As Jordan Cohen, a Pfizer manager, was leaving his office late one night, he noticed a highly talented colleague furiously working away at his desk, trying to clear his in-tray so it didn’t pile up for the next day. This gave Cohen an idea.

Seeing his colleague stuck in meetings all day, and then working after hours to complete menial tasks, seemed to Cohen a waste of his talents. What’s more, in 2005, Pfizer was in the middle of implementing a sweeping program to standardize processes and improve productivity through a global initiative called “Adapting to Scale.” Cohen felt it was time to see if the pharmaceutical giant was prepared to put its money where its mouth was.

First, he had to get to grips with the scale of the problem. Using his internal network, he convinced 12 volunteers to monitor how they spent their time over a six-month period. The results revealed that the employees were regularly bogged down doing basic data gathering and analysis, and preparing slide shows – tasks for which they were overqualified.

Cohen began brainstorming the best solution. Rather than thinking in terms of existing resources and departmental targets, he wanted to somehow boost the individual productivity of each employee. Inspired by Thomas Friedman’s book, The World Is Flat, Cohen started to wonder: Would it be possible to offshore the grunt work – not by shifting jobs or departments overseas, but by shifting the tasks? In other words, could he create a service that allowed everybody in Pfizer to have their own virtual assistants, hiring them on a per-project basis, as and when needed?

With this in mind, Cohen began to read up on networking, sourcing and contracting with emerging economies. The more he explored, the more he became convinced that his “pfizerWorks” plan could work, but there was one hurdle: As a humble middle manager with no positional power, how was he going to sell his idea to those at the top?

The Idea Takes Shape
To move ahead, Cohen needed a strong team, so he brought together Seth Appel, an external hire with offshoring experience, and Tanya Carr-Waldron, an internal employee who had cultivated a vast network of personal contacts during her 20 years at Pfizer. They set up a pilot program, using a small office in Chennai, India.

Part of the challenge was convincing Pfizer employees to start sending tasks to Chennai. However, talk of “offshoring to India” tended to make people jumpy: Were their own jobs next? This was where their network of trusted contacts came in handy, because Cohen and his cohorts were able to coax 50 people on board who were game for their little experiment.

As things got under way, there were the inevitable hiccups, and Cohen spent a lot of time mollifying people. But even the glitches gave them vital feedback, which enabled them to iron out the kinks in their system. The users of the pilot grew increasingly enthusiastic.

Armed with these results, Cohen felt he had the makings of a business case – but several new questions arose.

First, was the time right to present it to senior management? Getting the green light for the pilot had been relatively easy: His idea fit within the corporate “Adapting to Scale” drive, the budget was small and it wasn’t taking up too much work time. But getting management to roll out pfizerWorks on a grand scale across the organization – well, that was another story. Should he spend another six to 12 months getting it 100 percent right? Just present what he had and perfect it as he went along? Or argue for taking it big, anchoring pfizerWorks as a core service in the organization and investing in building strong capacity in this area?

Second, how should he explain or position the new service to employees? As a cost-saving tool, a productivity aid or something else? And how would he deal with the negative associations with outsourcing?

Finally, what about his personal stakes? If he placed all his bets on pfizerWorks and it flopped, as many innovations do, he could damage his career prospects. On the other hand, putting his own neck on the line could get upper management’s attention and show them that he was serious – though if it went wrong, they might just fire him.

Hear Jordan Cohen discussing the case of pfizerWorks, which is available from IESE Publishing.