A CEO’s advice for the next generation of leaders

Mike Sullivan is the CEO of Cubic Health. He started his career as a community pharmacist in Saskatoon, then moving into a role in the pharmaceutical industry, before taking on an MBA at the Schulich School of Business with a specialization in Finance. During the 2023-2024 academic year, he served as the Leader-In-Residence at the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Toronto where he taught pharmacy students leadership and entrepreneurship. In his journey as a founder, Mike took a practical approach to capturing opportunities. The idea for the business he co-founded in 2003, Cubic Health, came from a series of meetings he had in the first six months of his time in the pharmaceutical industry. Cubic transformed the way health benefit plans were managed and brought pharmacy leadership into a space that desperately needed clinical expertise. It was a diversity of professional experiences early in his pharmacy career that opened the door to entrepreneurship leveraging his pharmacy foundation. In our recent interview, Mike drew on his lived experience over the first 25 years of his pharmacy career to share some wisdom on innovation, taking risks, and failure.Stepping in and out of the pharmacist identityWhen we spoke about what it means to be a pharmacist entrepreneur, Mike got excited fast. One of his goals as a Leader-In-Residence was to showcase stories of pharmacists making an impact by acting on new opportunities. He mentioned to me that when it came to recognizing opportunities and building strong relationships with customers in the healthcare setting — “it all came down to pharmacy.”When he started his business, there were actually no pharmacists leading the management of pharmacy benefit plans. Instead, it was usually actuaries or group insurance professionals who took the lead. However, in the early 2000s the pace of change was significant with the emergence of specialty drugs, and Mike saw an opportunity to leverage clinical expertise to optimize both drug plan design to ensure sustainable plans and member health to ensure a productive workforce, bringing the pharmacy context to solving a health insurance problem. Mike also mentioned how important it was to make sure that we don’t “narrow what creativity and innovation could be.” To do so, we need to think beyond ideas with a clear-cut correlation to our profession, but also ones that have yet to make that connection clear. When he spoke about broadening our curiosities, it made me think about my time as a founder with 3D PPE GTHA where we leveraged 3D printing for manufacturing personal protective equipment. We had no background, training, or previous use case to go on, but it worked. We just had to try something new. What really helped back then, and Mike doubled down on it, was to support each other as a profession when we try new things. When we come together to explore new ideas, that’s when we succeed. Mike suggests that to better support each other, we should consider building communities for pharmacists with an entrepreneurial interest. Formalize networks to enable more learners to access mentors and professional connections. If we develop more community for pharmacist entrepreneurs and learn from each other, we also better emphasize the fact that we’re not leaving pharmacy behind, we’re leveraging pharmacy in a different way. Failure is a stepping stoneAnother lesson I learned from Mike was his mindset around failure. He spoke of failure as a necessary step in the entrepreneurship journey. That we should consider normalizing it as part of our culture. When we see others fail, we should applaud their efforts to build something novel. When we ourselves fail, we shouldn’t be fearful of the failure, we should wear it like a badge. This embrace of failure is an aspect of culture. There may be some differences between how we take on risk in Canada versus the United States, where failure has become almost a prerequisite to unlocking new opportunities. Investors, colleagues, and employees regard failure highly. More highly than a resume with a clean slate. Entrepreneurs take on failure without fear of judgement on their own personal reputation. As President Theodore Roosevelt once said: "It is not the critic who counts... The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood.”Don’t be intimidated by complexityTowards the end of our conversation, Mike laughed as he spoke about how finance in fact felt a lot less complicated than pharmacology. There are tons of fancy terms in finance like “discounted cash flows”, “capital structure” or “time value of money” but these finance concepts are basic compared to what a pharmacy student has to learn in pharmacology. From learning about G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) to the activation of ligand-gated ion channels, we’ve been through concepts much more abstract and challenging. Mike brought up this analogy to really emphasize the idea that we shouldn’t dismiss seemingly challenging areas of opportunity because it appears too complicated. Or too far from our domain. We’ve succeeded in learning concepts that are far more difficult, and we should be confident in engaging in opportunities outside of our comfort zone.ConclusionAs pharmacists, we should dig deeper into our success stories and help normalize the pursuit of new, and perhaps unconventional, ideas. Mike and his team is currently looking to the future as he takes on mental health as a new area of disruption for health benefits management. He plans to transform pharmacies into health hubs where AI is leveraged to ensure plan sponsors make efficient investments and plan members receive evidence-based treatments.Peter Zhang, PharmD, MBA is a technology professional, hospital pharmacist, and a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto studying entrepreneurship education

A CEO’s advice for the next generation of leaders

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