Leadership Lessons with Stan Jackson, Global Public Affairs Lead, Pipeline & Portfolio at Astellas Pharma

Peter Ferguson, Managing Consultant at Hanson Search, spoke to Stan Jackson, Global Public Affairs Lead, Pipeline & Portfolio at Astellas Pharma. They discussed Stan’s route into the profession, the qualities leaders need now, why boards are listening, and where public affairs is heading.

How did you get into Public Affairs and Politics?

I started my career as a journalist, with a short stint at The Times before moving into healthcare trade media as news editor of Healthcare Global. I studied History of Medicine at University, so health policy and politics was a field I gravitated towards and it has stayed with me ever since.

My first public affairs role was with UK Active, the trade association for the physical activity sector. Since then, I’ve taken many different angles on public affairs and policy, working in consulting, think-tanks, speechwriting, and for the past seven years I’ve worked in-house for a major global pharma company in various regional and global public affairs roles.

I think because of my journalism background, I have always gravitated towards policy communication, and I’ve never really seen a division between good communications and good public affairs. It’s two sides of the same coin; you have to have good ideas, and you have to know how and where to sell them.

What do you think are the key qualities needed from leaders in public affairs and politics in 2026?

Public Affairs is a rapidly changing industry, so I think we all need to be adaptive and curious. Most people working in public affairs have cut their teeth in a more predictable world where concepts like free trade and trust in global institutions were taken for granted.

As public affairs professionals, we need to keep up with the political zeitgeist, and to understand how our company, service or industry supports the needs of policymakers according to the motivations they have in the short term and in the long term. We can’t rely on recycling the arguments from decades ago; we need to be attuned to the moment.

In my industry, pharmaceuticals, very few people were talking about medicines in terms of economic resilience and industrial competitiveness a few years ago, whereas now these topics are central to the debate. Strong public affairs leaders have an ability to sense where the mood music is taking things and describe a client or business in the terms which hit the right buttons.

The final quality sounds obvious: showing up in person. Before the pandemic, that often meant a more office-based, traditional approach. Now there is far more appreciation of dynamic meetings, and of getting out to visit the places your industry actually operates. I recently had an opportunity to tour one of our state-of-the-art facilities in Boston, MA, and I learned so much about our business that I could never have done from behind a screen.

How important is Public Affairs representation at Board level from your perspective?

It is a far more appreciated function at board level now, with a specific focus on interpreting geopolitics and its impact on business operations. There’s a lot of scenario planning and feeding into strategic investments with a geopolitical angle.

C-suite leaders have always understood the need to grasp regulation. Now they also see there are trade-offs driven by policy and political decisions that do not always follow rational logic.

In the past, people kept risk registers and scenarios that assumed all actors were motivated by similar outcomes. That is no longer a safe assumption. So, leaders need to understand the risks and work through different scenarios.

Pharmaceuticals is arguably one of the most globalised sectors of any business, and that is changing around us. Boards and senior executives need to understand what those shifts mean and how to respond.

Our planning cycles are long. If you are making significant long-term investments, they carry real political risk, so a policy lens on them matters more than ever. That is why public affairs is brought to board level far more than it was five years ago.

For public affairs professionals getting more exposure at board level, it also highlights the need to up our game when it comes to understanding the business we operate in. We can’t be seen as detached subject-matter experts, we have to be part of the team.

How do you see the Public Affairs market evolving over the next five years?

Very fast. When I started, your currency was the quality of your content. We would write letters to MPs and lean on strong research skills. A lot of that baseline work is now done by AI, and we have to accept that.

Where I am optimistic is that this baseline content is now accessible to far more people, yet the professionals with dynamic ideas still stand out.

The ones who can spot the links between different agendas and use creativity to find solutions that are not already out there are the ones who will come through. We do not know what these tools will do in two years, but right now they cannot do that.

Even at the earlier end of a career, companies of every size need a strong sense of the political direction of travel. They need people who understand the different scenarios and who have real networks.

What advice do you have for someone looking to build a career in public affairs and/or politics?

For people early in their careers, take every opportunity to go to events. You never know who you will meet. Be genuinely interested in what people are doing, become really good listeners and take an interest in other perspectives. The worst thing a public affairs person can do is operate in an echo chamber of people with the same outlook or worldview. A great public affairs professional will have subscriptions to the Spectator and the New Statesman, not one or the other.

The second is reaching out. People earlier in their career would be surprised how much those links help, and how generous others are with their time. Much of my career has come from simply asking someone for twenty minutes over a coffee. People are remarkably willing to help, because they know what goes around comes around.

More specifically, given how the industry is changing, I see more opportunities to create a niche and a personal brand around your expertise. There are fewer barriers than there were to establishing yourself as an expert.

You can publish articles, go on podcasts and talk about the topics you know well. The barriers to entry are much lower than they were. And in hiring, an entrepreneurial spirit so often outweighs formal education, so start a small networking group or a campaign on an issue you care about. Show some energy about it, because that is what people want to see.

Whether you’re hiring top Public Affairs talent or considering your next career move, our team would be delighted to support you.

Peter Ferguson is Managing Consultant in the Public Affairs Practice. Peter advises and supports some of the world’s most renowned communications consultancies, boutique public affairs agencies and global in-house clients.

Hanson Search Group is a global talent consultancy providing executive search, recruitment and leadership advisory services. Built on more than twenty years of trusted relationships, we operate as a connected global platform of specialist practices with expert consultants embedded in key markets.