![](\"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/TITANS_PFIZER_009_260126mp400_03_45_15Still005.jpg?w=2048\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla says he used extreme team-motivating tactics to meet seemingly impossible deadlines during the COVID-19 pandemic.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In a conversation with Fortune <\/em>Editor in Chief Alyson Shontell on the Titans and Disruptors of Industry<\/em> podcast, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla admitted to using what he called \u201cemotional blackmail\u201d in order to create and deliver vaccines faster.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI 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\u2019t be made,\u201d Bourla said. \u201cIf you resist the temptation that rationally, it cannot be made, and you move the goal post instead to, that\u2019s what the world needs, then it can be done.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n All around the office, Bourla put up signs that read, \u201cTime is life.\u201d On several occasions, employees came to him to say there would need to be a delay of several weeks in meeting deadlines. In response, Bourla asked them to calculate how many people would die during the additional weeks they requested.\u00a0<\/p>\n In April 2020, that would have meant about 1,800 Americans dying per day; any longer delay could mean tens of thousands of lives.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIf you say, go and figure it out<\/em>, then within a week, they stopped worrying about how to convince you that it cannot be done, and they started worrying how they can find ways to overcome the obstacles and make it happen,\u201d Bourla said. \u201cAnd this is when they can come and surprise you with how much they can achieve when they are focusing on how to resolve issues.\u201d<\/p>\n In the end, Pfizer delivered. Bourla\u2019s team worked around the clock to develop products to combat the crisis\u2014Pfizer collaborated with startup BioNTech to bring the first FDA-approved COVID-19 vaccine to market, and also introduced Paxlovid, the first antiviral medicine customized to fight COVID.<\/p>\n \u201cI still believe it was an emotional blackmail, because I was asking them to do something impossible,\u201d Bourla said. \u201cAnd then I was putting on their shoulders the weight that if they don\u2019t make it, people will die.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n He said he feels \u201ca little bit\u201d guilty about putting that much pressure on his workers. But he still argues it was necessary, not only to save the \u201cworld, the economy and society, but make them feel like the most important people on Earth, those that were able to deliver.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThey will never forget,\u201d Bourla added.\u00a0<\/p>\n In normal times, leaders might hesitate to impose that kind of moral weight on employees already living through the hardships of a global crisis. But the pandemic was a time when all the pressures of sustaining life and livelihood in America fell on top of our complex, notoriously bureaucratic healthcare system, including drug manufacturing. It was a time for miracles and miracle-talk, Bourla said.<\/p>\n \u201cThe things that happened during that period of time were magical,\u201d Bourla said. \u201cMagical in the way that we were able to achieve things that we didn\u2019t think that we could,\u201d because of a \u201cfantastic collaboration between the public and private sector.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Watch the full episode on YouTube. The episode transcript can be found here. <\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n #Pfizer #CEO #emotional #blackmail #employees #achieve #impossible #goals<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla says … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17066,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[11055,11054,529,624,11052,3496,1199,6213,2985,5683,11056,3989,11053],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17065"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17065"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17065\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/17066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Bourla\u2019s leadership paid off<\/h2>\n