“Vertex’s vision is to “innovate to redefine health and transform lives with new medicines”. It is vital that we, as a Company and as individual employees, pay close attention to this vision and to how we put that vision into practice. Each word in our vision has a precise and a subtle meaning. Innovation doesn’t mean just new or novel--it also connotes something that is needed and wanted. Transforming lives: it’s not just about taking a pill and forgetting about it, it’s about a medicine that changes someone’s life; without it their life is different and with it they feel transformed, with new possibilities out in front of them that they couldn’t pursue before. And with all of this innovation and transformation, we intend to “redefine health”, to change the expectations around diseases – and of aging itself – turning resignation and despair into hope and optimism.”
On Values and Culture
“What’s a core value? It’s an unchanging principle to drive individual and collective behavior. It’s not something you stick on the wall and forget about. If it doesn’t speak to you about what you do everyday then it’s inauthentic. Our values define our culture. They are how the results are achieved. And they are how we are at our best. We discovered our values from the bottom up--literally, we asked more than 100 employees to put in their own words what they thought the Vertex values were. What came out of this was really consistent across all of our sites--three values rose to the top:”
On Leadership
“Great leadership is about leverage, because the most worthwhile goals are bigger than any person can manage. The task of leaders at Vertex is to assemble and leverage the diversity of skills, opinions and styles and focusing that diversity to achieve our vision. What we do really matters to people; it matters to families; it matters to people at this company who are directly or indirectly touched by the medical issues we are trying to address. As long as we remember for whom we are doing this – the patients – and really come in everyday saying, “This is worth it,” this is worth busting your brain – and busting the other end as well – because of how important it is that we do what we do. We operate at Vertex as if it really depends upon everyone because it does. The stakes are very high, and it depends upon us.”
