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Business is an unlikely hero: a force for good working to solve society's most pressing challenges, while boosting bottom line. This is social purpose at work. And it's a dynamic journey. Purpose 360 is a masterclass in unlocking the power of social purpose to ignite business and social impact. Host Carol Cone brings decades of social impact expertise and a 360-degree view of integrating social purpose into an organization into unfiltered conversations that illuminate today's big challenges and bigger ideas.
Carol Cone:
I'm Carol Cone, and welcome to Purpose 360, the podcast that unlocks the power of purpose to ignite business and social impact.
Today is an amazing, intriguing conversation with Jim Greffet, head of ESG at Eli Lilly, one of the world's foremost pharmaceutical companies. I want to start with an intriguing headline that ran recently in the Wall Street Journal. It was an article stating why Eli Lilly deserves to unseat Tesla among the magnificent seven technology firms that are at the top of market returns today.
So how does 148 year old company deliver on such innovation? Well, we're going to learn a lot with our conversation with Jim Greffet, but he's not going to talk about their drug portfolio. He's going to talk about the company's culture and the company's long-term view that ESG issues are critical to the resilience and growth of the $578 billion market cap company, with over 41,000 employees, with its products reaching more than 100 countries around the globe.
Together in our conversation, we'll dive into Lilly's approach to its formula for success, living deeply into their three key values established decades ago, integrity, excellence, and respect for people. So welcome to the show, Jim.
James Greffet:
Carol, thanks for having me. I've been looking forward to this.
Carol Cone:
Me too. And I have to tell my listeners how I met Jim. So we were at this fabulous Fortune Purpose Conference in Atlanta, and we just, I went, "Oh my god." Eli Lilly were so much on the news for so many of your great medicines. And we just started chatting, and then I invited Jim to join me at my dinner table and we became fast friends.
So we always love to start with your general background, and why do you do the work that you do?
James Greffet:
Yeah, it's a great question. And our dinner at the conference was the highlight for me, too. So you had me at hello to come on a podcast. So, I'm an accountant by training and I'd spent the majority of my career working in finance, in accounting type jobs, including investor relations. So I had some experience talking with outside stakeholders. So about four years ago, our CEO, seeing how much more important these environmental, social, governance, sustainability topics were becoming to our stakeholders, especially our investors. He asked a group to see if Lilly was contemporary with what our stakeholders expect of us.
One of the outcomes of that research was we need a job that focuses on this stuff. And by the way, we're an old company, so creating brand new jobs, doing brand new things, doesn't happen that often. But in this case, we created my job as the central point of contact. I worked throughout Lilly, these topics touch almost every function in the company, and I spent a lot of time talking with our external stakeholders. So it was that investor relations experience, having spoken with outside stakeholders, that got me on the radar.
Carol Cone:
There you go.
James Greffet:
But in my own mind I thought, "You know what? I don't know what this stuff is. It sounds kind of fluffy, and I'm not really thrilled about this new assignment." So I went into it, honestly, pretty reluctantly." There's an old Garth Brooks song...
Carol Cone:
The reluctant head of ESG, we're going to call you.
James Greffet:
There's a Garth Brook song called Thank God for Unanswered Prayers. And I reflect on that quite a bit, that after almost four years now in the role, this has been the most interesting, the most rewarding, the most stimulating job I've had in my 23 years at the company. So I couldn't be happier to be doing this work.
Carol Cone:
So now that you have this incredible role, and you've really acclimated to it after four years, so when you wake up in the morning, you go, "I'm so excited to go to work," to do what? What kind of an average day look like?
James Greffet:
A thoughtful question. Maybe let's start first with why Lilly focuses on these topics at all. We make medicine. The formal phrase is, "We unite caring with discovery to create medicines that make life better for people." And so when I get up in the morning, that, first thing, is a noble good cause for humankind. So how can you not be excited or grateful to be working in that environment?
But then to focus on our sustainability efforts. Everything we do with sustainability, we can tie directly to our purpose of making medicines. When you are thinking in long-term horizons to make medicine, you have to play the long game in everything you do, which is also at the heart of sustainability. So that maybe to give the foundational answer.
