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Jeff George: Growth, innovation, quality, people are Alcon’s strategic priorities
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Conner, Schollmaier, Sear, Rayment, Buehler and now George. Six months after the announcement that Jeff George would assume the position of Global Head of Alcon, just the sixth head in almost 70 years, Ocular Surgery News sat down with him in Fort Worth, Texas, to discuss his vision for the company.
George is new to Alcon but has held leadership roles in Novartis, the parent company of Alcon, since 2007. In this interview, George discusses the keys to Alcon’s focus on innovation, outstanding product quality, and unmet patient and customer needs.
Joan-Marie Stiglich, ELS Chief Content Officer
Ocular Surgery News: Please tell the readers how you are going to balance the Alcon tradition with the changes that you can bring.
Jeff George: Alcon has a long-standing tradition of being a pillar within the eye care community for almost 70 years. I intend to bring back a lot of what has made Alcon great over the years in terms of the focus on the customer, and focus on unmet patient and customer needs. That is why, in my first 6 months, I have been on the road to meet with doctors all around the world. The predominant reason is to learn from people who have been in this business a lot longer than I have been. My focus as a leader will be about innovation in partnership and in collaboration with our customers. The best innovations, at least on the surgical and device side, happen in many cases in the operating room, and that is what I have been emphasizing to our R&D team.
OSN spoke with Jeff George, the Global Head of Alcon, about the focus of the company.
Alcon has also benefited historically from its relationship with Nestlé and now Novartis, two big global Swiss companies that have helped Alcon to become a global company. In 2013, our medicines reached 250 million people in more than 180 countries. That sets Alcon apart from a lot of our competitors who have less of a global footprint. I would like to see the strong Fort Worth heritage continue and strengthen over time as well.
OSN: The physician-industry relationship has been under fire the last couple of years. What impact have guidelines and regulations had on the physician-industry relationship?
George: The number of regulation and compliance guardrails that have been put upon us as an industry, or us as a company, as well as the physicians that we work with, has certainly increased over the course of the last 5, 10, 15 years. This does not reduce in any way the importance of the partnership that we have with the physician and surgical community. If anything, it means that we need to be more thoughtful about how we collaborate and in what forms we do that. This can create challenges from a compliance management perspective in terms of more paperwork and more processes that doctors and we, as a company, have to go through, with the well-intentioned objective to maintain the independence of physicians and surgeons from companies that are investing in fields such as ophthalmology. There is an even greater responsibility for us to ensure compliant new ways of working with the physician and surgical community to advance innovation. At Alcon we are deeply committed to innovation. This year, we will spend almost $1 billion on R&D, which you will not see with some of our competitors who talk about cutting back on innovation and how nothing good comes out of R&D. My view is you can cut back for a short period of time but ultimately that will undermine patient innovation and customer innovation in the mid to long term.
OSN: Can you talk about the new segments that you are considering?
George: We are constantly evaluating potential segments that we have a small or no presence in today and looking at what bets we want to make. There is a lot of unmet medical need in everything from dry eye to surgical glaucoma to presbyopia. And hence, there are the multiple bets that we have in the presbyopic correction field from our ReSTOR multifocal technology to our multifocal contact lens technology to the Google partnership, with the goal of developing a truly accommodative or autofocus lens.
OSN: Which of Alcon’s traditional segments — surgical, pharmaceutical and vision care — will get the largest emphasis in the next few years?
George: All three of our franchises are important to our growth. We are seeing the strongest growth right now on the surgical side. We saw 10% growth in constant currency in the third quarter of 2014, which led our growth on the back of a strong Centurion launch, our new phacoemulsification platform. But there has also been good success over the last 3 years with our LenSx launch and femtosecond lasers. If I look at some of the new technologies that we have been rolling out, such as the Verion Image Guided System, this had a great impact on doctors doing astigmatic correction during cataract surgery, so we are seeing a big uplift in intraocular lenses associated with that. The acquisition of WaveTec will also give us access to additional technology to help with the placement and power selection of IOLs. Surgical will continue to be a big growth driver for us.
The pharmaceutical side, though, is still our biggest business, and while we face loss of exclusivity pressure in a couple of our products over the next few years, which is not an insignificant challenge to overcome, at the same time we are doing a lot of lifecycle management from a more incremental innovation perspective as well as some more breakthrough innovation. In particular, we are focused on retina. You have seen Novartis and other companies such as Regeneron and Bayer focus on the wet age-related macular degeneration segment. We have an exciting compound called RTH258, which was part of our ESBATech acquisition in 2009, and we are excited about the prospects for that product when we bring it to market. But it is a couple of years out. Similarly, we are exploring a couple of other areas within the pharmaceutical space.
Also, Alcon is the No. 1 player today in glaucoma, which is a $1.4 billion business, about a 20% market share. We are seeing strong double-digit growth, particularly of our fixed-dose combination products such as Azarga (brinzolamide and timolol maleate ophthalmic suspension) and newer products such as Simbrinza, which is the brinzolamide/brimonidine combination that we launched recently in the U.S. and for which we just got European approval. Our dry eye portfolio with Systane is approaching $0.5 billion in size and is growing 25% for us.
Vision care is an important segment, where we are the No. 2 in contact lenses. We are now neck and neck with Johnson & Johnson in terms of volume and market share in the U.S., although we still have work to do.
