Pfizer CEO says he used ‘emotional blackmail’ to get employees to achieve impossible goals during COVID-19

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla says he used extreme team-motivating tactics to meet seemingly impossible deadlines during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

In a conversation with Fortune Editor in Chief Alyson Shontell on the Titans and Disruptors of Industry podcast, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla admitted to using what he called “emotional blackmail” in order to create and deliver vaccines faster. 

Specifically, his team was tasked with creating a vaccine to combat the new illness from scratch. Once created, Pfizer needed to far exceed prior shipping and supply chain constraints; at one point, it even had to produce its own dry ice because not enough was available externally. Prior to COVID, Pfizer had been producing only 200 million vaccine doses per year. That needed to scale quickly to 3 billion doses. 

“I found that when you ask people to do things they perceive as difficult or impossible, the first thing they do is to use all their brain power to develop the arguments about why it can’t be made,” Bourla said. “If you resist the temptation that rationally, it cannot be made, and you move the goal post instead to, that’s what the world needs, then it can be done.” 

All around the office, Bourla put up signs that read, “Time is life.” On several occasions, employees came to him to say there would need to be a de...