Culture as Catalyst
Moderna defines its Mindsets to preserve its future.
In early 2020, Moderna delivered a Covid-19 vaccine for human clinical trial in just 42 days from finalizing the sequence for the vaccine, setting a record for the drug industry. But what seemed like a miracle was engineered by a culture that embraced speed and accepted risk, setting the stage not just for rapid development of a Covid vaccine, but for work on potential breakthrough products against other viruses and diseases, and even cancer. As the company went through a phase of extraordinary growth to protect millions of people around the world as quickly as possible, it faced an existential threat: Bringing in hundreds of new people from more established pharma companies could dilute its entrepreneurial culture, the very foundation Moderna was built on, and make the platform company less prepared to take on new diseases in the future. In 2021, Moderna partnered with IDEO to help codify its culture and values into a set of Mindsets that drive crucial innovation, a business imperative that has set the stage for its next goal: advancing its broad, diverse portfolio to deliver transformative mRNA medicines for patients.
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When the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the Covid-19 health crisis a pandemic in March of 2020, Moderna had fewer than 1,000 employees. Four years later, it’s more than five times the size.
In just 42 days from finalizing the sequence for the vaccine, Moderna sent a Covid-19 vaccine candidate to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for human clinical trials; getting ready to deliver it at scale was the next challenge. And that meant scaling the company’s functions and processes, as well as hiring hundreds of employees from outside the biotech industry, from organizations with establishment cultures that are sometimes slow, bureaucratic, territorial, and cautious.
Moderna could be a bit of a paradox for incoming employees: While the company's smaller size once made its culture and norms clear and tangible, its rapid growth and commercialization made these aspects increasingly challenging to understand for new employees. Moderna was facing a complicated merger/integration of new people with their culture and needed to act fast.
Many companies view culture-building initiatives as nice-to-have. At Moderna, Mindsets are a business imperative, crucial to its plans to develop breakthrough products quickly.
For companies working on solutions as vital as a Covid-19 vaccine, delays and mistakes don’t just mean missing a product launch date—they’re life or death, and on a large scale. Moderna had to ensure that its employees knew how to make the right decisions, evaluate risk, and move quickly—even if they came from organizations with more bureaucracy and less risk tolerance. In 2021, IDEO sat down with long-time Moderna veterans to hear stories about moments that exemplify company culture, like the day a critical piece of equipment arrived, but was too big to fit through the door. Taking it apart would have added days to their timeline. So employees took sledgehammers to a wall instead. Stories like this one fed into crafting the list of Mindsets, like “Act with urgency: Action today compounds the lives saved tomorrow,” and “We behave like owners: The solutions we’re building go beyond any job description.”
To gather feedback, the team shared the draft Mindsets with a diverse set of employees—new hires, veterans, folks already closely-aligned with the culture, folks for whom it wasn’t the most natural fit, and a plethora of employee resource groups. CEO Stéphane Bancel and the leadership team took the crafting and iterating of the Mindsets very seriously, wordsmithing and tweaking with the team until they were ready to share them officially. Now, new hires learn about the company’s Mindsets in Moderna ONE, an onboarding process that IDEO helped revamp, while existing employees attended a workshop to make sure that everyone at the company knows not only what to do, but how to do it effectively inside Moderna. In a matter of weeks, IDEO was able to help the company codify its culture for its employees, and set the company up for continued success. Moderna continues to embed these Mindsets across the entire employee lifecycle to systematically scale its culture.
For employees new and old, the clarity of the Mindsets has made it easier to understand expectations, and to understand the company itself. Long-term veterans responded with comments like, "These really help explain why we're working this way,” while one newbie said, "It feels like a homecoming to hear the culture that we’re trying to bring through.” But more than just solving a cultural issue, the new Mindsets have fulfilled a business imperative: Holding on to the secret sauce that made Moderna successful to begin with, setting the stage for its next five years of breakthroughs.
Many companies view culture-building initiatives as nice-to-have. At Moderna, Mindsets are a business imperative, crucial to its plans to develop breakthrough products quickly.
For companies working on solutions as vital as a Covid-19 vaccine, delays and mistakes don’t just mean missing a product launch date—they’re life or death, and on a large scale. Moderna had to ensure that its employees knew how to make the right decisions, evaluate risk, and move quickly—even if they came from organizations with more bureaucracy and less risk tolerance. In 2021, IDEO sat down with long-time Moderna veterans to hear stories about moments that exemplify company culture, like the day a critical piece of equipment arrived, but was too big to fit through the door. Taking it apart would have added days to their timeline. So employees took sledgehammers to a wall instead. Stories like this one fed into crafting the list of Mindsets, like “Act with urgency: Action today compounds the lives saved tomorrow,” and “We behave like owners: The solutions we’re building go beyond any job description.”
To gather feedback, the team shared the draft Mindsets with a diverse set of employees—new hires, veterans, folks already closely-aligned with the culture, folks for whom it wasn’t the most natural fit, and a plethora of employee resource groups. CEO Stéphane Bancel and the leadership team took the crafting and iterating of the Mindsets very seriously, wordsmithing and tweaking with the team until they were ready to share them officially. Now, new hires learn about the company’s Mindsets in Moderna ONE, an onboarding process that IDEO helped revamp, while existing employees attended a workshop to make sure that everyone at the company knows not only what to do, but how to do it effectively inside Moderna. In a matter of weeks, IDEO was able to help the company codify its culture for its employees, and set the company up for continued success. Moderna continues to embed these Mindsets across the entire employee lifecycle to systematically scale its culture.
For employees new and old, the clarity of the Mindsets has made it easier to understand expectations, and to understand the company itself. Long-term veterans responded with comments like, "These really help explain why we're working this way,” while one newbie said, "It feels like a homecoming to hear the culture that we’re trying to bring through.” But more than just solving a cultural issue, the new Mindsets have fulfilled a business imperative: Holding on to the secret sauce that made Moderna successful to begin with, setting the stage for its next five years of breakthroughs.
“These Mindsets not only guide decision-making, but they are also designed to make it clear to employees what company leadership cares about and how we work together. Our collaboration with IDEO in defining our Mindsets helped lay the groundwork to ensure we could scale our culture.”
