Pfizer Case

DPO-187-E
October 2009
Rev. 10/10
Jordan Cohen at pfizerWorks: Building the Office of the

Future
In late 2005, Pfizer’s then CEO, Henry McKinnell, launched a high-profile global initiative
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called Adapting To Scale (ATS). ATS was aimed at pursuing gains by standardizing processes,
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sharing best practices, centralizing purchasing and otherwise leveraging Pfizer’s sheer size as
the world’s biggest pharmaceutical and healthcare company.
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McKinnell’s launch of ATS had a special impact on Jordan Cohen, a manager in the Pfizer
Pharmaceutical Division’s World Headquarters in New York. Cohen had originally come to
Pfizer in 1996 after having spent seven years in Deloitte Consulting and REL Consultancy,
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and his first job in Pfizer had been in Corporate Human Resources, Quality and
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Organizational Effectiveness. In 2005, as ATS was launched, the 40-year-old Cohen was
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managing an eight-man support team that acted as consultants and effectiveness coaches to
the rest of the organization.
Over the next five years, Cohen would embark on a journey that would lead him to build
pfizerWorks, an innovative and successful employee productivity initiative, and create a new
job for himself in the process. pfizerWorks, in brief, was a web-based one-stop shop that
allowed Pfizer’s employees to become more effective by shifting ‘grunt work’ – like preparing
presentations or compiling data – to external providers from all over the globe.
The front end of pfizerWorks was conceptually simple. When a Pfizer employee needed
something done, he would simply click a button on the Outlook menu and provide a short
description of the task or project he or she was looking for. Within one hour of submitting
the request, the user would receive a phone call to further clarify the project; this ‘scoping
call’ took place directly between the user and the remote team which would be doing the
work. After the call, the remote team would send a full project description to the user,
including proposed deadlines and a price quote (which was negotiable). The entire service was
This case was prepared by Professor Paddy Miller and Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg, Consultant, as the basis for class
discussion rather than to illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of an administrative situation. October 2009.
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DPO-187-E Jordan Cohen at pfizerWorks: Building the Office of the Future
built from scratch by Cohen, who eventually created his own full-time job as Head of
pfizerWorks, and by 2009, he presided over a small New York-based team that formed the
nexus of the operation. By then, pfizerWorks supported approximately 4,000 of Pfizer’s
employees, and was considered a success story both internally and externally. But if getting
pfizerWorks to this stage had been challenging, the next phase would possibly require even
more of Cohen and his team as they would attempt to spread the idea to the rest of Pfizer’s
80,000 global employees.
The Seeds of pfizerWorks
According to Cohen, several factors caused him to start the initiative that would eventually
become pfizerWorks:
“While ATS obviously didn’t specify what we had to do with pfizerWorks, it nonetheless

gave me a clear feeling that we had a mandate to look into all kinds of effectiveness and
improvement opportunities. Secondly, through my job where we effectively worked as an
in-house consulting company, I had a wide-ranging exposure to how work was getting
done at Pfizer – not just in our little corner of the world but in our many different
geographies, functions and divisions. And finally, through conferences, books and other
sources of inspiration, I had a reading knowledge of what was happening outside Pfizer, in
other industries and business areas. These three things in conjunction created the platform
that enabled me to start thinking differently about how we could increase employee
productivity.”
At the time, Cohen was intrigued by Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, a book that
highlighted the possibility of leveraging capabilities available in the global marketplace. This
led Cohen to wonder if something similar was possible in Pfizer – delivering completed tasks
at the highest quality, lowest cost, on-demand, to very busy Pfizer employees from all over
the world. Was there a way of making Pfizer’s employees radically more efficient?
The first incarnation of the idea for pfizerWorks came to Cohen as he was observing his
people and thinking about how to help them do their jobs better.
“At the time, from my office I could see the office of Paul, a very talented MIT graduate
that I had hired out of McKinsey. Paul was a new father, and on a regular basis he would
spend most of his days sitting in meetings. At the end of his day (after hours) he was
typically in his office getting work done and preparing for the next day; the faster he
could complete his tasks the sooner he could get home to his new family. I was a new
father myself as well at that time, so I had a heightened focus on his situation – and I
really felt that it was my responsibility to provide a work environment that would
leverage his core capabilities and enable him to have a healthy life/work balance. Could I
do something to minimize the amount of grunt work that he was doing? Could I increase
the time he spent being really productive, given his great qualifications and his not
negligible salary? That would benefit both him and Pfizer.”
2 IESE Business School-University of Navarra

