#WeLeadComms: Javier Boix

Switzerland-based Javier Boix is today’s #WeLeadComms honoree.

Javier has spent more than twenty years in corporate affairs across global healthcare, and in multiple geographies. His job has taken him and his family from Barcelona to Madrid, to Chicago, and now to Basel, where he lives with his wife and four children (well, the eldest is now at university in Milan…).

In his most recent role as Global Head of Communications & Patient Advocacy, International at Novartis, he ran a team of roughly 235 people across 45 markets — with a focus on three pillars: corporate reputation, policy shaping and patient activation in Europe, Asia and Latin America. The work meant advising senior leaders through stretches of heavy public and political scrutiny, and steering communications around global product launches where the clinical, commercial and reputational stakes were all high at once.

Before Novartis, he led U.S. communications at AbbVie through the years of intense attention on Humira. It’s the kind of assignment that teaches you what holds up under pressure and what doesn’t — lessons he’s more interested in sharing than the headline numbers. He started his career at Edelman, in what he defines as an experience that taught him all the basics – from sending press releases via fax to writing good press releases.

These days he’s testing his own thinking in public. He hosts The Reputation Room, a podcast sitting at the intersection of reputation, business and leadership. Each episode is a conversation with a senior leader in the reputation space about the things that keep us busy today: from geopolitics to artificial intelligence to decision-making to the importance of good judgment.

Away from work, he’s a sports obsessive and a long-distance runner — marathons and ultramarathons, mostly — which is either a healthy outlet or proof that he doesn’t know when to stop. Possibly both.

Multilingual and based in Switzerland, his favourite quote is: “The only person you should be better than is the person you were yesterday.” (Jordan B. Peterson) 

If any of this is your terrain too, he’d like to hear how you see it.

Links to The Reputation Room: YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts.

+++