Adam Knights
Adam’s leadership capabilities, developed during 19 years in the pharmaceutical industry and in HM forces, enabled him to understand challenges in the field, empathise with his people and take his different teams across challenging conditions to consistently deliver on expected outcomes.
Adam was recently Director of Sales Force Effectiveness at Takeda UK where he led Takeda Regional Account Directors (RADs) on delivering sales on demand and transforming Takeda into the fastest growing pharmaceutical company in the UK. Adam was previously the first RAD where he designed and experimented with this novel form of selling in pharmaceuticals. Adam started his pharmaceutical sales career at AstraZeneca before joining Takeda as a Regional Sales Manager.
Adam spent the first nine years of his career in HM Forces where he led troops in the execution of their mission across the world.
Adrian Giles
Trained and bred by the NHS during a 17 year career in primary care. Adrian also spent the past 7 years in the pharmaceutical industry aligning the interests of his pharmaceutical employers to those of their NHS customers.
Adrian was the National Sales Force Effectiveness (SFE) manager at Takeda UK, supporting the Regional Account Director (RAD) team in the delivery of their mission. This role followed a successful period as a RAD where Adrian was amongst the top performers. Adrian started in pharmaceutical sales with GSK as an Integrated Healthcare Manager.
During 17 years with the NHS, Adrian developed and implemented healthcare programmes in South Worcestershire across different therapy areas with the aim of improving patients’ outcomes at lower costs by looking holistically at patient pathways, flexibly integrating the wishes and capabilities of local healthcare professionals whilst balancing costs across healthcare providers and treatments.
Adrian received a BA in business administration from Birmingham University.
Thibaut de Cours
Thibaut spent the past 15 years aligning his employers’ organisational interests to those of their customers by sharing best practices from one country to another, particularly in the application of the fast moving consumer goods industry (FMCG) category management into healthcare. Category management is a process that aligned the diverging interests of suppliers and their local retailers by looking holistically at the market (category) to maximize the outcome of the interaction for both parties.
Thibaut was recently European Sales Force Effectiveness Manager at Takeda Europe where he worked on aligning the interests of the local subsidiaries to those of their only customers: local or national governments. This approach involved adapting the subsidiaries’ processes and organisational behaviours to those expected by the evolving customers. This organisational redesign involved all aspects of the subsidiary from HR policy, marketing support and messages to leading and rewarding the organisation whilst highlighting and sharing best national practices across Europe. Thibaut was previously in a similar national role within AstraZeneca UK and started his career with Sanofi in Romania.
Prior to joining AstraZeneca UK, Thibaut spent five years at Nestlé across different European subsidiaries where he became an expert in category management that lead him to leverage his expertise as a consultant for the Sara Lee Corporation in the USA.
Thibaut, a French national, received a BA in business administration from ESC Amiens in France and an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in the USA.