Then what I do, as I mentioned before, these things touch almost every function in the company. So a lot of my effort is working across functions, manufacturing, HR, DEI, even my friendly colleagues in finance, to understand what they're doing and perform a synthesis, consolidation, integration role.
Then the other part of my day is similar to what we're doing here, telling the outside world about the good work we're doing, either investors, employees, future employees. I presented to a strategy class at a local university last week about what we're doing. So a lot of it is taking what we're learning inside and bringing that out.
Carol Cone:
So I'm really curious, because how did someone who's got an accounting background, I understand the investor relations part, but how did you... Did you develop them? Are those just characteristics and capabilities you've had because you're Jim?
James Greffet:
Well, you're very thoughtful there. I'd say it's a couple of things. One, the culture at Lilly. We were founded by Colonel Eli Lilly in Indianapolis, Indiana. He was a Civil War veteran, and members of the Lilly family ran the company for decades in its initial years. And they established a really strong foundation. Our values are integrity, excellence, and respect for people.
And if you walk the halls of Lilly and ask people that, you'll get the answer. And it's not because we force new employees to memorize it. It's because it's really prevailing in your word and the ethos of the company.
Carol Cone:
Oh, by the way, and almost congratulations on your 150th, that's going to be 2026, right?
James Greffet:
That's right. Yeah. Big celebration.
Carol Cone:
I bet. Big celebration. And I love the fact, I didn't know that you were one of the few pharmaceuticals that hasn't had a mega merger, because we represent some others. And yes, the mega merger does have cultures, who's going to win, what values, et cetera.
So let's talk about your purpose statement, which we love, "To create medicines that make life better."
James Greffet:
Let's start with how we thought about our sustainability strategy, to begin with. We started with that purpose. We make medicine. We identified 15 topics that we focus on in sustainability, and we can draw all of those to the overarching goal we have here of making medicines. Take care of the planet, take care of our employees, be a good member of the community, operate with ethics, work to get our medicines into the hands of patients that need them, and so on.
So the decision-making part of it, it's grounded in that there aren't distractions or extracurriculars or things that we're thinking about in sustainability that we wouldn't otherwise be doing to run the company. This is a reflection of how we do what we do, I think I had mentioned. So that makes it easier, so to speak, that this is how the company is operating every day.
And when you have that as the overarching approach or umbrella, then it's the lens that you sort of look at any decision through. You're not making a different decision, or hopefully, occasionally, maybe it happened where you have tension in things. And I can give you an example if you like, but generally, we're running the company in such a way that the sustainability foundation under it.
Carol Cone:
That's incredibly powerful. I would just love to talk about your role in diabetes. I mean, you have a significant role, and I have to give you a lot of kudos about, I believe you preceded the Biden administration's mandate for $35 per dose.
James Greffet:
We did. We did. And actually $35 insulin, it goes back even into COVID days. And then we worked with the government to expand that, such that now anybody, whether you have insurance, whether you don't have insurance, Medicare and Medicaid, you can get your full month worth of Lilly insulin, regardless of how much that might be, for $30 out of pocket to the patient. Keep in mind, that a lot of patients with insurance coverage paid much less than that, but you're correct.
Carol Cone:
And of course, access to medicines and affordability is one of those core material issues for you. I'd love to hear, if you have a story at all, about that... Living that value, basically, and how it came to life, if you could share one with me.
James Greffet:
What we focus on is the cost to the patient at the pharmacy counter. There are so many other complicating factors on list price, and rebates, and net price, and PBMs, and many other players. If I have disease, I want to have a medicine that makes me feel better. I want to be able to go to the pharmacy and get it and be able to afford it. So that's where we focus, and that was our effort on the $35 insulin.
We also invest a tremendous amount in Lilly Cares, which is a separate foundation, but the Lilly Care website. It provides free Lilly medicine across our portfolio for patients that are eligible that otherwise can't afford it. So we're working at length there, as well.
