EDITOR'S NOTE
LSL
LIFESCIENCELEADER.COM NOVEMBER 2014
6
ers to the enactment of the National Minimum
Drinking Age Act of 1984.
While you might be thinking Steve Jobs and
Bill Gates are Course Changers, citing their out-
sider roles and significant impact on the music
industry (i.e., Apple/iTunes) and global health
(i.e., the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation),
they had significant financial and social status
advantages to get things done. Lightner had no
law enforcement, legal, or political experience,
and yet with limited financial resources was
able to change the status quo.
True Course Changers aren't just outsiders too
naïve to know the rules of your industry, but
highly motivated people often moved to action
by personal tragedy. There's no doubt that, with
the challenges facing our industry today, we
could use a few more Course Changers. They
are out there, as I discovered when I interviewed
the leadership team of PatientsLikeMe for my
feature story this month on page 30. Their story
is very similar to Lightner's. The co-founding
brothers Jamie and Ben Heywood were inspired
by tragedy (i.e., their brother Stephen's diagno-
sis and decline from ALS). They are outsiders,
mechanical engineers who aren't buying into
the notion "It is what it is" when it comes to how
healthcare is delivered, drugs are developed, and
clinical trials are executed. The PatientsLikeMe
team has built a data-sharing platform they
believe will change the way patients manage
their own conditions and transform and align
the relationship between patients, physicians,
and biopharma. If you want to change the direc-
tion of your business and our industry, perhaps
it is time you listen to the ideas and perspectives
of a few Course Changers, for they do not believe
as you, nor do their beliefs require you to agree
with them — and that could be all the difference
you need.
l
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N O V E M B E R 2 014 V O L . 6 N O. 1 1
ave you ever had an experience
that forever changed the course
of your existence? I know I have.
When you think about things
such as how you met your sig-
nificant other or why you are working where
you are, you realize the significant role human
decision making plays in determining or alter-
ing your course. Advocates of predestination
contend that free will does not exist based
on the assertion that you did not choose to
be born. I do not subscribe to this notion that
either the destiny of your life or the success/
failure of your organization is preordained.
Chaos theory not only teaches us to expect
the unexpected, but more importantly, that
small changes made early can often drasti-
cally alter outcomes. This principle is popu-
larly referred to as the butterfly effect and
attributes the power to cause a hurricane off
the coast of Mexico to a butterfly flapping its
wings in India. In the business world, I contend
the existence of Course Changers — human but-
terflies who can and do dramatically impact
outcomes and alter courses well beyond their
immediate environments. To find them, how-
ever, you probably need to look outside of your
industry. For example, Candy Lightner founded
Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) after
her 13-year old daughter was struck and killed
by a hit-and-run drunk driver in 1980. Since
then, Candy has been influential in everything
related to eliminating drunk driving, from the
passage of laws imposing fines for drunk driv-
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