NEW YORK — More than 30 years ago, Pfizer chief corporate affairs officer Sally Susman moved professionally from Capitol Hill to corporate America, with a “theory in my head that if you go to a great company, you might have a chance, as in government, to do good work.”

"I believe we are uniquely placed to make a difference,” Susman said.

What making that difference takes was a running theme of a Q&A with Susman Thursday at the Conference Board’s corporate comms conference in New York, during which she discussed her take on leadership and transformation of in-house comms as well as her book, “Breaking Through.”

Susman, who managed Pfizer's communications during the pandemic, emphasized the value of leadership and tenacity during the eight months Pfizer spent developing a Covid vaccine — a process that more typically takes a dozen years.

"I decided I was going to use that time to turn around the reputation of Pfizer and big pharma," Susman said.  She detailed unconventional tactics, such as making Pfizer's intellectual property accessible on its website and granting access to journalists and a documentary filmmaker without knowing whether the pharmaceutical giant would succeed in its quest for a vaccine.

“You are documenting potentially the biggest debacle in corporate history,” Susman said. “But I also knew that if we failed the world would have bigger problems than a bad news day for Pfizer. And if we succeeded, we had a story that we wanted to tell for the rest of our lives.”

Those risks paid off in in full in August 2021, when the FDA approved Pfizer’s Covid vaccine — the first of its kind.

“The outcome was a scientific transformation, a reputational transformation …  and I like to say a personal transformation for me,” Susman said.

That experience was one of the drivers behind Susman’s book, which was published last March. In it, Susman highlights  principals behind her leadership strategy, and what it took to win skeptical consumers over.

Susman emphasized the importance of communicators setting goals and backing up the motives for achieving them.

"I encourage people in communications to be deeply intentional," she said. "You need really solid reasons to do something. You have to have the courage to do that."