All right. Hello, everyone. Mohamed and Yehia here. We're coming from Cairo and we're excited to share our transformation journey with all of you. We just knew from the guys at the BAI that that's the first time a talk is delivered from the Middle East. So we're very much excited to share with you what's happening. Our talk involves the global story of how Roche went through their transformation journey. We're going to share with you how we at the Middle East with specific focus on Egypt, how we made or localized that journey and gave it a Middle Eastern twist. Over to you, Yehia.
Thank you, Mohamed. Good morning, everyone. I'm happy to be here. I'm coming from Cairo and happy to be here and share the exciting story that we have been going through during the past years and looking forward to connect with each other and to learn from each other as well. Before jumping into the journey, let me share maybe a brief around the company we're working in, Roche, and at a glance, some, I would say, facts around it. It's a Swiss-based company. It's a 125 years old company. It's a global leader in pharma and diagnostics, leading in major therapy areas like oncology, neuroscience, and rare diseases. Also it's the biggest pharmaceutical company in terms of R&D investment. Around 20% of our total annual revenues is put back in R&D. Some quick facts. It's around more than 100,000 employees, and we're treating more than 14 million patients. But the most importantly, what drives this company is a very strong and clear purpose, which is doing now what patients need next. This purpose statement actually, that's the reason for our existence. This defines everything we think of and everything we do in our day-to-day jobs and in our day-to-day work. Actually, although we're having this strong purpose, but we've been realizing that not everyone in the organization was truly living and connecting to that purpose. This was an inspiration and one of the main factors to trigger the transformation journey that we have been through during the past years with the aim to not just become a traditional pharma company that delivers medicine, rather than a full patient solutions provider. This is how we see our company.
There are some enablers that enables us to do that. We'll be sharing this in a moment. But when I reflect back three years ago when we started this transformation journey in the Middle East and in Roche Egypt as well, and we were looking for a true partner to have that journey with and to provide us with the external eyes as well. And here came the introduction with Mohamed and the connection we started together. And maybe I'll pass it to him to share more about it. When I was first approached by Roche and by Yehia, that was back right during COVID, and this was three years ago, what really struck my attention was how they were very clear on why they wanted to transform. In the previous two talks, everyone was talking about the purpose behind transformation. For me, I've been working with a lot of different organizations spanning different industries. This was the first time engaging with a pharma company.
And you know, the pharma industry is really notoriously known for being very commercially driven, favoring sales and numbers over value to patients. For me, they first told me that our purpose, that's our destination, we want to truly live that purpose. They didn't tell me we want to scale agile, we want safe, or we want scrum, or we want Spotify. This was not the discussion at all. It was simply, we want to truly live that purpose, and we want your help on how can we transform and how can we navigate that journey towards that purpose. And for me, that was very crucial in making that journey a possibility. Okay. Yeah. There are four crucial enablers that we saw, they made that journey a possibility. When we talk about purpose, when we talk about being really a patient- centric company, there are four key enablers. The first one is Roche Ownership setup. We talk a lot about leadership and executive alignment with transformation and with agility, but it goes actually beyond that. It goes to the shareholders and the business owners of the company. Although Roche is one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world, their founding family, Hoffman La Roche, still holds the majority of shares. The commitment of that family to their purpose made that journey possible and provided the momentum across Roche group and across all divisions of Roche on a global scale. And that really made the difference. That was one of the key enablers that made that journey possible.
The second enabler was Roche as a group, they had different divisions providing solutions and value across the whole value chain of a patient. Imagine there is disease prevention, there is diagnosis, there is treatment, and there is post-treatment solutions. And Roche holds divisions that can deliver value across the whole value chain. And that also was a very crucial enabler because if you can provide value across the end-to-end value chain, you can influence that whole value chain to achieve the best outcomes for your patients or the best outcomes for your customer. So the ability to influence that end-to- end value chain was also very crucial. Another important enabler we see that enabled the journey is the commitment to R&D and innovation. I think this is one of the main company attributes, the commitment to innovation and commitment to R&D. So we don't do, I would say, generic business or copying innovation, but we're very much committed to this. And this is obvious when we see the company as the top pharma company in investing in R&D expenditures, one of the top 10 in all companies across different industries compared to even tech companies. Even when we see, WHO, for example, list of essential medicines, Roche has 32 essential medicines or breakthrough therapies in the history of, I would say, of the medicines.
