It’s a natural human desire to want stability. But I need to look at each change that comes down the road and ask, ‘Am I resisting this because it’s really not necessary or just because change is hard?’ I usually look back and see that the change really was necessary. Those of us who are over 30 may want to ignore how 22-year-olds work, and how that is changing the workplace, but that’s not going to stop it from happening. Embracing change is hard, but finding a way to do it is critical.”

Marc: “Thanks, Rebecca, for sharing these three moments of learning with us. I’m sure our community will benefit from putting this advice to work.”
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