Maybe expanding a little bit, Carol, this whole concept of access, it's challenging because it's so multifaceted. In the US, it's oftentimes a price or an affordability concern. Internationally, it can take many forms. Here's a great example. Many of our medicines need to be injected, and injectable medicines typically need to be refrigerated. There are countries that don't have the infrastructure to keep our medicine cold all the way to the patient. So we could work a lot to get the medicine there, but it's other related concerns that get in the way. So, just last year we made a large investment to help bring cold chain, to bring refrigerators into countries that don't have it. So I think that shows the way we're thinking about access, we try to be as broad as we can.
Carol Cone:
And that delivery example is great. So you see yourself as a holistic solution, not just, "Here's the medicine." So that's really, really good. Do you have another story? Because I love stories.
James Greffet:
Let me tell you a little bit about a program we have called 30 by 30. We want to improve healthcare for 30 million patients in resource limited settings by 2030. So there's the whole spiel, but there's a couple things I'll point out.
We use the word healthcare. We want to improve healthcare. That may involve Lilly medicine, but it transcends Lilly medicine. How can we play a role in healthcare, not just getting you a bottle of insulin. And then, the other element is resource limited settings. That isn't just poor countries, it's resource limited things.
Our headquarters is in downtown Indianapolis, and there are studies that show patients with diabetes in Indianapolis, near our corporate headquarters, have a meaningfully lower life expectancy than patients with diabetes out in the suburb. This is our own backyard. So we're working. We've partnered in what we call the Diabetes Impact Project, DIP. The Diabetes Impact Project in Indianapolis, DIP IN, where we're bringing community healthcare workers to three different zip codes near our corporate headquarters, and working with patients with diabetes in a pretty holistic way. It seems simple to say it, but complicated to live it. If a patient with diabetes, if they don't have food in the pantry, if their kids are sick, if their car isn't running, taking their insulin shots and testing their blood sugar is probably not the first thing on their mind.
So through this diabetes impact project, we're working with community healthcare workers that have standing in the community. So they're known and respected people...
Carol Cone:
Trusted.
James Greffet:
Exactly, trusted. That work with patients with diabetes in this comprehensive way. All right, let's figure out what's going on in your life and how can we stabilize that. Now we're on a better foundation to talk about what's going on with your diabetes.
And there was a great interview with one of the people in the program who said, "You know what, if I got an appointment with the doctor, I'm going to put on my Sunday best and answer the questions that I think the doctor wants. The answer he or she wants to hear, and it's probably, it's going to be a superficial interaction." We're not going to get the harder [inaudible 00:23:38]. These community healthcare workers hopefully are getting to a much more meaningful discussion and meaningful intervention.
Carol Cone:
So you are embracing social determinants of health.
James Greffet:
Indeed.
Carol Cone:
In terms of it's not just the medicine, but what is causing the situation, barriers, challenges and things like that?
James Greffet:
Correct.
Carol Cone:
So that's really wise. Have you, in this model now, have you measured it to see the outcomes, and then have you exported it to other communities?
James Greffet:
We're scaling it. You're great leading... So what's next? We are. So we have extended the duration of this program from its original intent. We continue to try to invest in it. And we're deliberately, and maybe in a broader sense, as we take on these projects in this 30 by 30 program, we're deliberately looking at things that are scalable, that are transferable, that can be replicated in more places. So we're doing it in such a way, I'd say the experiment is still going on with DIP IN, but absolutely that's the intent with all of these things, let's solve a local problem with the vision of solving a bigger one over time.
Carol Cone:
So I want to talk about local. You've got a big investment strategy in your home state and home city.
James Greffet:
We do. Maybe another quote from a member of the Lilly family that goes, it was like 1917, I think. "The broad overall concern should be doing the most good for the most people over the longest period of time that we can." It's 1917. Man, he was way ahead of the system.