Jordan Cohen at pfizerWorks: Building the Office of the Future DPO-187-E
Speaking of pfizerWorks, Cohen added:
“The idea was very, very fuzzy to start with. It may seem fairly straightforward in
retrospect – but that is an illusion. At the time, I didn’t really understand what the idea
was – it was more of a general sense that there was something here worth digging into.
But loose as it was, it was enough to get me excited, to make me decide to go beyond my
regular job duties and spend time pursuing this.”
In the Beginning: Framing the Opportunity

As Cohen first started working on the pfizerWorks concept, he knew that before he could
start exploring and scaling potential solutions, he needed a clearer understanding of the
actual problem he was trying to address. At Pfizer, the strategy cascade process was well
established; the strategy was determined by senior management and then cascaded down to

the employees who would develop annual objectives within their well-defined roles. Cohen
added:
“But what if all you have is an idea and a feeling, like I had? We didn’t have any
corporate processes for those. All I had at the beginning was an ill-formed idea that ‘there
was something there’. But I also knew this was an area that I really needed to learn a lot
about if I was to move forward – so I started to organize myself to accelerate my personal

learning, and to get a clearer idea of what we were talking about.”
He dedicated nights and weekends to immersing himself in the areas of innovation,

productivity, global sourcing and business excellence, reading everything he could lay his
hands on (see Exhibit 1 for a partial reading list). Inspired by Keith Ferrazzi’s book Never Eat
Alone, he also started talking to people about the idea, internally and externally:
“One has to be very deliberate about networking and relationship building. And since I
wanted to know more about sourcing new and emerging capabilities in the global market
place, I started calling many of the people that were mentioned in Friedman’s book,
asking them for a meeting. Six of them agreed, and gave me some invaluable advice. I
also tapped into some of my other contacts. For instance, I got a meeting with the COO of
MTV Networks, and got some tremendously useful insights simply by asking him, ‘I have
this idea – what do you think of it?’ Talking to people outside my own industry gave me
some different perspectives on what I was trying to do – which really paid dividends
when I started to move forward with the project.”
Internally, Cohen used his existing network to recruit 12 volunteers within Pfizer and for six
months, as a learning experiment, he tracked how they spent their time. The 12 people had
diverse backgrounds but were, in his words, “people who knew that I cared about them, and
so were willing to commit to me in return and make an effort to help me out with this still
undefined project.”
“At first, we did things in a very low-key way, using the Task function in Microsoft
Outlook. When our volunteers assigned a task to themselves or someone else, they would
enter it into the Outlook Task function and route it to the responsible party (or
IESE Business School-University of Navarra 3

themselves). We then grabbed that data and analyzed it. It was a bit of a blunt instrument,
but it gave us an indication that the idea had potential.”
The Outlook data revealed that people spent a rather large chuck of time on tasks for which
they were hugely overqualified: finding information, preparing presentations, doing basic
data analysis and similar jobs that were not core to their job descriptions and roles. From
this, a clearer problem started to emerge: how could Pfizer support its employees so they
could spend more time on work that really added value?
“I think we did two important things when we developed the idea. One was to start with a
blank page when we tried to solve the problem. We didn’t say, ‘These are our resources –
how can we solve the problem by using them.’ Instead, we said ‘This is the problem –
what would be the best possible way to solve it? What do our people need, and what is
the best way to get it to them?’ This way of exploring the issue got us to think beyond the
limitations of our current tools.

