SHL Medical is a leader in designing, developing, and manufacturing drug delivery solutions, such as autoinjectors that enable patients to administer their own medication. CEO Ulrich Faessler sat down with BCG’s Torben Danger to discuss steering organizations through change, leading in the age of AI, and defining what comes next for SHL and the health care industry. Edited excerpts of the conversation follow.
As a leader, what’s most important to you in terms of leadership traits, and what do you expect from other leaders in the company?
To be authentic is at the core. When you’re authentic, you are more true to yourself, and your environment will reflect that. Then of course you must listen. But don’t listen to respond; listen to understand so you can support. And then having an entrepreneurial spirit moves companies much faster forward instead of just being there to do the job.
Times of change can be taxing for organizations. How do you help your employees to maneuver through these times of change?
We say, “Always listen attentively, think carefully, and then act boldly.” And that’s SHL in a nutshell. So we listen to our customers, we listen to our stakeholders, and we listen to our employees, obviously. We think, interpret—but then we act very boldly. And I think that’s a different way of operating compared with other companies.
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Another thing that is changing is AI, and especially AI in manufacturing. What are your thoughts regarding the opportunities AI presents? And what are you doing to address this topic?
In 2020, we started to digitize the company end to end. With AI, you need data, otherwise AI can’t really do much for you. So we digitized all our processes and we created enough data that we can use to bolt AI onto different areas in the business. We started with the root cause analysis, which is fully driven by AI already, and then identified many other areas that we are going to address step-by-step with AI agents so that our people can benefit from this and not have to do work that can be done easily by an agent.
There’s often some defensiveness among employees around digitalization. How have your people reacted? Have they been open to it? How have you managed that?
You see both. At first, they were not too open, actually. That’s the first reaction because they don’t know what it means for me. Some people think, “My job is gone,” but that’s not the case. So I drive it from the top down, and I’ve seen that with many other areas, like digitalization. And of course we also have the bottom up. I want to see the ideas that could move the company forward quite fast.
I always tell our people to start working when you have 60% of the information you need, then while working, you increase to 80% and then it’s about what you get, and that’s where you start to build your vision or your product or whatever it is. And while you are building, already working on the real product, you increase to 90% or 95%. You won’t get more. If you wait to reach 100%, you will never have a product—but someone else will.
You’re the market leader in your space. What keeps you going? What excites you to define the next chapter?
First of all, we are very proud. We just recently had the 1.5 billionth device that was used by a patient. That shows that what we are doing has an impact. It has an impact on the industry—and also on patients’ lives.
Thinking about SHL Medical in 10 or 15 years, what is your vision of the company? What will have changed?
I will just start with what will not have changed. We will still remain number one in ten years. But what will have changed is, first, we will have a fully functional global footprint in “closed-loop manufacturing,” as we call it, so we can manufacture all products anywhere at any point in time. Second, we will reach a bigger patient population through a global footprint. Today, we are more in the Western countries, and by then we will have addressed more emerging markets. Third, we will have products that will have evolved from not only doing an injection but also providing closed-loop feedback that will help the industry and physicians provide a more effective therapy for patients.