Carol Cone:
1917. It's great. Really fabulous.
James Greffet:
Where we really come together, and like a lot of companies, but we were early to the game here, our Lilly Day of Service. The entire company, all 40,000 of us, on a particular day, the whole company is out of the office volunteering in the community, and the Foundation plays an important role in that, as well.
And for a lot of us, we work at Lilly for a reason. We're passionate about making medicine. Maybe we're impacted by disease ourselves, and we're members of the community. So we are personally invested in the places we live and work. So this Lilly Day of Service is a good example of employees. It's not viewed as a day that I don't have to go to my cube, or a day that I have to go do manual labor that I wouldn't otherwise do. It's a day where I get to go do something that's meaningful to me and also meaningful to the community.
Carol Cone:
That's great. That's a great example. Lilly has an amazing commitment to DE and I, and I want to quote from you. You have a DE and I report not just an ESG report, and it says, "DE and I is more than a moral or business imperative. It lays the foundation for optimal employee performance." And so can you explain why is there such a deep commitment to DE and I, and then we're going to dive... You've won incredible accolades, but I'm sure you don't do it for the accolades. They just come along.
James Greffet:
Like my answer to many of these questions, it starts with our purpose of making medicines. To make medicines, we need the best, the brightest, the smartest, the most creative, the most diverse brains we can find bringing everything they've got to work every day. And therein lies the rationale for DEI.
And you're right, it's not for the accolades, but we measure things. If you're not keeping someone in my finance trainings, if you're not keeping score, you're just practicing. So we've been focused on this for a long time.
And also, we're a science company. We use data to inform decisions. You can see the research out there that companies that have a more diverse set of employees perform better. So we're also using the data there.
I know we'll get into some specifics, but let me offer something that I think is particularly interesting on the DEI front, and that's clinical trial diversity. It's good science to test our medicines on as many patients as we can that might have the disease. So that just makes logical sense. We want to bring a medicine for everybody, not just a certain subset of patients. So we've really been focused on clinical trial diversity.
Carol Cone:
That's very important. Absolutely. I'd love you to talk about how you embed deeply DE and I into the company, and you have this Level Up DE and I conference. So can you share why was it created, and you're committed to it. Can you talk about that conference, and why I think your colleagues really look forward to getting to going to it and getting engaged with it?
James Greffet:
You bet. The Level Up Conference is cool, but let me start maybe before that. In selling medicine, we've often done what we call a patient journey. We want to understand the journey a patient with disease goes through with a goal of identifying what we call the moments of truth. Where are the moments, either the diagnosis with the doctor, getting the prescription, going to the pharmacy, having a side effect, where are those points that determine whether a patient succeeds or has less optimal results on a medicine?
A few years ago we said, "Huh, what if we take that patient journey, and do an employee journey?" So, what is it like being a woman working at Eli Lilly and company, and what are the moments of truth in the day, the month, the year that that person experiences? And are there interventions that we might be able to put in place? And we run several of these: women, African-Americans, LGBTQ. We were just doing one last year with our disabled employee base. And we got really good insights of things we wouldn't have seen or identified had we not not been deliberate about it. "I'm the only person that looks like me in a meeting, so I'm not going to say anything because I'm uncomfortable." "I never get recognized for my contributions." "I'm the one that's always asked to take the notes." Whatever it may be. Some of these things are small, but really impactful.
Go back to your question, and there's an example of actionable thing we've done to learn about our employees' lived experience, and then take action to make our employees more included, more effective, more contributing, and that also creates what we hope is a virtuous cycle. "I work here, I'm having a great experience. I've got friends and colleagues and classmates that I'm going to tell about it, also." So it hopefully creates a better flow of increasing diversity over time.
So then the Level Up Conference, the first one was the year before last, and it's all employees. We had I think 5,000 or 7,000 of our Indianapolis colleagues in the Indianapolis Convention Center, and then, remote tie in throughout the world coming together for a day of talking about diversity, breakout sessions, external speakers, workshops. And it's both provocative, educating, and inspiring that shows why this is valuable.
We don't view DEI as a, "This group is in. This group is out." It is Team Lilly. We're going to assemble the best team we can to again make medicine.