The second thing revolves around what I think of as the unit of analysis. Most department
heads naturally focus on their own department: how do I reach my objectives, while I stay
on budget. Given my background and previous role, I think differently about this; I tend
to look at the individual as the unit of analysis. When the unit of analysis is the
knowledge worker, the individual, the question becomes, how can we help her contribute
more? The idea for pfizerWorks occurred because we went beyond the traditional
department-level perspective and instead placed the individual at the center of our
attention.”
At the end of this process, Cohen and his team decided to move forward with the project. The
next step was to explore who could deliver the services they would need, at the best quality,
the lowest cost and on an on-demand basis. Cohen conducted some tests with external
service providers that were already being used by either Pfizer or other companies, but found
that these pre-existing solutions were not appropriate for his needs; they needed to look
elsewhere.
Finding the Service Providers

One of the first things Cohen realized was that there was no one-size-fits-all solution for the
many tasks that needed to get done in Pfizer. For instance, the job of preparing a good-
looking PowerPoint presentation from a draft was scalable and easy to define, and so could
potentially be done by lower-cost providers in developing nations. Other tasks, such as
scheduling meetings, flights and similar administrative work required someone who was
based in the same time zone as the user. (For this, Cohen eventually chose to cooperate with
an organization of disabled American veterans.) Other tasks again required very specific
knowledge that only existed inside Pfizer; for pfizerWorks to deliver on these tasks, Cohen’s
team would also need a very good understanding of Pfizer’s many business units and the
services they could deliver.
And some tasks were so idiosyncratic that there were no economies of scale to leverage,
leaving the users to fall back on more traditional approaches instead of using pfizerWorks.

Finding suppliers that could deliver what Cohen had imagined proved surprisingly difficult.
Commenting on his search for potential partners in India:
“Many of the potential service providers in India had sales offices in the US, so I first met
with various salespeople in New York – and they all said the same thing: their company
could deliver what I needed, and they were already doing the same thing for other clients.
But to make sure, I decided to go to India and do my own due diligence. On my way
there, I stopped over in London and met up with the controller of a major telecoms
company that one of the potential suppliers had mentioned as a reference. So when we
met, I asked the controller, ‘You partner with this business process outsourcing company
to complete tasks – how is that working?’ He looked quizzically at me and said, ‘No, we
don’t do that.’ I first thought that maybe I had made a mistake when looking at my notes
from the meeting. But it gradually dawned on me that the company’s salespeople had
been a little, shall we say, inaccurate when they told me what they did.

And that was just the beginning. In all of the four companies I visited in India – and these
were high profile, established companies whom others had done due diligence on before –
I found that there was a gap between what I had been told and what they really had
experience with. For instance, one company had produced a sample report that I liked –
but when I dug deeper, I found out that the report had been produced not by a research
team but by a part of the sales team they had in place to attract clients. I would get lots of
information on other projects they had done, but in none of the cases were they actually
doing the kind of work I wanted done. Nobody seemed to have experience in supporting
knowledge workers in the way I was imagining. It simply wasn’t being done by anyone.”
At this point, Cohen was on the verge of abandoning the idea entirely. Before going home,
though, he decided to talk to one of his contacts in the offshoring industry, Joe Sigelman,
co-CEO of the outsourcing company OfficeTiger, to get a better understanding of what was
going on.
“What Joe told me was that when the company salespeople say ‘We do this’, they really
mean ‘We can do this’. I should not think of this as lying. Rather, it is simply aggressive
salesmanship; they really believe that they can do it. It was a problem for me, though. I
knew that we needed a partner we could really trust, and this whole business was not a
good sign. Joe, though, was more open – he freely admitted that his company didn’t do
this, but also said that they were willing to try. I had started our conversation by telling
Joe that he wasn’t allowed to pitch me on the business, and that I was going to go home
and work on a different solution. But because Joe was straightforward and honest with
me, I eventually decided to take a meeting with his salespeople in New York, and they
later won the contract.”
The Pilot Program

As the initiative progressed, Cohen gradually built a small team inside Pfizer to work on
pfizerWorks. To manage the back end of the process (i.e., setting up the processes with the
suppliers), Cohen hired Seth Appel, an external expert who had worked in the Indian off-
shoring industry for several years. To manage the front end of pfizerWorks (i.e., interacting

with the users inside Pfizer), Cohen hired Tanya Carr-Waldron, a Pfizer veteran with 20 years
of experience working ‘in the field’ and dealing directly with Pfizer’s many customers.
Together with his team, Cohen then proceeded to set up a pilot program with OfficeTiger in
early 2006, lasting four months. Cohen described the atmosphere of the first days:
“Later in the process, the workspace at OfficeTiger became a very nice and organized
place – but in the beginning, it was a quick prototype, largely held together with
bubblegum and Band-Aid. I remember how we had our first meeting in this tiny little
room in Chennai, six people jam-packed around a rickety table as I explained them what
the plan was. As I put my hand down for support, the table, which was really just a block
of wood put on top of file cabinets, started tipping over along with the five massive
computer monitors that stood on it. The room was smaller than my current one-man
office in New York; as the program grew, it was turned into a storage closet.”
However, getting the Indian team in place was not sufficient; for the pilot to work, they

