When Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla asked his employees to compress years of vaccine development and manufacturing into months, he knew the first reaction would be resistance. Faced with a task that seemed unrealistic, even impossible, teams would do what large organizations often do best: marshal their intelligence to explain why it can’t be done.
Before Covid, Pfizer produced roughly 200 million vaccine doses a year. At the height of the pandemic, production had to surge to roughly 3 billion doses annually. Scaling manufacturing to that level was, in Bourla’s view, as daunting as developing a vaccine in short order—if not more so. While public attention focused on the scientific breakthrough, the operational challenge demanded an equally radical shift in mindset.
“When you ask people to do things that they perceive to be difficult or impossible, the first thing that they do is to use all their brainpower to develop the arguments about why it cannot be made,” Bourla told Fortune editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell. Rather than debate feasibility, he reframed the challenge in moral terms. Speed was not a business metric. It was a matter of life and death.
Bourla lined Pfizer offices with signs that read, “Time is life,” a constant reminder that delays carried real human consequences. When leaders warned that a process would take three weeks longer than planned, he asked them to calculate the number of lives lost in that time. He describes the tactic, bluntly, as necessary “emotional blackmail,” uncomfortable but effective in forcing teams to stop defending constraints and start focusing on solutions.
The shift unlocked extraordinary effort across the organization. Beyond the breakthroughs in the lab, Bourla points to the work done at Pfizer’s manufacturing sites, where scientists, engineers, and plant workers performed “miracles” to produce doses at an unprecedented scale. Once people understood that leadership was serious and that the mission mattered beyond the company, they delivered far more than they believed possible.
That intensity also created a shared sense of purpose. Employees were not simply meeting aggressive targets or hitting production milestones. They understood they were helping save lives, stabilize economies, and reopen society, a responsibility that reshaped how they viewed both their work and themselves.
The broader lesson, Bourla argues, is not that leaders should rely on guilt or crisis to motivate people. It is that teams are capable of far more than they initially believe when the mission is clear, the stakes are real, and excuses are no longer rewarded.
Watch the full interview here.
Ruth Umoh
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