Carol Cone:
DE and I is Team Lilly. It's been baked in forever. It's integrated. It's cross-functional. I'm very curious as DE and I is being attacked as being woke, the Supreme Court ruling, and such. And companies, unfortunately, they made incredible commitments during, after the George Floyd murder, and a lot of these via reputable sources just have not been completed. Has there been any inkling at all at Lilly to go backwards in your DEI commitments? It doesn't seem like it. It seems like you're very real in them.
James Greffet:
That's right. We're doing this. Our efforts on DEI preceded the tragedies of the 2020-2021 timeframe. We've been reporting our demographics over time. It's on our website esg.lilly.com. I'm surprised it's taken me that long to put the plug for the website, esg.lilly.com.
On that website, we've been transparent showing percentage of men versus women, women in management, minorities in management, breakdown of minority populations over time. So we're showing that this is an important way that we run the company, and we're not going to change that because back to our previous earlier conversation, this is the right thing to do, to make medicine. So I don't think we change our strategy because somebody takes a particular view on a politically charged thing if it's still in our best interest to help do what we need to do.
Carol Cone:
That's great. Let's talk about DE and I and your supply chain, because it sounds like you're making some very significant investments in diverse suppliers.
James Greffet:
We are. We've had a supplier diversity effort in place for many years, and so, thank you for bringing that up.
So I'll tell you about this mentor protege program. We have a class, say 10 to 15, of typically business owners that are owners of companies that might be suppliers to Lilly, typically diverse. We pair them up with a Lilly executive as their mentor. Maybe it's helping them with finance capabilities, strategy capabilities, marketing capabilities, whatever the case may be. And we work with them over time with a goal of building out their capabilities, their strength to provide what we need with a view of bringing them on as a Lilly supplier over time. And that has a couple of benefits. We're building our own supply base. We're also building capabilities for suppliers that make them more capable of supplying other companies.
Carol Cone:
That's really great. Let's turn to the environment, because you have made a significant investment, or investment commitment, to about $100 million to reach your 2030 environmental goals. So can you talk about this $100 million goal and perhaps the Ireland story or others?
James Greffet:
Absolutely. So, let's start with our goals first. We've set climate goals for 2030. We set them in 2020 with a 10-year window. We want to get there for 2030. And that was deliberate. There are a lot of companies that set environmental goals out to 2050. I hope to be on a beach somewhere 26 years from now. When the goal is that long, is there enough urgency for a short period of time? So we picked a 10-year window to set a timeframe where we need to take action.
The other thing with climate goals is you can't wait until year nine to start thinking about what are we going to do here? You got to change the way you run the place. So we've got 2030 goals to be carbon neutral in our own operations. So the emissions that come out of Lilly owned things. So carbon neutral we want, and that's called scope one, for the techies out there.
And we want to buy all of electricity from renewable sources, also by 2030, for scope two emissions [inaudible 00:41:02]. And we're making progress. But 2020 through 2022, we've reduced our overall emissions in the absolute by almost a quarter while the business has been growing, so we're making progress there. And we have a line of sight to get to 2030.
So we're building a lot of capacity right now with our existing facilities, making them more efficient, getting more out for the same amount putting in, that helps us serve patients more. We want to do that. There's aligned incentives there.
We're in a real expansion phase right now. We need a lot more factories to make this medicine. We're building five new factories right now. We just brought a sixth one online. And the benefit of starting with a white sheet of paper is we can build in the sustainability and environmentally friendly concepts from the ground up. So we're using things like LEAD, a particular certification for buildings. We just announced a $10 million investment in solar fields for solar panels at our corporate headquarters in Indianapolis.
Let me offer one other sort of creative thing we're doing here, on the story front. An individual plant, we realize, and coming from finance, this really gets me excited when we get the budget, the annual budget, to a plant, their primary concern is producing medicine, good, safe, efficacious medicine. They might also have interesting ideas to improve waste reduction, lower water use, become more energy efficient. But we appreciate they're not going to compromise, making good safe medicine.
