Brian McNamara

Well, let me see if I can make that succinct. It’s quite a long journey to get here, but maybe I start with how I started my career. So, I started at Procter and Gamble and supply chain. I was an electrical engineer undergrad, and I went right into manufacturing management. I did various roles there for about nine years and decided to then make the move to marketing at P&G. I remember it was a big decision at the time, because it was a two-level demotion to become an assistant brand manager and start from the bottom and work my way up. But I was convinced that I wanted to be on the strategic kind of growth side of the business.

And then eventually, after another eight years or so, I decided to leave P&G and joined Novartis. So, in 2004, I became the head of the North American business at Novartis, and over the next 11 years, I was president of Europe and President of the Americas, and ultimately the division CEO for the OTC business. That was the business that did a joint venture with GSK. So we created a joint venture between GSK and Novartis, and I joined to work for Emma Walmsley to be the head of Europe and Americas. And then a year and a half later, Emma got promoted to become the CEO of GSK Group, and I took over as CEO of that joint venture. Eventually, we bought our way out of that joint venture and got into another joint venture with Pfizer, and ultimately that business became Haleon, and we listed as an independent company in July of 2022. And it’s been a fantastic journey since three and a half years in.

I think it’s really critical. It’s probably one of the things about integrations that people underestimate, and it’s probably the biggest challenge you have. So, you know, having gone through two integrations, on one end I was being acquired and decided to join the company and led the integration, the other one, I was part of the acquirer in the Pfizer deal. But in each case, we sat down and we looked at both cultures of the organisation and we the way we did that is we surveyed the top two levels of leadership and other people in both companies to try to understand and put a framework around culture, like: “What is culture? It’s about how decisions are made, how centralised versus decentralised are you as a company. How much are you consensus driven versus top down driven.”

There’s lots of elements that we looked at. We looked at that and we had a very, very clear plan on what culture do we want the company to be. And then we had to be very intentional about driving the new culture and forgetting about the two old cultures, because I think people also run the mistake of trying to integrate one culture into another culture, as opposed to taking a fresh look and saying, you know, what is the culture we want to create with this opportunity we have in front of us.