Naji Gehchan: Welcome to SpreadLove in Organizations, the healthcare leadership podcast where we explore leadership with purpose.
I’m Naji, your host, joined today by Kylie Wagner, a commercial executive with more than 20 years of experience leading growth, portfolio performance, and launches across rare, specialty, and chronic markets. Kylie currently leads marketing and business unit customer engagement at Takeda, where she is responsible for commercial strategy and P&L performance for a complex portfolio. Her work centers on translating scientific innovation into real-world adoption by aligning strategy, access, and customer engagement. She builds organizations grounded in trust and accountability so teams can perform in uncertainty and turn strategy into consistent results. In addition to her commercial leadership roles, she previously served as Chief of Staff to the U.S. Business Unit President, supporting enterprise strategy across the organization. Kylie holds an Executive MBA from MIT Sloan, and this is how we met. Kylie, I’m really excited to have you with me today.
Kylie Wagner: Yes, thank you so much. I appreciate you bringing me on your show.
Naji Gehchan: Of course. Well, we’ll start where we always do. Tell us your story. What shaped you, and how did you find your way into commercial leadership and healthcare?
Kylie Wagner: Yeah, like many people, there are a few experiences that really shaped how I think and how I operate. I’d be remiss if I didn’t start where I grew up. I’m a Midwestern girl. I grew up in the Midwest, and I really grew up in two different environments. That showed me early on that performance is often reflected by the system you operate within, because capabilities can exist in any environment. Because of that system and opportunities, I was also able to take advantage of being a successful athlete. I was a competitive tennis player growing up and played through college. That showed me early that results are really driven through consistency, structure, and preparation. Many times, what I learned through it is that what you hope to achieve doesn’t always work out, and so you learn resilience and how to rethink things. As I reflect on my 20 years in the industry, in commercial roles across rare, specialty, and chronic therapeutic areas, I’ve gained a different perspective. I’m able to identify patterns maybe that others don’t see, and I’ve really built this enterprise lens that has become my decision-making framework as a business leader. A lot of those experiences taught me that outcomes rarely come from a singular team, but more so from how business decisions are made in organizations — or not made. If you better understand those systems and design that through teams, you can help impact patient care, which ultimately is why I’m here.
Naji Gehchan: I love this. And you immediately went into systems. I have in mind all the system dynamics we certainly worked through at MIT. But it’s really an important piece, right? The environment creates those systems and the culture for people to be at their best. Before diving into strategy and how you lead this, why healthcare? How did you end up at Takeda from being a tennis player and all that you had done before?
Kylie Wagner: Great question. My decision to get into pharma is actually very personal. Growing up, I watched my father, who was a veteran, struggle with mental health. Outcomes became very real to me early on, watching the complexity of how my parents navigated that. For me, it became real that to truly make an impact, you have to think differently. Joining this industry was about trying to be a voice for patients who didn’t necessarily have that voice themselves. That’s really my North Star.
Naji Gehchan: That’s powerful. Tell me more about strategy. This is what you do today, and a lot of people dream about doing strategy and influencing especially in our industry. As you think about team strategy, execution, and operations, where do you most see strategy actually failing, and how do you ensure it turns into impact for patients?
Kylie Wagner: That’s a great question because there’s always a lot of talk about strategy. You absolutely have to get it right. You need a solid commercial strategy that drives a brand or a portfolio, but also the bigger enterprise goals. It also has to create competitive advantage, especially in a noisy environment. But I think where organizations fail is execution. We don’t always get the execution right. Decisions, especially in large matrix organizations, can get stalled. If you don’t have a clear operating structure and the ability to move decisions forward faster, ultimately patients don’t get helped. So all that great strategic work goes down the tubes. It doesn’t matter how great your strategy is if you can’t execute it.
Naji Gehchan: Let me go there because it’s always extremely important to set the strategy. But when I talk with people earlier in their careers, there’s often a lot of talk about wanting to be in strategy and not operations. What is your perspective on that?
Kylie Wagner: My diversity of experience has taught me that operations matter. Actually, it’s embedded in everything that you do. You’re not going to sit around a room and just talk about strategy if you can’t deliver it. It’s the day-to-day execution of how you build operating systems within your teams and cross-functional ecosystem that drives progress. Operations is embedded in everything, and those decisions then drive the culture you build and the teams able to deliver innovation. Strategy doesn’t live by itself, even though job descriptions sometimes make it seem that way.
