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In March 2020, when Eli Lilly announced that it would begin providing drive-through COVID testing services to the state of Indiana\u2019s healthcare workers, more than a few hospital administrators likely scratched their heads.

After all, the giant pharma company was not in the business of providing healthcare services, any more than it was a medical device manufacturer.  

Still, drive-through testing turned out to be just the most recent offshoot of an effort under way inside a specialized facility at Lilly Research Laboratories. As months turned to years, as much as 40 to 50 percent of all samples being tested within Indiana were to end up being processed by the Lilly facility.   

\u201cA CFO may look at this and rightly ask, \u2018What are the costs that are going to be required to establish this? What are the sets of risks associated with deciding to move forward with something like this?,\u2019\u201d observes Anat Ashkenazi, who at the time served as head of strategy and transformation for the pharma behemoth as well as CFO of Lilly\u2019s R&D arm.

For Ashkenazi, who would be named CFO of Lilly within 12 months of COVID\u2019s arrival in North America, the pandemic would become the ultimate testing ground and not just for the virus.

\u201cI remember walking into this office on the day that we announced that I was taking on the CFO role, and there were only three or four other people working on the whole floor\u2014the building was empty,\u201d remarks Ashkenazi, who had joined the company 20 years earlier with an MBA in hand from Tel Aviv University.  

Ashkenazi\u2019s appointment had been hastened due to the abrupt resignation of her CFO predecessor, who Lilly management had concluded had exhibited poor judgment when it came to a personal relationship in the work environment\u2014a management drama that would unfold as the pandemic bore down.

Asked to recall some of the challenges that she faced during the first 30 days of her CFO tenure, Ashkenazi comments, \u201cI would say that trying to build connections quickly with the management team with whom you\u2019ll be working was important and very difficult to do when you\u2019re virtual. That was one of the things that I had to figure out: \u2018How do I get this done?\u2019\u201d

Like all of us, Ashkenazi, a mother of three (between the ages of 11 and 17), faced challenges during the pandemic that tested the boundaries between work life and home life. Still, she seems intent on letting us know that her greatest lesson or takeaway from the pandemic has to do with Lilly's resolve to step up and become one of its community\u2019s primary testers.

Says Ashkenazi: \u201cWe can talk about ESG, but I don\u2019t think that you can run a firm successfully over many years without having a clear line of sight into your role in the community and acting on it.\u201d \u2013Jack Sweeney