Posted on Mar 11, 2014

Making A Comeback With Passion + Courage

Most companies consider it an honor to attain a place on the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For. Rankings are based on anonymous employee responses to a survey as well as an evaluation of the company’s policies and culture.

The latest survey included 257 entries, representing 252,000 employees. In order to enter, a firm must be at least 5 years old and have more than 1,000 U.S employees.

Looking at the top 10 winners, Genentech was the one that improved the most since last year. It jumped from #36 to the #6 spot. So I decided to do a little digging and learn more about this company.

A Bit About Genentech

Genentech is a biotechnology company that was founded in 1976. Since 1990, Swiss pharmaceutical giant Hoffmann-La Roche has owned 56% of Genentech’s stock. In 2009, Roche bought all remaining shares for a deal worth $46.8 Billion. That’s a lot of money!

So what makes Genentech worth so much?

From 2004 to 2009, annual revenues for their cancer-fighting drugs rose from $4.6 Billion to $13.7 Billion. Total number of employees soared from 6,100 to 11,000

But possibly most importantly, in 2006 Genentech achieved the #1 spot on the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For. Here’s the comment Fortune attributed to Genentech:

“What’s better than being a valued member of a cancer-fighting team? Having a great time while you’re at work. (It doesn’t hurt that 95% of workers are shareholders – and they’ve benefited handsomely from the soaring stock.)”

It appears everything was going great – until Roche took over.

The Fall and Rise of Genentech

After Roche paid out all that money in 2009, both revenues and employee count remained fairly flat. From 2010 to 2013 sales hovered around $13.5 Billion a year and employee count just over 11,000.

It appears something was stuck.

For some insight into Genentech’s culture, we just have to look at the shift in placement on the Fortune listing of Best Companies to Work For. Genentech plummeted to #19 in 2010, then to #35 in 2011, and then to #68 in 2012.

Ouch!

However, by 2013 something must have changed. Maybe the cultural shifts of becoming part of the Roche empire turned a corner, as its placement on this prestigious listing rose back up to #36. And then in 2014 rising again to the #6 spot. By all accounts, this is very impressive. Even revenues are starting to climb again.

It would seem that Genentech is back on track, under the new cultural umbrella of Roche.

Values: Then and Now

It is difficult to identify the core values that Genentech embraced prior to the 2009 deal with Roche. However, I did find a 2011 MIT presentation by Bill Anderson, SVP of the BioOncology Business Unit at Genentech.

In his presentation, Anderson highlights what he calls “Values: why the people of Genentech to what they do” that he personally observed or uncovered during his time at Genentech (since 2006):

Technical excellence
Fact-based approach
Speaking in plain English
Trusting over your idea to your peers
Keeping communication personal
Dis-ing the trappings
Humility and being wrong
Checking your ego at the door
Hard work
Collaboration and conflict
The true mission of companies… and Genentech
Enforcing the values

That’s a lot. And not necessarily easy to explain to others.

Anderson goes on to suggest that while Genentech did have a statement of competencies (vs. a formal list of core values), they were not clearly articulated throughout the company. Instead, the culture simply evolved through the various decisions made by key leaders, in particular former CEO Arthur Levinson.

The principles that Anderson lists above clearly worked for Genentech, enabling them to experience significant growth and creating an amazing place to work. But once they became 100% part of Roche, with over 85,000 employees worldwide, some things changed.

Now that Genentech is part of Roche, there are only 3 core values. These are clearly articulated throughout all of Roche’s business units.

Passion. We use our drive and commitment to energize, engage and inspire others
Courage. We are entrepreneurial and thus take risks, reach beyond boundaries and experiment.
Integrity. We are consistently open, honest, ethical and genuine.

While just about every business touts the importance of integrity, the other two values – passion and courage – might be the new magic makers for Genentech.

Passion + Courage

There is power in mixing the values of Passion and Courage. They way Roche defines them; employees are to energize, engage and inspire each other to be entrepreneurial and take risks. That’s pretty amazing for such a large company that is fairly conservative by nature.

But for the entrepreneurial folks at Genentech, this might just be the foundation they need to preserve their collaborative culture, promote loyalty; and rebuild a sense of pride in being a great place to work.

Whatever it is, the employees at Genentech must be feeling re-energized, re-engaged, and re-inspired. Achieving the #6 spot on the Best Companies to Work For is a positive sign for a comeback.

It also means the executives at Roche might just see their sizable investment in Genentech begin paying dividends.