Naji Gehchan: You mentioned team culture. In a volatile environment like biotech and pharma, how do you build a team that can perform under uncertainty rather than be overwhelmed by it?
Kylie Wagner: That’s imperative in healthcare today. I always like to challenge teams toward innovation — fail fast, try things differently. We have to get out of traditional ways of thinking for commercial models and portfolios. Yes, fundamentals matter, but there are also digital solutions that help us connect with patients faster. I try to embed a curious mindset into teams and leverage their expertise. People often think leaders need all the answers, but I actually believe if you build a team with a great mix of experiences and pause to listen and ask great questions, you unlock talent and pure innovation ideas that can truly change how we work. That’s when it starts to get really fun.
Naji Gehchan: Something you anchored on is trust and accountability as you build organizations. Tell me more about your philosophy on leadership.
Kylie Wagner: My leadership philosophy has evolved over time with experience — doing things right and wrong. I think about it as slowing down to speed up. Slowing down becomes critically important when you lead larger teams. You can’t do everything yourself. As a former competitive athlete, I like to win and drive results relentlessly. But when you lead people leaders, you have to learn how to execute through others. Slowing down means teaching them how to evaluate trade-off decisions, understand enterprise strategy, and see how today’s decisions impact future launches and portfolios. By building judgment in others, they’re able to drive the business, and that’s when speed really happens.
Naji Gehchan: Do you have any tips about building trust?
Kylie Wagner: First, you start with trust. I assume the best intentions in people, and I treat others the way I want to be treated. It sounds basic, but it has a real place in business. You can be accountable, deliver, and still have mutual respect. The way you build it is by spending time with people and building relationships. Through that, they become vulnerable with you and vice versa. That trust strengthens. Then, when you are in crisis or under extreme pressure, people know how you operate, and they know that very few decisions are irreversible. That creates the environment where people thrive.
Naji Gehchan: As you think about the next generation of healthcare commercial leaders, what mindset or capability will differentiate those who truly shape the future?
Kylie Wagner: How quickly we lean into digital technology and data-driven decision-making. The next generation is already ahead of us in many ways. I love building teams that have those strengths so they can teach others. Organizations also need to be willing to challenge the status quo and take chances on doing things differently if we truly want to reshape the industry.
Naji Gehchan: I’m going to give you a word, and I’d love the first thing that comes to mind. Leadership.
Kylie Wagner: Role modeling, trusting your team, and creating an environment where they can achieve both their goals and the organization’s.
Naji Gehchan: Pharma.
Kylie Wagner: Responsibility. We all have a responsibility to find better ways to reach patients, help patients, and move faster. If we can’t create and execute a commercial strategy, then we’ve done a disservice to people.
Naji Gehchan: EMBA.
Kylie Wagner: The best professional gift I could have given myself. I learned frameworks that I apply daily. It helped me identify problems faster and build sustainable solutions, plus an amazing community.
Naji Gehchan: Do you have a preferred framework?
Kylie Wagner: One of the early frameworks we learned in organizational processes — the three lenses. It pops up every day. Culture, structure and strategy, and the political lens are all critical to move decisions through an organization.
Naji Gehchan: The last word is spread love in organizations.
Kylie Wagner: For me, spreading love starts with respect. Respect is also shown through clarity — clarity in priorities and decisions. Reducing confusion helps people be successful in both the short and long term.
Naji Gehchan: Any final word of wisdom for leaders around the world?
Kylie Wagner: I would challenge all of us to think differently in our industry and remember why we got into healthcare, pharma, and biotech — ultimately to help patients. We need to rethink our commercial organizations and models, embed more of a digital-first approach, and move decisions faster. Patients cannot and should not wait.
Naji Gehchan: Every day spent debating or dealing with internal barriers is a day less that a patient can get their treatment and feel better. With this, thank you so much, Kylie, again for being with me today and for this great chat.
Kylie Wagner: Thank you very much.
Naji Gehchan: Thanks for listening to the show! For more episodes, make sure to subscribe to Spreadloveio.com or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Let’s inspire change together and make a positive impact in healthcare, one story at a time.
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