Our guest on this episode is Vijay Chand, who is Director of Global Reporting on the Global Insights, Analytics and Commercial Excellence Team at AstraZeneca. Vijay joins us on The Day One podcast to share what things in the industry he’d like to see banished to Room 101 forever. The main pet peeves Vijay describes are: the notion of an infinite number of KPIs, short-term working relationships, and the false thinking that AI is not going to disrupt the future. Vijay provides meaningful criticism during our conversation, and we hope you enjoy it.

Key Quotes:

• “In this age, global truly means global. Because you're talking to people across the world. You have to be able to handle different cultures, different work styles, deal with people and communicate things where you're never going to meet in person, or the chance is going to be quite low. So you have to be able to facilitate working together in an online manner, looking at Teams or something like that. So that can have its own challenges, but it also can expose you to things you wouldn't otherwise be exposed to just working in an office environment” (06:01)
• “By having this notion that we have to be able to track everything across every single data type, I think is a false fallacy which just creates more churn than it's worth.” (11:38)
• “So those are your fundamentals that you would want to track, whereas sometimes we seem to get lost in trying to link things and correlate things that may not necessarily have a correlation there, but we have the data, so let's try to engineer something and see if it sticks.” (12:56)
• “What also tends to happen is that you'll have a foundation, and then the person that's built the foundation moves on and you have someone new coming into the role, and they don't look back. They just add on and over time, you'll end up with this case where you've got this behemoth of KPIs that you need to track and then half of them may be redundant and make your strategies change, or that data is no longer available, or you have stopped purchasing it due to budget constraints.” (15:44)
• “This notion of just getting short-term wins or trying to save a little bit of money, or trying to push really hard on some discount or some additional provision within a contract, or having a ridiculous expectation in terms of a project deliverable or reporting deliverable, wherever it may be. It doesn't do much to foster long-term relationships and can be a resentment over time if you're the person that develops their reputation for being like that.” (19:05)
• “So I think that people may think they get more out of people by being, as you said, quite hard on them, but actually I don't think that necessarily is the case. And I think, certainly for us, we're only as good as our team and we're a people industry. In the end, really, we'll buy and sell people. So you have to be good to your people and your talent because they're the ones that are really making your company what it is.” (23:05)
• “And this is probably one of those first times, other than the release of computers, that you're in a situation where if you don't evolve, you may be left behind. So having that false fallacy that “actually it's not going to disrupt things to that degree”, I would really want to banish. So it wakens people up, so that they start leavening up their skills” (24:53)
• “We're in an industry where companies tend to be a little bit more risk-averse and a little bit more conservative about adopting technology on a mass scale. So I think it's going to be quite slow and steady. We're going to be looking at it from an ethical standpoint, from a compliant standpoint, making sure that you're not able to identify patients. So there's a whole privacy aspect as well. So I think it's going to be slow and steady, but I do think it's going to start to disrupt in certain key areas.” (28:50)

Key Topics: 

• Vijay describes how he found his way into this niche sector (1:46)
• Advice for someone coming in to the pharma research sector (03:47)
• The importance of a diverse team in market research (05:16)
• Vijay shares two funny stories from their career (07:10)
• The first nomination for Room 101 is revealed (10:50)
• Is there a right number of KPIs to track? (12:11)
• How do we know what to track? (14:31)
• Vijay shares his second choice for Room 101 (17:20)
• Net worth versus networking in a small, niche industry (17:38)
• Maintaining  working relationships versus pushing hard for results (21:50)
• Vijay’s third topic for Room 101 is shared (23:56)
• How to prepare for AI disruption to your career (26:20)
• The future of AI in pharma research (28:45)
• Day One’s paper comparing real patient responses to ChatGPT (31:10)
• Different ways of adopting AI in the industry (32:40)
• Vijay and Hannah decide what to banish to Room 101 forever (33:23)

About – Vijay Chand:

Vijay Chand is Director of Global Reporting on the Global Insights, Analytics and Commercial Excellence Team at AstraZeneca. Vijay is an ambitious and versatile leader with a proven track record in commercial data strategy, contracting and platform program management. His visionary approach has driven the creation of impactful performance KPIs and the seamless integration of multi-channel reporting across primary market research, secondary data and internal assets. He thrives on turning challenges into opportunities and excels in transforming complex data landscapes into informed decisions.

Relevant Links:

• Vijay Chand – LinkedIn
• Day One - https://www.dayonestrategy.com/
• Hannah Mann - LinkedIn
• Abigail Stuart – LinkedIn

The Day One podcast is published by the Day One Strategy and produced by Zorbiant.

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