HR's bitter pill

Most HR leaders know the pattern: the strategic workforce planning spreadsheet, the 40/30 resource allocation exercise, the onboarding programme that drags on for months, the leadership programme everyone defends and no one can prove works.

Tripti Jha stopped all of it. When Sandoz spun off from Novartis in October 2023, she inherited a function with no legacy to protect and a board that expected commercial results. Her response was to apply a discipline borrowed from capital markets: if something isn't earning its place within a defined window, you drop it. You don't defend it. You don't redesign it. You kill it.

In this 60-minute conversation with Hein Knaapen, she explains the specific choices she made, the outcomes that followed, and what other CHROs can take from the reset.

A lot of what she's willing to say, HR people will hate.

For CHROs and senior HR leaders running transformations now, or who know one is coming.

The Stop List is The Strategy

HR functions accumulate. Tripti Jha asked one question about each of them: what is this actually worth?

At Sandoz, that produced a stop list. Talent decisions served margin, not convention, procurement leaders from low-margin industries, not pharma peers.

Learning solutions with sub-10% usage were cut. Headcount moved from 24,000 to 22,000 while the portfolio grew, by dropping work that had stopped being relevant.