RARE - Víctor Ferrero

​​Welcome to RARE; a blog dedicated to the rare disease industry by Laura Hulley, Principal Consultant at SciPro.​

RARE feat. Víctor Ferrero

For this episode of RARE, I welcomed Víctor Ferrero onto the blog to discuss a topic he feels passionately about – personal effectiveness. Víctor works as an Associate Director, Global Product Strategy, Gene Therapy at BioMarin having progressed through sales, multichannel strategy and marketing roles at Merck and Takeda. Víctor has a Business Education background, and he also completed his master's degree in Health Economics and Market Access. (It is important to note that the views and opinions expressed here are those of Víctor and do not represent the views or position of Biomarin).

Key takeaways

• Víctor was born and raised in Spain and has been living with his family in Dublin. He belongs to the Commercial team of BioMarin with a duty to launch a gene therapy for patients with a very rare bleeding disorder. Víctor is passionate about what he does and has a genuine interest in science, people and beyond rare diseases, he loves the oncology space.

• Personal effectiveness is important to Víctor for one overarching reason – life is too short. Time is very limited, but making good use of your time makes a huge difference. Looking back he has realized that leaders and colleagues whom he has admired throughout his career have been very effective at managing their time, regardless of their leadership style. These have become his role models and he has tried to emulate this.

• Víctor goes on to talk about how he prioritises his time. He creates an effective plan whether it is the day, the week, the month or even the year. He is proactive in making decisions, managing his agenda and not just completing his to-do list but prioritizing them.

• There are always challenges in managing your time successfully. He has identified his challenges when he often finds himself caught up in the whirlwind of a busy schedule, sometimes the tornado of urgency is difficult to manage and sometimes he is not consistent enough to really own his agenda and prioritise appropriately.

• Looking back on his career, the old Víctor was not as good at managing workload as he is now. He has learned a lot throughout his career, constantly reflecting on how each day can be better – how do we manage our inbox? How do we prioritise meetings? How do we prepare for meetings to ensure an efficient exchange?

• When talking about how we remain present in a post-covid world and more importantly take an active part in meetings (especially virtual ones), where we are consistently connected via Zoom or Teams he emphasizes the importance of calling out the “fear of missing out”. It is important to focus on the quality of meetings and not the quantity, take a step back, plan an agenda, and allocate time precisely.

• I finished by asking Víctor what habits we could adopt in order to influence others so that they could increase their own personal effectiveness. He goes on to reference a book he read by Stephen Covey – Habits of Highly Effective People with a few possibilities:

• Be proactive

• Act with the end in mind – envision success

• Think with a win-win mindset. Search for help. Synergise and collaborate.

• “Sharpen the saw” – listen more, talk less, analyse more, act less and make sure we fine-tune our plan before putting things in motion.

Thank you to Víctor for taking the time to feature. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out at l.hulley@sciproglobal.com