needed some people inside Pfizer to send work to them. To jumpstart the demand for
pfizerWorks’ services, Cohen and his team recruited a pilot group of 50 people in Pfizer’s
offices. Tom Dever, a manager in Pfizer and one of the pilot group members, reported on the
experience:
”Basically, I used pfizerWorks because Tanya asked me to do so; before she joined
Jordan’s team, we worked on the same floor and had become good friends. At the time, I
needed to compile some socioeconomic data on a specific customer segment, which was a
massive task – we were looking at a spreadsheet with 80,000 cells that needed to be filled
out. It would probably have taken me several months to get it done; pfizerWorks delivered
it to me in a few weeks, at a very reasonable price compared to other external vendors.
There were some issues that I had to sort out with them – for instance, they hadn’t vetted
the data for duplicate entries – but overall, it was a very positive experience. I have
subsequently used them a lot for a wide range of their services.”
Another pilot user was the senior executive David Kreutter, Vice President of US Commercial
Operations. Kreutter was also part of Cohen’s existing network, and had been closely
involved in the project as an informal advisor to Cohen.
”We had some companies we wanted to do a general business profile summary on, as
potential partnership candidates. I suggested that we use Jordan’s setup to do this, instead
of having the investment banks do it, as was customary. As we had just started with
pfizerWorks, though, the recommendation was not endorsed by the project leaders at
Pfizer, who preferred to leave the task to the investment banks, despite their much higher
cost. But since pfizerWorks were so cheap to use, we decided to try it anyway, and ran the
two searches in parallel. As a result, we could compare pfizerWorks’ output to those of
Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan and similar institutions – and it was very gratifying to Jordan
and me to see that pfizerWorks could deliver the same quality as these famed investment
banks, for a fraction of the cost.”
The initial phase was characterized by trial and error, as the team gradually explored how to
get things done. Cohen commented:

“With the pilot, I basically spent a lot of time apologizing to people, managing
expectations, and asking people to be patient as we tried to fix the problems. As we
launched the first version of pfizerWorks, I already knew that it would not work – but it
allowed us to get started.
In the first period, we were constantly putting a new version out, getting feedback on it,
and then immediately putting the next, slightly improved version out – sometimes on a
daily basis. And at the end of the pilot period, we were getting to a point where people in
the organization started using it for real, and more and more, we saw some fantastic
results come out of the process. One of the driving principles of that period was ‘fail often
and early’ – and that, along with the patience of our pilot group, helped us get things on
track.
It was also a very demanding period for us. I didn’t have a budget for pfizerWorks, simply
because I hadn’t anticipated it and thus hadn’t put it into our plans. So all of this was

theoretically happening in the 20 percent of my time that was dedicated to ‘other’
strategic work. In reality, we spent many nights and weekends making it happen; it could
never have happened without that extra effort. My family didn’t see me a lot in this
period, but I think they were supportive because they could see that it was something I
was really passionate about.”

Getting Buy-in from Above

At the beginning of the process, it wasn’t difficult for Cohen to get the necessary approvals
from above. The project was small and inexpensive, and the ATS initiative had created an
expectation that something should happen. In addition, Cohen’s boss at the time, Robert Orr,
VP of Organizational Effectiveness had attended some of the same seminars that Cohen had;
as a result, Orr also had the feeling that ‘something needed to be done’, quickly approving
Cohen’s suggestions.
As the project moved forward, however, it became necessary to get more formal buy-in and
support, including a budget. In 2006, once the first study had been completed, Cohen
prepared a business case to establish that the project was economically viable. He then
presented it, over the course of two meetings, to a group of people from Pfizer’s leadership,
consisting (among others) of the CFO and the Vice Chairman.
“In the first meeting, as I presented the business case to the Vice Chairman of Pfizer, he
asked ‘who is going to do this?’ I was a bit surprised, and said that I wanted to drive it
personally. He clearly took this as a very positive thing. I later realized that this guy
probably saw hundreds of business cases every month – people coming into his office
saying, ‘someone in Pfizer should do this’, but not putting themselves on the line. I think I
was different because I was so passionate about the idea, and because I so clearly was
ready to put myself on the line to get it done.
He also asked what would happen if my assumptions were wrong. I answered him, well,
then you’ll have to fire some people, first of all me. And you will have to get out of the

