A rare mix of wit, charm, and global business acumen (not to mention an impressive golf game), has established Ronnie Miller as one of the key players in this country’s pharmaceutical sector. Yet Miller hasn’t forgotten the importance of fairness and respect when dealing with people, embracing his father’s wisdom, to “treat everyone else the way you’d like to be treated.” But being raised in Scotland may also have something to do with it: “You put your head above the parapet [and] you get shot,” jokes the President and CEO of Roche Canada.

Little wonder that the affable Scot has garnered a loyal following over his 28-year pharma career, which began in 1979 when he was a sales rep at Bayer (UK). From that position came a series of career enhancing moves—Regional Sales Manager, Product Manager, National Sales Manager—at a time when the industry was “vastly different”. Says Miller, “There were probably twice as many companies as there are now, and doctors were easier to see. If you worked hard you could make seven or eight calls to GPs in a single morning.” Moreover, “we sold four products at any one time to the doctor—that would be considered a luxury these days.”

In 1988, Miller was hired as National Sales Manager for Roche Products Ltd. in the UK, thereafter taking a series of globe trotting assignments: International Sales Manager for Neupogen at Roche’s head office in Switzerland, Marketing Director and Deputy Divisional Director of the Pharmaceutical Division in Japan, and back to head office to lead the Global Task Force for Xenical before landing full circle in the UK as Divisional Director of Pharmaceuticals.

By April 2000, Ronnie Miller was at the helm of Roche’s Canadian operation, where his personable leadership style would be immediately felt. Indeed, one of his proudest achievements over the seven years has been seeing Roche Canada named as one of the 50 Best Employers in Canada by Report on Business magazine for the past four years. Becoming the number one hospital company to bring innovative drugs like Herceptin and Avastin to an increasingly conservative market was also a defining moment. “If you’d asked people about Roche 20 years ago, they would have known us as the Valium company and then you’d get into Hollywood movies and Valley of the Dolls. These days we truly are a leader in oncology.”

Moving forward, Miller sees the need for health systems to understand the value of diagnostics early in the patient care continuum. “I think that helps position Roche in its vision of delivering tailored medicines, so that we’ve got a test and a drug that will follow through from the test and treat the patient, so that ultimately we’ll get into more segmentation of patients…where we know with a high degree of accuracy if the drug will work or not. I think that’s becoming clearer in the research that Roche is doing and how the company is structuring its research to try and find those opportunities.”

In terms of general industry issues, Miller is frank about challenges involved as incoming chairman of Rx&D. “One of the things I’d like to try and do is bring some focus and clarity to what the association can bring, try to leave our competitiveness at the door, and work together to overcome some of the obstacles that I think the Canadian environment lays down. Access to medicines these days is a huge issue. We’ve done our best at shoring up what the industry used to be, but I think we need to be more forward-thinking and say, ‘There are major challenges for all companies to get [medicines] listed and reimbursed.’ Canada may be a Western, civilized society but it is lagging behind, not only in approval times, but in the reimbursement of some of these new innovative medicines.”

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