What we are doing from an innovation standpoint in contact lenses has been exciting. Dailies Total 1 is a breakthrough technology — the first truly water-gradient premium silicone hydrogel lens. We have launched toric and multifocal lenses as part of our Dailies AquaComfort Plus portfolio as well as Air Optix Aqua, our weekly/monthly silicone hydrogel platform. We also have the No. 1 position in contact lens care solutions, although that has been a business that because of the shift from weekly or monthly to dailies has been declining.
OSN: Can you discuss Alcon’s R&D group?
George: Alcon has a rich history of innovation, most significantly on the surgical equipment side. An example of this is the active fluidics design within our new Centurion phacoemulsification platform, which is geared toward retaining and helping surgeons maintain a better level of intraoperative stability and eye pressure during the phaco process. It uses less phaco, which is ultimately better for the eye. Other examples are our Constellation platform to perform vitreoretinal surgery, our Grieshaber 27-gauge instruments to perform those delicate surgeries as well as Dailies Total 1.
An area we could have done a better job innovating is our intraocular lens portfolio over the past 5 to 10 years. However, I am pleased that we have a great opportunity now. Only recently, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Ophthalmic Devices Advisory Committee recommended approval for AcrySof IQ ReSTOR Multifocal Toric Intraocular Lens for patients undergoing cataract eye surgery who are astigmatic and suffer from presbyopia. The advisory committee agreed by a unanimous vote that the available clinical data demonstrate a favorable benefit-risk profile.
There is also an opportunity to accelerate the pace of innovation within our pharmaceuticals franchise. When you are an $11 billion company like Alcon, it takes a lot of innovation to continue to drive continuous, sustainable growth.
OSN: Discuss the competitive landscape in which Alcon exists.
George: Ultimately, leaders of companies in health care need to decide whether they are going to pursue a model that I essentially call “buy, cut, buy,” in which you buy a company, you cut a lot of the costs out of it, including R&D, and then you buy another company and you cut costs, and then you buy another company, etc. Our model is more geared toward innovation, which is something that I think is a hallmark of Novartis. We stand behind a commitment to address unmet patient and customer needs. That enabled us to drive the performance, growth and reputation of Novartis. A buy, cut, buy model can work in the short to mid term, but the question for me is how much sustainable growth does it create over the long run. You need to invest in research and development in order to generate innovation for patients and customers. My own view is if we do the right thing for our patients and the right thing for our customers and we create a great environment for our associates to thrive, that ultimately will create strong shareholder returns in the end.
I do not want to talk specifically about any competitors, but I can say that we are focused on a commitment to innovation as the engine and catalyst of growth. One needs only to look at who spends 2% or 3% and who spends 8% or 9% on R&D within eye care to have a sense of what model people are pursuing.
OSN: What kind of leader are you?
George: I am a driven, high-energy leader who is inclusive of my team but occasionally impatient because I am always wanting for results to improve even faster. I think people would say that I am authentic. What you see is what you get. People who have worked closely with me would describe me as someone who is tough but at the same time fair, empathetic and caring about what is going on in their life beyond business.
I put a high value on decision-making speed and moving quickly. Sometimes it is important to have structures that allow me to make sure that I am slowing down to step back and reflect. One of the things that I have done for 10 or 11 years is meditate every day, and it is a practice that, before I come into work, slows my mind down and centers me for the day and allows me to be more present with people than I otherwise might be.
OSN: What do you want OSN readers to know about your product innovation plans and their concerns?
George: Having met close to 250 doctors either one-on-one or in a group setting, I would hope they would recognize that Alcon is a company that wants to listen to their feedback and focus on where we can make a difference in ophthalmology together for patients and for customers and that they would see Alcon as a good partner.
While I have not come from inside the ranks of Alcon, I have a deep respect for Alcon’s legacy, its traditions and what it stands for, and I can look back and say that Alcon, growing from a company of $300 million at the time when Kevin Buehler joined in 1984 to $10.5 billion by the time he left, has done a lot of things right. I also want to make sure that we focus on what Alcon is doing well as I look forward to leading Alcon into its next growth phase.
OSN: Any long-term plans you can share?
George: From a strategic priorities perspective, we have oriented the organization to focus on four simple priorities. The first is the acceleration of growth because that is the engine of doing more for patients. My aspiration is to go from serving 250 million patients in 2013 to ultimately a billion patients whom we aspire to reach.
The second priority is innovation. While growth provides great opportunities for associates and returns for our shareholders innovation is the catalyst for our growth. There is a lot we are doing to create, renew and re-energize the culture of innovation within Alcon.
The third priority is productivity and quality: productivity in the sense that we have to constantly look at how to drive continuous improvement and operational excellence to enable us to fund growth and innovation, and quality from the standpoint that it is our commitment to our patients and to our customers, as well as to regulators and governments, to be focused on outstanding product quality.
Lastly, maybe the most intangible but probably the most important priority, is people. What we are doing in terms of energizing the Alcon culture to be even faster, even more global, even more inclusive. All areas have made a lot of progress over the course of the past 5, 10, 15 years, but there are areas that we are looking to accelerate as we focus even more on everyone’s individual leadership journey within Alcon and what you can do to reach your own full potential, culminating in a culture that, over time, becomes a magnet for great talent and for creating, at the end of the day, a winning and inclusive culture.