contract with the partner. So that would be the downside. Based on the two meetings, we
received a budget that would cover the entire first implementation of the project.”
With that, Cohen had effectively created a new job for himself inside Pfizer, as leader of
pfizerWorks.
From Pilot to Product: New Challenges

As the initiative moved out of the pilot phase, Cohen and his team faced several new
challenges. Seth Appel commented on his work with the back end:
“The product we deliver in pfizerWorks is an innovation in itself, and not just within
Pfizer; where traditional outsourcing replaces people and jobs, pfizerWorks is really a new
kind of support function that allows you to do your job better. But pfizerWorks isn’t

simply one innovation, but rather a combination of several innovations. For instance,
other companies typically engage in what is called ‘Lift and Shift’ – take a unit, move it
abroad, and have it operate independently from the rest of the company. pfizerWorks is
the first example I have seen of a completely front office service provision model, where
people on the front line, all across Pfizer, are invited to engage directly with the research
teams abroad. So it is not just the basic service that is new: the service delivery model we
built to make it happen is also something we had to invent from scratch.”
The same applied to the way pfizerWorks charged for its services:
“Most internal support units in Pfizer send you an aggregated bill once every quarter for
services rendered. In pfizerWorks, we operate on a ‘pay by the drink’ basis, and we
provide the users with a price up front. It makes things very transparent – but because it
is new, it has occasionally generated some confusion among the users. There were – and
are still – a lot of challenges we have to find creative solutions to as we implement the
project.”
On the front-end side, Carr-Waldron spent a lot of time communicating the initiative and
managing the expectations of the expanding user base within Pfizer. This came with its own
set of challenges:
“Our users consistently underestimate how long things take; they will say to me, ‘This job
takes your team ten hours? I could do it myself in two hours.’ In fact, they can’t do it in
two hours – but they think they can, and it is hard to convince them otherwise. So we
typically take a different approach and say, ‘So those two hours, what will they cost you?
What is your time worth per hour? Because our ten hours will probably cost you a tenth
of that’.
There is also a certain sensitivity because people have some negative connotations about
India and outsourcing. People think, ‘Is my job in danger if this grows? Can they do
proper work, or will this be like that time last month when I had a bad experience with a
call center person?’ However, people start to relax once I explain how things work, and
how we also source work from disabled US veterans. And as they try it, they realize that

by taking away the grunt work, we are allowing them to become better and more
productive in their jobs. They realize that pfizerWorks basically gives them back time.”
Another challenge concerned the name of the initiative. Originally, Cohen had called his
project Office Of the Future, or OOF in short – and the name had quickly caught on, to the
point where people started talking about ‘OOF-ing tasks’. However, as his team started to
expand into the rest of Pfizer, Cohen discovered that some people confused his project with
another, similarly named internal project that had gotten a mixed reception. For this reason,
in January 2009, Cohen decided to rebrand his project to pfizerWorks.
Finding the Right Home for pfizerWorks
At the end of 2007, the proof of concept was established, and judging from the reactions of
the employees who used it, the project was a clear success. However, other challenges went

beyond managing the daily operations; one prominent example was the need to find the
right home for pfizerWorks in the organization chart. David Kreutter, who by then had
become one of Cohen’s closest advisors, commented:
“pfizerWorks was originally part of a group called Global Operations, but this was not the
ideal home for the project. Global Operations deals with real estate, facilities management
and similar issues that had little in common with what Jordan was doing. And from a
financial perspective, Jordan’s budget was relatively small for a unit that dealt with near-
billion-dollar budgets, meaning that pfizerWorks would never get the amount of attention
that it needed as a start-up operation.
One option we discussed was the procurement division, whose activities were more
aligned with what Jordan was doing. But I think the relationship would have become
somewhat transactional in nature, focused on cost savings, minimizing expenditure, and
so on – and pfizerWorks, in both Jordan’s and my mind, had a greater potential than that.
pfizerWorks was a strong potential vehicle for driving change and productivity; it
shouldn’t be run as just another cost center. So in the end, in December 2008, Jordan and
I worked together to shift pfizerWorks over to my own business unit, US Commercial
Operations, where we could give it the attention and the resources it required.”
Making the Team Work