Last enabler is our market leadership. I think the company had a good, strong market leadership position in lots of therapy areas like oncology and neuroscience. That also enabled the company to utilize that leadership position in partnering with the stakeholders in shaping the healthcare ecosystem into, I would say, the future. Those were some of the enablers that enabled us to spark and achieve that journey.
The next piece that we want to focus on is how did we create a narrative around the purpose? When we say we want the purpose to be at the heart of everything that you do, we want you to think about the patient. The patient is why you exist. We started with creating that narrative about the purpose, and that led us to create the term, Triple Win. Triple Win refers to, okay, so we want to provide value for patients. We want to always provide value for patients, which means the patient experience going through those different stages, we want to improve it, and we want to improve the overall health outcomes for our patients. The second part is value for the health ecosystem or for the health system itself. We want to help that health system be more sustainable, allocate budgets more efficiently, and be able to provide more value to patients as well. And the third element, value to Roche. We're still running a business. It's not a charity organization yet. When we say value for Roche, what we think of is we want to sustain our ability to create value for patients. That requires bringing value to Roche so that Roche invests more in R&D, which in turn bring more innovation and more value to patients as well. So that Triple Win term played a big role in that shift and that narrative about the purpose. The other point was how to bring that into life. So how to bring that good, nice narrative into life.
I would love to borrow what John has been saying in the then inspiring previous session on the Compass. So that was the compass for us as an organization and for our teams. Two bold decisions that had been taken, and this was an earthquake for lots of people in the organization, what is happening here? One was moving from having brand objectives and sales targets into having therapy area outcomes and removing sales targets. So that was a big move. The other one was moving from having... We were reimagining the operator model that we were having. So we're having product specialists that are experts in sales and marketing and pushing and promoting medicines and push selling. And we moved away into new roles that are patient journey partners, health system partners. Those are totally new roles with a different capability profile. We call them job-agnostic roles. So they need to have capabilities from access, medical, commercial, and definitely customer experience. So new capabilities have been arising. And those roles are actually solving pain points in the patient journey across the full spectrum that Mohamed was mentioning from prevention until the follow up. And that was a big thing. That was a big thing. We're actually still on the journey, still learning.
Still, I would say, that operating model is evolving. So the evolution is happening. Yeah, that's it. Imagine you're a salesperson and you wake up in the morning and your company sales says, "There are no sales targets anymore," and your job actually is not to sell a product anymore. Your job is to create value and to partner with stakeholders to create value. Your job, you're called the patient journey partner. You're not a salesperson anymore. The second piece to that was what we work towards. What are the goals? What are our strategy? What are we trying to achieve? That's where outcomes played a huge role in that narrative. The difference between having a financial goal or a target when we say we want to achieve X number of sales in that product by the end of the year. An outcome on the other side, it describes the actual value that is realized on the patient side or on your customer side as a result of you delivering a solution or delivering an initiative or a product or whatever you're delivering. The outcome describes that value that is realized in terms of the change or the shift that you've done in the lives of the patients or in the lives of your customers. If you look at the slide, we are contrasting the sales targets on the left side, and then there is the outcomes on the right side, like improve the quality of life of 2,000 breast cancer patients in the public market. So look at that outcome. In that outcome, if you really want to improve the lives of 2,000 patients, then you need to provide solutions that will help you achieve that outcome. And part of that solution, by the way, is some of your own medicines and your own products. But you're not working towards just the sales part because historically, pharma companies, they have a sales target. They don't care about whether patients actually accessed the right treatment or not. For us, we have a sales target. If we've achieved that target, then we couldn't care less about what happens afterwards. And whether those medicines were utilized by the public health care ecosystem or not, whether they expired. But here, the outcome was not to sell. The outcome was the actual value for the patient.
