By: Joshua Finley

Julien Willard is an economist and digital strategy executive known for his integrity, strategic thinking, and dedication to leveraging technology to drive positive change. His career has traversed diverse industries – from public health to management consulting – yet common threads run throughout: a passion for problem-solving, a focus on human needs, and unrelenting honesty.

Julien recently sheds light on the experiences, lessons, and principles guiding his work. While not dwelling on the past, he touches on formative challenges as an outlier child and his drive to advocate for marginalized communities. Underpinning it all is a philosophy of listening, relationship building, and empowerment.

Early Life: Difference as a Catalyst for Change

Julien faced adversity from a young age. Just a few decades ago, as a gifted student with extraordinary intellectual abilities, he was singled out for being different. “You can be the worst performer in a class and an outlier, and everybody’s pointing at you and eager to bully,” he reflects. “And you can be the best performer in the class and still an outlier, and everybody’s pointing at you too. You just can’t win.”

The bullying took a toll, compounded by lack of allies at school or among friends. In finding his way alone, Julien discovered a determination to advocate for those without support systems. He set his sights on medicine and science as vehicles for enacting change. And with LGBT friends suffering from lack of HIV treatment access in Moscow and neighboring countries, he found a cause needing his problem-solving skills.

Core Principles Forged Through Patient Advocacy

In recounting his decades of work in medical school, global public health, and consulting, Julien highlights relationship building, honest communication, and community participation as linchpins for making progress.

He stresses the primacy of listening first, researching context, and only then asking thoughtful questions. “You can’t be showing up and doing something to the community or imposing actions on the people,” he states. “You need to demonstrate knowledge and respect for their current status, earn respect through thoughtful action, and you need to involve the people—the beneficiaries—into the process.”

Likewise, Julien believes honesty breeds solutions. As he bluntly puts it: “You have to be honest with each other to get to the bottom of the problem.” Though his directness has drawn criticism in the past, he now embraces it as his “secret sauce” for establishing trust and making difficult calls others avoid.

Solving Today’s Problems with AI’s Help

When it comes to artificial intelligence, Julien provides a sobering perspective. He cautions against both the hype and hysteria, clarifying AI will not achieve human-level reasoning anytime soon. “We are very, very far from an intelligence threat,” he says. What AI offers instead is augmentation of human strengths through taking over repetitive tasks. “AI offers incredible capabilities in terms of assistance in decision-making and forecasting,” Julien adds.

As a consultant, Julien sees AI as moving the needle at earlier phases so he can devote energy to higher-level analysis. It facilitates information gathering and preparation so he can quickly move to problem solving, hypotheses creation, and analysis. He gives the example of AI swiftly doing market research based on the latest investor presentations and transcripts from companies’ senior executives.

In his pharmaceutical consulting work, AI similarly helps expedite manual data tasks, freeing talent to do what they spent years learning to do—research and development. “Practical applications of AI in biopharma today really give speed to what used to take months and years,” Julien continues. But he stresses you can’t advise on technology without direct experience. He used to be well-versed in R and Python when he was doing hands-on data science work in economics. “You have to roll up the sleeves and learn early on to grasp capabilities, best practices, and limits.” This hands-on perspective lets him guide clients toward transformational solutions with integrity. “Right now, many consultants have swapped their ‘public cloud’ hats for ‘generative AI’ hats without really doing any hands-on work themselves.”

Guiding Clients to Serve Patient Needs

While Julien works with executives day-to-day, the people—the patient community—remain his north star. He sees his problem-solving role as reducing research bottlenecks so life-changing innovations get delivered sooner. Or ensuring supply chain transparency so vulnerable communities aren’t subject to fraudulent medicines.

But just as critical is the trust he establishes with leadership teams. “I literally try to step in their shoes and imagine I am currently in their role,” Julien explains of his focused approach. By building relationships where clients feel heard, understood as humans, and empowered in their vision, he helps unlock their potential for impact.

To learn more about Julien and his approach, get in touch with him via LinkedIn or visit his website here.

Published by: Holy Minoza