When pfizerWorks was started, the team received one or two projects per day. As the project
was scaled up, however, that number rapidly grew, reaching around 400 projects per month
in August 2009 and making increasingly strong demands on Cohen’s team. According to
Carr-Waldron, one of the key factors that allowed the team to meet the demand was the
atmosphere Cohen had established in the team:
“With Jordan, you don’t suffer from death by meeting. He acts quickly. Jordan is great at
saying, ‘Ok, we believe this, let’s go try it out’.

Also, you have the feeling that Jordan always has your back, that he cares for you. For
instance, there was a meeting where I wasn’t present, and where one of our users joked
that I was ‘bugging him all the time’ with pfizerWorks. Jordan immediately told the
person, joke or no joke, that if he had an issue with me, he should take it up with either
Jordan or me, instead of in a group meeting.”
The open atmosphere and Cohen’s belief in giving frequent feedback also allowed the team to
deal successfully with various internal challenges. Cohen explained:
“In the beginning, I was micromanaging everything about the project – and that was one
of the reasons it started to become real. I cared so much about it that I couldn’t help
myself. But at one point, as the project grew, my micromanagement stopped being a good
thing, and started to become an obstacle. I noticed that my people started trying to keep
me out of decisions and meetings.

Eventually, we had some conversations about the issue in the team, and after that, I asked
them to help me keep out of things that I didn’t need to be in on. For instance, I used to
lead our weekly ‘tactical’ meetings, and got involved in everything. Now, the meetings
still happen, but I’m not in them. Instead, with a few exceptions, I only get involved when
it becomes necessary to escalate a decision and take it upstairs. As a project like this one
gets bigger, as a leader, you start being pulled away from the day-to-day activities. But on
some level, I still feel that I need to stay close to make sure that it doesn’t become ‘just
some service’.”
The team also became stronger because the team members made an effort to understand each
other’s areas better. For instance, Seth Appel was included in several sales calls, and Carr-
Waldron went to visit the Indian partners. Carr-Waldron commented:
“Visiting India made me understand Seth’s world a lot better. When you are sitting in New
York as I am, working with the front end, it is deceptively easy to suggest ideas for new
functions in pfizerWorks – ‘Let’s add this service as well, that should be simple to do’. But
once I had seen how the back end works, I realized that things aren’t always as simple as
they seem; there is a lot of complexity that you never see as an end user.”
Challenges Going Ahead

In August 2009, as Cohen looked towards the future, there was little doubt that pfizerWorks
held great potential; it was already an established success story, and had been featured in
BusinessWeek and other business periodicals. Gradually, the nature of the challenge had
shifted: the focus was now on scaling the project, and selling pfizerWorks to the rest of the
80,000 people big organization. And to that end, there were still many unanswered questions.
Kreutter, Cohen’s boss, saw three big challenges for the pfizerWorks initiative:
“First of all, we probably still need to anchor the initiative more solidly in the
organization. Politically, Jordan and pfizerWorks currently have pockets of strong support
in the organization, but they are exactly that – pockets. I’m not sure whether pfizerWorks
would still exist if Jordan and I were to leave tomorrow.

Secondly, I think it is crucial how we present the initiative internally. It is important to

avoid framing pfizerWorks as a cost-saving initiative, because while cost saving is nice, it
is not what really makes people turn their heads in here. As the world’s biggest
pharmaceutical company, we are sometimes operating with very large numbers in our
budgets, and in that context, a million dollars in cost savings doesn’t really merit as much
attention as it should from a rational economic perspective. So in my view, we need to
frame pfizerWorks as a tool to increase productivity and free up time – those benefits are
much more interesting to people in here.
Finally, if this initiative is to make a real and lasting difference in Pfizer, I believe it needs
to be grown aggressively, fundamentally changing the scale of what we do. It is not
enough to scale up as we go along, step by step, mirroring the daily demand. We need to
make a bold plan for where we want to become truly big – what are the core services we
will offer? Is it research, analytical services, or something else? – and then invest
proactively in building a strong capacity in that area.”

