Managing Director at Kaye/Bassman, Michael Pietrack, Authored “The one person executives need by their side,” Featured in BioSpace

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Managing Director at Kaye/Bassman, Michael Pietrack, Authored “The one person executives need by their side,” Featured in BioSpace

Plano, TX | 8/24/2026

Michael Pietrack is a Managing Director at Kaye/Bassman International, an executive search and recruitment firm. Michael is a practice lead for Kaye/Bassman’s pharma and biotech recruiting team and host of “The Pharmaverse Podcast.” The following is an article published in BioSpace:

In this column of Leadership Lab, Kaye/Bassman’s Michael Pietrack discusses executives navigating the real-world pressures of leadership.

A few years ago, I sat across from a biotech founder who described his own company with more energy than most people reserve for their wedding day. He had the science down cold. He could explain the mechanism of action to a room of investors, leading scientists or fifth graders, and each would lean forward. He was brimming with ideas, brilliant ideas. What he could not do was triage them all, and most importantly, he could not pull ideas through to implementation.

Since that day, I’ve noticed this gap increasingly: The person generating the ideas is rarely the right person to implement them or even to decide which ones to implement. Why is this so important? The company with the best ideas doesn’t always win. It’s the one that gets the right ideas through to the finish line while the rest wait their turn.

But who is the person who decides and focuses on pull through? They’re the most important person an executive can have at their side: the implementer.

To be clear, “implementer” isn’t a title you’ll find on an org chart or a job posting. I use it because it names the actual function and why the person is so important. However, despite that importance, very few biopharma companies I’ve worked with have someone whose full-time job is deciding which ideas are worth the team’s time and then executing on them.

The executive who can’t stop generating ideas

Every startup needs somebody who sees the future before anyone else does. Let’s call that person the visionary. This leader is usually the founder, or perhaps the CEO, but it could be an executive at the top of a department. The gift of the visionary is also the challenge of the visionary: They never stop generating ideas. And, while each idea on its own might be worth pursuing, the volume can be overwhelming. Without an implementer filtering that stream, a leadership team ends up chasing whatever the executive pitched most recently instead of finishing what they already committed to.

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