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100 Day Reflections: A Q&A with Our CCO Sam Pearce

We are dedicated to delivering transformative medicines for communities with high unmet medical needs. As part of this commitment, we not only drive innovative science but also strive for commercial excellence to ensure treatments reach those in need. In line with this focus, we created a new role in 2024: Chief Commercial Officer. Sam Pearce stepped into this position in August of that year, bringing with her an established track record of effectively scaling commercial operations to achieve transformational growth and accelerate patient access to medicines across geographies.

With her first 100 days now behind her, we sat down with Sam to reflect on her initial experiences and her vision for the future. Sam explains that while efforts to listen and learn in the first months are formative, it is her ability to translate insights into meaningful action that will build a sustainable commercial organization in the long term.

What have been your focus areas for the first few months of the position?

Wow, I can’t believe it’s been three months already; it’s been a whirlwind start to an incredibly busy yet energizing role. My appointment also led to the creation of a new Global Commercialization Organization for Jazz, aimed at building the capabilities we need to thrive in a rapidly changing environment. One immediate change I made in my first 100 days was to unite and strengthen our Medical Affairs capability by creating the role of Chief Medical Affairs Officer under the CCO organization as well.

When I take on a new role, it’s important to me to meet my teams and understand our challenges and opportunities. I’ve done this through small listening sessions, meeting over a third of our global commercialization organization in the process. I’ve been hugely impressed by the global talent in our organization and the work being done to serve our customers and patients. These sessions have also sharpened my perspective on where we need to build for the future.

Our goals are ambitious: making a meaningful impact for patients, achieving growth, delivering sustained value to our shareholders, developing our pipeline, and creating a great place to work for our employees. The organization I’m leading has focused intensely on key milestones, including the commercial launch of one of Jazz’s oncology medicines. At the same time, I’ve needed to consider the landscape in which we operate, our capabilities, and our long-term strategy for success.

When you were appointed, you spoke about “unlocking the potential of our business”. How are you working towards that in your role?

Jazz is at a truly exciting point of its development journey. As a company we’ve scaled our portfolio, pipeline, and footprint in recent years and, with global brands and a late-stage pipeline of assets, we have the opportunity to drive significant improvement in patient outcomes.

Having led Jazz’s Europe and International region for the past four years, I have the benefit of a global perspective, and one thing that strikes me moving into this global role, is the universality of our challenges and opportunities – we’re focused on the same problems either side of the Atlantic yet we too often default to a bifurcated strategy, when it comes to engaging with our customers, and building our core capabilities as a business. One key “value unlock” will be creating an aligned organization under a globally unified strategy, which in practice means breaking down silos across our business and building a differentiated customer capability to ensure that we are always focused on delivering for the people who rely on us in the best possible way.

How would you describe your leadership style?

Being an authentic leader is important to me. I strive to be transparent, approachable, and genuine in my interactions with others to build that trust needed to foster open communication, collaboration and an environment where people feel confident to share their ideas.

In my past role at Jazz, I am proud of the effort I led driving high performance across our team leading to high impact. To achieve our results, we encouraged employees to embrace a growth mindset, seek feedback and hold themselves and others accountable for these practices. This may sound obvious, but this concerted focus on high performance behaviors really did drive impact and encouraged continued innovation and today positions our teams to do the best work for patients and the organization for long-term success.

Can we consider ending on a more personal note... what do you do for fun?

Absolutely! I’ve moved countries before but this is my first time as a resident in the US. I've thoroughly enjoyed exploring the differences in culture, landscapes and way of life. I’m an avid skier and love the outdoors so it’s perhaps unsurprising that me and my husband (and two dogs) decided to settle in Colorado, as this location not only gives me great access to an international airport, but also the mountains. It’s a great opportunity to leverage our Jazz Remix flexible working model where we are remote first for most roles. Anyone that’s worked with me knows not to schedule meetings in late June, when I have a firm appointment to be at the Glastonbury festival each year. For anyone not familiar, this is a legendary five-day festival of performing arts on a farm in Somerset England, with great music, camping and depending on how much rainfall they’ve had that year, a lot of mud! I’m still looking for a U.S. equivalent so if you have any recommendations, please get in touch!