Roche India: A Purpose-Driven Culture

Roche India’s Managing Director, Lara Bezerra, had a very different kind of formative experience as a young woman, and this largely influenced the kind of “Quantum Leadership Transformation,” and its associated company culture, that she initiated at Roche. The Roche transformation, though including the essential elements of RenDanHeyi, also differs from that of Haier because Roche is a pharmaceutical company operating in the health sector, not a manufacturing company. Lara Bezerra believes that both leaders and employees work at their highest potential if they find their life’s purpose and that they then live that purpose both in their private lives and at work. Everything about the radical changes she has made at Roche India, organizational and cultural, follows from that. In the process, she has redefined the very purpose and meaning of a pharmaceutical company, turned every management sacred cow on its head, and changed the lives of both her own employees and India’s patients. She changed her own title from “Managing Director” to “Chief Purpose Officer.”