PPD (Thermo Fisher Scientific)

So it is the birthplace of the CRO industry, at least the modern CRO industry.

When Dennis Gillings founded Quintiles, Fred Eshelman founding PPD.

So we have a real history in CRO, and it's very evident in the workforce in our community.

In manufacturing, we currently have 34,000 people working in biomanufacturing across the state.

It's an ode to an episode we did with Tony Burkhardt over at Pfizer Center One, where we ask you, who do we interview next? Who is a leader, someone either inside your organization, outside of it, someone who is doing meaningful work that the Activating Greatness audience can learn from?

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of great leaders out there, but one of my mentors and really where I learned a lot about the development of scoreboards and the scorecards and managing teams towards that is Mike Kleppinger, who's the chief commercial officer at, uh, at, uh, Fisher, um, PPD, um, Thermo Fisher, PPD.

So, uh, he's, uh, yeah, I, I worked for him for years, um, at, uh, at another CRO and, and he was just the architect of, of this, a lot of what we talked about today, right? How do we develop a scoreboard, um, How do you develop the, you know, and be able to show that pathway to success with data? So to get people to really see what they need to do and buy into what they need to do in order to get there.

I learned a lot from him.

So, yeah, he would be a great guest.

And he's he's done some amazing work right now at Fisher PPD.

Yeah, that's awesome.

I love sending the little clip and the quote specifically to each of the nominees.

You know, what I wanted to get started was you have had quite a journey in driving AI and digital transformation.

So prior to you coming to PPD, give me a little bit of your background and kind of that journey and some key takeaways before we explore what you're doing currently.

My journey through healthcare and AI has been very interesting and a fascinating journey by itself.

Not all of it planned as most interesting journeys are.