Another example was patients are able to adhere to the treatment for a specific indication. We really wanted our teams to work towards those outcomes. We want patients to adhere to the right treatment. Adhering to the right treatment, for example, means that you need to work with doctors about treatment solutions, about diagnosis solutions, which, by the way, will not only help Roche, but it will help other players in the market as well, because you're not the only medicine provider. So your aim here is not to acquire the biggest market share. Your aim is to actually focus on the value created to your patients and have that abundance mindset, which is we want to create value for the patient, and we want to collaborate with everyone in that healthcare ecosystem to provide that value. I think here also the signals. We're not here measuring sales and market share, but we're measuring value signals. So value around improving patient outcomes, patient experience, what pain points are we solving in the patient journey, patient outcomes, how we're improving survival, quality of life, and things that really value measures that speaks to our purpose and vision. Let me fast forward. I'll be moving because of the time. They warned us that they will kick us out of the stage. Okay. Getting back to the journey and how we envisioned that transformation journey in Egypt specifically. Again, like you've heard in the previous two talks, for us, transformation boiled down to behavioral change.
We started to think, okay, so what are the behaviors we want to see in that affiliate, in that company? What are the behaviors that we want to observe in our people? We started to describe those behaviors in outcome statements. For us, there were outcomes that we called mid-term outcomes, like we imagined a year from now or two years from now, what do we want to observe or what do we want to see? And that was a bigger outcome. Then those bigger outcomes or mid-term outcomes were broken down into short-term outcomes. A short-term outcome, what's the behavior or a shift that I want to observe that can be achieved in the next 3-6 months? And that was the short-term view. In order to drive those outcomes on ground, we thought of a holistic and a systemic approach to change. How do you drive large- scale behavioral change? You need to work on people's mindset, mental models, and beliefs, and you need to work on the environment or the ecosystem that they live in. And for us, we came up with those six pillars. For every behavioral change, we needed to work with leadership. Our leaders needed to role model, to endorse, to recognize, and to develop their capabilities to drive that change.
Our strategy, our measures of success, our people's practices, our HR practices, our rewards, recognition, performance management, our ways of work. How does our ways of work support that change? Our structure, our rules, our processes and tools, our people, of course, their mindset, their beliefs, their capabilities. Lastly, our supporting functions like finance, admin, compliance, how can they join forces and how can they actually accelerate and catalyze that change as well? If I share an example around that, so applying also the outcome-based planning, which is the planning framework that we're utilizing here. And when we imagined, if we want to amplify the purpose that we are having in our organization, so this will not happen without people being fulfilled and they feel fulfilled with their own personal purpose. So we started to imagine and describe what would be an outcome, a mid-term outcome that we want to see. He would describe people as people are intrinsically motivated and they contribute to a purpose that fulfills them. This is how we want to see people. We started to break that down into shorter-term outcomes to work on a 90-day cycle, or it's three, four months. Some of those shorter outcomes were about, first, we need to see people, they are able to lend their own personal purpose with the purpose of the company. So that's an outcome we want to see. We want to see people that are recognized and appreciated for their contributions that you're doing, however how different they are. And then we want to see people learning and taking active steps towards learning, and learning that is matched with their inspirations and needs and purpose.
Then we started to create delivery business and experiments and outputs across the full organizational ecosystem that Mohamed was mentioning. Some examples here, when we started around people, so we have done workshops for self exploration workshops where people identified their values, motivators, and personal purpose statements, and then connected that with the company purpose. Then we have put that into a tool like a learning journal tool, and that's where you try to match the development, whatever development plan that you want to link with that profile. For leadership, for example, leadership will role model in first that personal profiles around their values, needs, and personal purpose statements, and how they are fulfilling those personal purpose statements in the roles. Also, leaders were taking actions in moving people within roles that does not match their purpose. We had very good examples around people moving from roles that they cannot connect to and they cannot fulfill their purpose in, into other roles. And that was really magical. Also, we had education for leaders how to coach your teams and your people, how to enable, how to wear the coach hat and coach people in that. That's for leadership.
And I think time is running. Yeah, time has run out. We thank you all. We have a lot to share, we know. It was very hard to squeeze our message in the 18-minute window, but we're happy to be here. Those two days to answer more questions and to share with you more details about what we've done. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.