Bausch + Lomb is one of the world’s leading eye health companies, known for its wide range of contact lens, lens care, pharmaceutical, and surgical products. Chairman and CEO Brent Saunders sat down with BCG’s Torben Danger to discuss the company’s focus on innovation, customers, and the sales force. The conversation also touched on leadership lessons, digital and AI , and making products more affordable.
When you began your stint as CEO of Bausch + Lomb, what were the first areas you wanted to focus on?
I wanted to focus on top-line sales growth, operational excellence , and innovation. Top-line growth was about valuing those frontline salespeople, reestablishing that trusted relationship with our customers, and giving the salespeople all the tools necessary to do their job. Once you get that top line going, it’s a lot easier to invest in other areas.
Second, operational excellence. Can we make our products with the quality and efficiency that they deserve and the margins we expect?
Lastly, can we invest in innovation with confidence, supplementing our R&D team to drive innovation and feel comfortable? Most innovation in our industry is a long-term bet and high risk. You need to de-risk with talented scientists.
I feel really good about the progress we’ve made, although we still have a lot of work to do.
You’ve held many senior management positions in the biopharmaceutical industry. What are the leadership rules that you most consistently follow when facing today’s challenges?
What distinguishes any successful biopharmaceutical or medtech company is products solving for real medical need, really helping patients. You do that through meaningful innovation. So the value of your R&D and all the processes that support innovation, whether it be business development and licensing or just internal processes around how to source and find great innovation, is paramount.
The second is a focus on customers. It tunes your culture in to the real needs of the population you’re trying to solve problems for. In addition, you look for ways to solve things like affordable medicine or reimbursement. You look for ways to help your physicians interact with you around medical education or scientific discovery in ways that are perhaps better, therefore giving your products a better chance to shine in that environment.
How do you embed this customer focus in your day-to-day operations?
You can’t just snap your fingers and create a customer-centric environment. As a CEO or as a leader, you walk the walk. So I’m constantly out in the field talking with customers, riding with sales reps, standing at the booth at conventions, and interacting or going to medical programs or dinners. I see customers—if not every day, every week—and they all have my cell phone number and can interact with me. That sets an example at the top that the cascades through the organization. Whether you’re the CFO or you’re the head of HR, you’re still expected to get out in the field because all of us at the top have that same obligation.
In addition, I prioritize our frontline salespeople as the most important people in the company because they are the tip of the spear. When you go out and you ask a customer, “What is Bausch + Lomb to you?” they will generally answer with the name of their sales representative, not our products.
I spend a lot of time making sure our sales reps have the best resources to do their job. I always say that I’m overhead. Most people in headquarters are overhead. Our job, every day, is we should wake up and say, “What have we done to help support a sales rep?”
How do you equip salespeople with the support they need to do their job?
We prioritize them in terms of career planning, professional development, training, and all the tools and technologies. It’s consistent, steady prioritization of those colleagues that make, sell, or invent our products.
What is your main lesson when it comes to mentorship for future leaders?
One is it works both ways. When you get involved in mentoring someone younger, you as the mentor also learn a lot, you get a fresh perspective. Maybe you get introduced to technologies or ways of doing things that you hadn’t thought about.
How do you find the right balance between creating accountability and performance focus on one hand, but also creativity and innovation on the other?
Changing a culture is a long game—particularly at Bausch + Lomb, with close to 14,000 employees, spread out all over the world—but it is an important part of our success story. I’m trying to embed a sense of ownership into our DNA. I always say, “This isn’t my company, it’s our company.” I’m trying to empower everyone to own our culture and be part of creating the best eye health company.
I don’t like group decision-making—I like individual accountability. It’s okay to fail, but let’s talk about that failure so we can learn from it. You learn some of your best lessons that way.
Your pharma strategy focuses on dry eye and retinal diseases. How does that fit into the overall growth story, and what are some of the early successes?
We have three different businesses: pharma, vision care, and surgical. While all three have slightly different strategies, they all focus on being the best eye health company. For example, in our pharma business, we wanted to be a leader in dry eye. So one of the first things I did was acquire the drug XIIDRA® from Novartis. That way, when our own dry eye drug was approved and launched, we would have the two best assets in that class.
We’ve also invested in R&D talent to expand our retina capabilities, and we’ve focused early business development and licensing around retina opportunities. The goal is, in three to five years, to start really talking about solving some unmet needs for patients.
Digital, AI, and GenAI are changing our world, and especially health care. How is Bausch + Lomb using new technologies to improve operational performance?
We established an office of digital transformatio n and have had some really good early success. We started in our manufacturing operations to improve the efficiency of our contact lens lines. We’re also using AI in our R&D organization, particularly as it relates to unmet need in retina, where we have a great database of patient records from retina specialists. We’re scanning all the mechanisms of action to look for targets where we may be able to make a difference.
We’re using AI commercially as well in our CRM system for our sales reps. And we’re using AI now as a management tool to help with planning and budgeting.
But it’s beyond AI. We’re looking at digital expansion for direct to consumer. We now have a digital platform in China, and just launched a digital platform called Opal in the US. We’ve also invested substantially in internal digital and AI capabilities.
The next two years are probably going to be the most transformative with respect to using these technologies to improve productivity and efficiency inside the business.
What kinds of tools do you give to your colleagues, and also health care professionals and eye care professionals, to better serve customers and patients?
We focus on medical education. We’ve invested significantly in programs concerning different disease conditions and the tools available to the medical field to solve them. It’s different in each part of the business. In the surgical business, it may be more hands-on training, it may be wet labs, it may be helping them understand different surgical techniques. In pharma or vision care, it may be more product education or disease-state management education. But it runs the gamut depending on the business and the regulations.
What is Bausch + Lomb doing to make products more affordable?
We have patient assistance programs, and we also look at ways of contracting with health payers mostly to make sure that we get coverage of our products in an affordable manner with a minimum copay. We also make a lot of branded generic medicines that generally have zero copay.
What excites you most when you think about eye care of the future?
I am super excited about where the science is going. There are still so many diseases that can lead to truly devastating outcomes. For example, glaucoma. There are lots of glaucoma medicines, but 30% of people will still lose visual function over time.
My hope is that with our own RD capabilities, our newly AI-enabled R&D, and other techniques, we can continue to invest and solve some of these really big problems.
