How can a beginner’s mind and a collaborative approach make you win at the team sport of “insight”? With Mark Montgomery, Novartis’ Head of Integrated Insights

Data Malarkey - the podcast about using data smarter

In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, data storyteller Sam Knowles is joined by Mark Montgomery, Vice President and International Head of Integrated Insights at Novartis, a role he’s held for the past three years. Mark has a rich and varied career in pharma, having served as the Global Head of Commercial Analytics and Insights at GSK before joining Novartis, following a seven-year spell at AstraZeneca in digital, data, and strategic planning. Before working in pharma, Mark spent a decade in creative, content strategy, and brand management in three different agencies.

Mark holds both a Batchelor’s in marketing and an MBA in organizational leadership from the Southern New Hampshire University. Indeed, his resumé more than hints at a love of life-long learning, with recent qualifications in AI and behavioural economics from Yale School of Management, the Chicago Booth School of Business, and Kellogg Executive Education. He’s also been a guest lecturer at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania for the past decade.

Our conversation was recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, on 28 November 2023.

Thanks to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

Mark describes his job at Novartis as “the best job in the world” – particularly for someone as driven as he is by curiosity to find things out and answer challenging questions. He brings together Novartis’ data science practice, some of the smartest market researchers he’s ever worked with, and a crack team of business analysts. As their work is focused on strategic decision-making to change both attitudes and behaviour, this is often overlaid by the learnings of behavioural science.

Mark’s rich and resonant definition of insight is a “meaningful, intuitive understanding of a person or thing that compels action or brings about change”. Insight, for Mark, answers the questions “What?”, “Why?”, and “What to do?” Among Mark’s favourite tools for moving from data to insight and insight to action are the Root Cause Analysis (those famous Five Whys) and Design Thinking.

More than once, Mark says that insight is a “team sport” requiring a collaborative approach to foster success, one that requires us to bring a beginner’s mind and park our biases and prejudices at the door. In a memorable analogy, Mark compares building a cross-functional team to solve genuine business problems with insight to rugby, that most inclusive and ‘c’ catholic of games that finds a role for everyone, no matter their shape, size, or speed.

Mark is in the enthusiast camp when it comes to AI, pointing out the irony that human cognition – rather than technology, data processing speed, or computer power – is now the rate limiter on problem solving. Our role is to ask smarter questions and organise data better for AI to use. With scientific progress set to double every seven years thanks to AI – a seven-fold acceleration in just a couple of decades – Mark gives us a tantalising glimpse of the future of personalised medicine.

EXTERNAL LINKS

Novartis – https://www.novartis.com

Mark’s LinkedIn profile – https://www.linkedin.com/in/mdmontgomery01/

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