Cohen concluded:
“I know that the route to increased impact for Pfizer is to get pfizerWorks in the hands
and desktops of as many employees as possible, as quickly as possible. But the trust
building and expectation setting approach that brought us to the point we are now is very
time consuming. We are still trying to figure out what to do next.”

Exhibit 1
Recommended Reading
Below are some of the books that Cohen was inspired by and recommends:
• Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat. Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2005).
• Seth Godin, Unleashing the Ideavirus. Do You Zoom (2000).
• Tom Peters, Re-Imagine! Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age. DK Publishing

(2003).
• Erich Joachimsthaler, Hidden in Plain Sight: How to Find and Execute Your
Company's Next Big Growth Strategy. Harvard Business School Press (2007).
• Larry Bossidy, Ram Charan and Charles Burck, Execution: The Discipline of Getting

Things Done. Crown Business (2002).
• Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan, Confronting Reality: Doing What Matters to Get
Things Right. Crown Business (2004).
• Traci Entel, Sarah Grayson and Nathan Huttner, The Empathy Engine®, Turning
Customer Service Into a Sustainable Advantage. Katzenbach Partners, 2007. Free

download on www.booz.com/media/uploads/The_Empathy_Engine.pdf.
• Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause

Great Firms to Fail. Harvard Business School Press (1997).
• Keith Ferrazzi and Tahl Raz, Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One
Relationship at a Time. Broadway Business (2005).

Exhibit 2
pfizerWorks timeline
 Q2 2005  2006  Jun 2007  Jan 2008  Jan 2009

• Conducted analysis of • Worked out kinks and • Business case • Signed scaled • Rebranded Office
where Knowledge expanded pilot approved contract with Of The Future to
Worker time was spent  Aug 2007 supplier pfizerWorks
• Contacted interviewees • Hired director of  Sep 2007–Apr 2008  Aug 2009
in Thomas Friedman's operations • Build scale • Launched
book, The World Is Flat  Nov 2007 version of OOF Translation
 Q2–Q3 2005  Hired PMO  Apr 2008 Service
• Researched Supplier manager • Hired Account
market US and x-US  Sep 2007 Director
• Q3 2005  Issued RFP • Launch scaled
• Issued RFP for pilot for scaled version of OOF
• First trip to India to version • Launch
conduct due dilligence Celebration
visits of potential
suppliers
 Dec 2005
• Signed first pilot 2009
contract with OfficeTiger
2008
2007
2006
2005
Source: Company Documents.

13 IESE Business School-University of Navarra You are permitted to view the material on-line and print a copy for your personal use until 3-Oct-2017.

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DPO-187-E

Jordan Cohen at pfizerWorks: Building the Office of the

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Last edited: 11/17/10

The Seeds of pfizerWorks

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2 IESE Business School-University of Navarra

Speaking of pfizerWorks, Cohen added:

In the Beginning: Framing the Opportunity

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about if I was to move forward – so I started to organize myself to accelerate my personal

He dedicated nights and weekends to immersing himself in the areas of innovation,

IESE Business School-University of Navarra 3

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Finding the Service Providers

4 IESE Business School-University of Navarra

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The Pilot Program

IESE Business School-University of Navarra 5

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6 IESE Business School-University of Navarra

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was really passionate about.”

Getting Buy-in from Above

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From Pilot to Product: New Challenges

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built to make it happen is also something we had to invent from scratch.”

8 IESE Business School-University of Navarra

Finding the Right Home for pfizerWorks

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Making the Team Work

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Challenges Going Ahead

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Secondly, I think it is crucial how we present the initiative internally. It is important to

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time consuming. We are still trying to figure out what to do next.”

IESE Business School-University of Navarra 11

• Seth Godin, Unleashing the Ideavirus. Do You Zoom (2000).

• Tom Peters, Re-Imagine! Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age. DK Publishing

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Customer Service Into a Sustainable Advantage. Katzenbach Partners, 2007. Free

• Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause

12 IESE Business School-University of Navarra

DPO-187-E Jordan Cohen at pfizerWorks: Building the Office of the Future

 Q2 2005  2006  Jun 2007  Jan 2008  Jan 2009

Source: Company Documents.

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