Role of Business

TAKEAWAY: Role of Business

COLES:
You’ve made a compelling case for the leadership stance, for the need for future investment to take care of all the opportunities we have for scientific innovation. What are we missing as a society? What do we not see that’s very clear for you?

FRAZIER: 
First of all, I actually do think government is failing to solve our biggest problems across the board, and I think you can see that with the way people look at government. I think business now has a really important role in solving all kinds of societal problems.

When you say what’s missing—I got asked by one of the senators, just give me the solution. And I said, no, that’s a cop out. I’m not going to play that game with you. Anybody who says I know how to fix health care, and here it is in one sentence, it’s an unserious conversation. It’s like what are we going to do about education? The fact of the matter is as a country, we’re not educating our young people. We have to import talent in a company like Merck. Something like 60% of our biostatisticians are Chinese nationals, because we just can’t get people with the mathematical skills. We should not be in that position.

So I have to say that I think the answer to your question is that smart people have to sit down and say we’ve developed a system over time that is not working for us anymore. It’s costing too much. It’s delivering too little value. How do we now set up a new system and then how do we migrate from the bad system we have to the new system? That’s complicated. But I’m willing—and I said there, and I mean it—I’m willing to have Merck sit at that table to try to solve some of these health care issues.

I’ll say one more thing about the role of business. You know our country is incredibly divided now. It’s no longer the case that if somebody doesn’t agree with you on a political issue, you just disagree. That person today is your enemy. And we can’t afford to have a country in which we are increasingly armed camps of people who don’t understand one another.

If you start to think about it, our society is more separated than it’s ever been. Our schools are more segregated. We tend to live in communities that are enclaves of people that are like us. Because of social media and cable, you can go and listen to people who already agree with your point of view. I think the workplace is the last place in the United States where people can’t choose to interact with people who are like them and think like them. So I think business has an incredible role to play in helping us as a republic stay together, and I think business leaders have to step up to that. Because again, as I think about it, the workplace is the last place where Americans interact.