So we've created a central pot of money, a fund, so to speak. We call it the Energy, Waste, and Water Reduction Fund, where the plant can say, "I've got this cool idea. I can't necessarily pay for it myself, but we've given them a new place to look," and we've funded tens of millions of dollars of projects through that central fund, getting things that are good for the company, great investments, that if we thought about it the old way, might not have been.
Carol Cone:
It's again, the cross-functionality. I mean, you're really permeating across the company, and I love it. This 148-year-old company that acts like a very young and forward-thinking ESG aficionado. I don't know if I want to call it that, but you're doing wonderful things.
So we're unfortunately getting to the bottom of this conversation, but it's been great. And I just have a few more quick lightning round questions. What advice would you give to an undergrad or a grad student who ultimately wants to sit in your seat?
James Greffet:
Let me offer two quick anecdotes. One, before I came to Lilly, I worked in public accounting and consulting for almost nine years, and I knew pretty quickly I didn't love it. I wasn't passionate about it. And I looked at the people that are above me on the ladder, and their job didn't look any more appealing than mine did. Not a lot of purpose there. Yet, I did it for nine years. So that was the first learning, not fully wasted, but I could have been more engaged in the early part of my career deliberately. So the first part of the answer is when you hear the little whisper in your ear, that this isn't aligning with my values, my purpose, move on.
Item number two, I didn't say this before, but the real reason I work at Lilly, my wife, Bonnie, this year will have had type one diabetes for 50 years. Count them, 50 years. And she has used Lilly insulin her entire life, or since she was six years old and was diagnosed. So our medicine keeps her alive. That makes our purpose really important to me.
So the advice I would give is, one: if you're not finding fulfillment in the work you're doing or what the company is doing, force yourself to move on because you'll be more happy and more effective in the process. And then, when you do find that, give it everything you got, jump in and find reward that you're making a difference.
Carol Cone:
Super. Thank you for that personal story. Do you have a favorite book or two, or any reporter you follow to just keep you up on ESG, sustainability, and purpose issues?
James Greffet:
I like George Serafin. He has a book called Purpose Plus Profit, and it really focuses on the business case of ESG. Hopefully, that's something that's come out in our discussion. This isn't nice to have, or beyond the day job. This is how you run your business in a sustainable way. That's one. And Bob Ackles is a second one.
Carol Cone:
Oh, he's great. Bob's great.
James Greffet:
And a pretty fun guy to listen to.
Carol Cone:
Yeah, absolutely. So, in closing, I always like to turn the mic over to my guest. So what haven't we asked or what haven't we discussed or do you want to reinforce something? It's over to you, Jim.
James Greffet:
I'll offer this. We focus on 15 things that matter to how we run the company. And if you distill those things down, like we were saying before, take care of the planet, take care of your employees, be a good member of the community, operate with ethics and compliance, none of those things should be controversial or the source of debate or friction or discord in our society. So I would hope that we embrace these topics of sustainability is not being a political hot potato, but something that will make our companies run better.
And then the final thought, relatedly, of the 15 things we focus on at Lilly, 13 of them could be any company. Only two of them are really germane to us as a pharma company. So there's a lot of consistency here. A lot of these topics are relevant to every company and how we should be running the place for the long run.
Carol Cone:
Well, that's fantastic. I really appreciate your time, and hopefully we'll get to reconnect in a year or so, see how some of these great initiatives are proceeding. We always like to invite great guests back, so I hope you'll come back to the show, Jim.
James Greffet:
I'd like that very much, Carol. Thank you for having me.
Carol Cone:
This podcast was brought to you by some amazing people, and I'd love to thank them. Anne Hundertmark at Carol Cone On Purpose, Pete Wright and Andy Nelson, our crack production team at True Story FM, and you, our listener. Please rate and rank us, because we really want to be as high as possible as one of the top business podcasts available so that we can continue exploring together the importance and the activation of authentic purpose. Thanks so much for listening.
p360_172 RAW (Completed 02/13/24)
Transcript by Rev.com
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