Reinvention at Roche: Don’t Leave Gains on the Table

"The CEO's first response to this painful realization was typical: "I'll set up a couple of days when each of my divisional vice presidents can come in and pitch their view of the future." It takes more than two days to develop industry foresight; building foresight is not about "pitching" and "reviewing," but about exploring and learning. To really understand the future, to have the courage to commit, top management must get more than just a fleeting glimpse of the future. The required effort is measured in weeks and months, not in hours and days. - Gary Hamel and CK Prahalad

If you’ve ever been to the gym, you might have heard that how often you train doesn’t really matter as long as you put in the same amount of effort each week. In theory, it shouldn’t matter if you train a muscle once or three times a week, as long as you do enough work. But in practice, that’s not always the case.

You can’t expect meaningful growth from showing up once, working hard, and then disappearing for the rest of the week. Muscles tone and grow through consistent, repeated stimulation. After a workout, your body enters a repair-and-growth phase that only lasts about 48 hours. If you wait too long before training again, that growth window closes. Miss too many windows, and you’re just recovering, not growing. It’s the same for any serious goal. You don’t get results from a one-off push, but from repeated effort.

Just as you can't expect results from a single gym session, you can’t expect innovation to flourish from a once-a-year strategy day or the periodic brainstorming session. Change, like any muscle, is built through consistent, repeated activation. By simply paying lip service you leave gains on the table. This is what Hal Gregersen captured so well in The Innovator’s DNA, shared with us on our Clayton Christensen tribute series. His research shows that innovation isn’t the result of a rare genius spark—it’s the output of deliberate habits, applied consistently in the right conditions.

The Muscle of Innovation

"Innovative leaders know innovation doesn’t just happen, but requires a significant time commitment." - Clay Christensen, Hal Gregersen, Jeff Dyer

In their multi-year study of innovative companies, Gregersen and his co-authors identified five core “discovery skills” that drive creative impact: associating, questioning, observing, experimenting, and networking. What separated the most innovative leaders from their peers was their discipline and time allocation. Gregersen et al found that innovative CEOs spent 50% more time on these activities than their less innovative counterparts.

That’s where Google’s famous 20% time comes in (I am not sure if it is still the case). It’s a structural way of ensuring innovation gets trained, not left to a yearly workout. By giving employees protected time to explore ideas, experiment, and collaborate, Google created a consistent “innovation rhythm.” Gmail, Google News, AdSense, and even early social platforms like Orkut all emerged from 20% time projects.

Other companies have their own versions. 3M pioneered a 15% time policy before Google was born, while Atlassian created “FedEx Days”—24-hour innovation sprints where developers deliver fully formed ideas overnight. P&G, meanwhile, encouraged employees to split their time between “working in the system” (day-to-day execution) and “working on the system” (finding ways to improve it). While the formats vary, the principle is consistent: if innovation doesn’t get time on the calendar, it doesn’t happen.

This is the same logic we apply in the gym: if you’re not actively scheduling time to train, your muscles atrophy. As we age, the body naturally loses muscle mass unless we fight to maintain it. This is the law of entropy, eventually everything decays. And the same is true for organisations.

An aging company, like an aging body, tends toward rigidity. Layers accumulate. Reflexes slow. Decision-making becomes cautious, brittle, and bureaucratic. If you’re not deliberately carving out time to think, question, test, and collaborate, you’re losing capability.

This is why Roche’s transformation stands out. It wasn’t a one-off intervention or a burst of enthusiasm by a new leader. It is (not was) a sustained ongoing programme. Like a body regaining strength, Roche committed to deliberate, structured, repeated practice. The company’s leadership didn’t outsource change to a consultant. They scheduled time to build it into themselves. As Andy Grove put it in Only The Paranoid Survive, "If you’re in a leadership position, how you spend your time has enormous symbolic value. It will communicate what’s important or what isn’t far more powerfully than all the speeches you can give. Strategic change doesn’t just start at the top. It starts with your calendar."

Reinvention at Roche

"Innovation takes time—time to dream, to reflect, to learn, to invent, to experiment.” — Gary Hamel

The kind of patience required for reinvention is rare in organisations conditioned to optimise for certainty and speed. But as Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini describe in their updated edition of Humanocracy, a company that exemplified patience and persistence as the foundation for reinvention is Roche.

Founded in 1896, Roche is a global leader in healthcare, with core businesses in pharmaceuticals and medical diagnostics. By 2020, it generated $66 billion in revenue, with around 70% from pharmaceuticals. Its innovation capabilities deepened following the full acquisition of Genentech in 2009, which continued to operate independently, managing R&D and North American drug distribution.

The impact of Roche’s transformation has been striking. By 2023, Genentech’s revenues were up 24%, ROI rose 27%, and this was achieved with 22% fewer people—thanks to bold delayering. Pharma International saw similar results, with one-third fewer employees delivering one-third more revenue. In total, the changes freed up $3 billion annually, redirected into R&D.

The work of reshaping the organisation wasn’t tacked on between meetings. The effort absorbed a quarter of the top team’s time, week after week. At first, there were fears that this shift in focus would cause operational drift.

Then-CEO Bill Anderson (now at Bayer) reminded his team that Roche had capable people to keep the business running while leadership did the harder, slower work: changing themselves. Padraic Ward, now Head of Roche Pharma Europe & International, said the process of redefining leadership roles and behaviours “occupied the majority of [his] time for over a year.” As he put it: “The commitment had to start with me. I wasn’t doing the things I had done before… but I knew that if I didn’t demonstrate a commitment to changing the way I led, I’d have no chance of helping others change.”

Like training a new muscle group, the early sessions were uncomfortable, uncertain, and slow to show results—but over time, they laid down the neural pathways of a very different kind of organisation. Not over a workshop weekend, but consistently, weekly, monthly, quarterly and over several years. As Gary put in our finale of a 17-part series on his collected works,  "They (Roche Leadership) were working explicitly on the management model in every aspect, in a way that very seldom happens." He later concludes that, " The real resource that drove this was the energy and the time of the senior team."

That is how change sticks, discipline, dedication, persistence, fluid resource allocation and most important of all, time.

The finale of our 17-part series with Gary Hamel is on the Roche case study.