It’s been an ug­ly cou­ple of weeks for Eli Lil­ly’s C-suite af­ter for­mer CFO Josh Smi­ley was shown the door for send­ing “in­ap­pro­pri­ate mes­sages.” In the fall­out from that scan­dal, Lil­ly could be ex­cused for look­ing to mit­i­gate some of its risk — and Fan­nie Mae COO Kim­ber­ly John­son join­ing the board could help on that front.

John­son joined Fan­nie in 2006, months be­fore the wheels came off the US hous­ing mar­ket. The mort­gage fi­nancier was roughed up in the fall­out from that cri­sis and im­pli­cat­ed as one of the in­sti­tu­tion­al play­ers that loaded up on bad-mon­ey sub­prime loans with the gov­ern­ment’s back­ing. In fact, the firm’s de­riv­a­tives port­fo­lio hedg­ing those balky mort­gages may have added even more fu­el to the fire.

Start­ing as a vice pres­i­dent of cap­i­tal mar­kets, John­son’s for­tunes rose in the af­ter­math of the cri­sis un­til she even­tu­al­ly took on the po­si­tion chief risk of­fi­cer in 2015 and then chief op­er­at­ing of­fi­cer — the role she cur­rent­ly holds — in 2018.

Work­ing at the cen­ter of the hous­ing mar­ket’s col­lapse and help­ing the re­build gave John­son a unique view­point on risk mit­i­ga­tion that Lil­ly is like­ly hop­ing to co-opt.

“We now see our­selves as the cen­ter­piece of the en­tire ecosys­tem around hous­ing, which gives us a dif­fer­ent sense of re­spon­si­bil­i­ty,” John­son said in an in­ter­view with Forbes in 2018. “Fol­low­ing the cri­sis, we are no longer try­ing to win ex­clu­sive­ly for us, but we are try­ing to win for every­one. Gen­er­at­ing more ac­ces­si­bil­i­ty to home­own­er­ship, cre­at­ing bet­ter liv­ing com­mu­ni­ties, and en­sur­ing that the en­tire ecosys­tem is func­tion­ing bet­ter are su­pe­ri­or games to win than just be­ing suc­cess­ful and pump­ing out more mort­gage-backed se­cu­ri­ties.”

Pri­or to her 15-year stint at Fan­nie, John­son worked for near­ly six years as a di­rec­tor of fixed in­come sales at Cred­it Su­isse and be­fore as an eq­ui­ty trad­er at D.E. Shaw.

“Kim­ber­ly brings a strong back­ground in tech­nol­o­gy, gov­er­nance and glob­al risk man­age­ment strat­e­gy, as well as sig­nif­i­cant fi­nan­cial ex­pe­ri­ence,” CEO David Ricks said in a state­ment.

John­son’s ap­point­ment al­so makes good on Lil­ly’s di­ver­si­ty pledge in the af­ter­math of 2020’s calls for racial eq­ui­ty across For­tune 500 com­pa­nies. John­son, a Black woman, is one of the few fe­males in chief op­er­at­ing of­fi­cer po­si­tions at the na­tion’s largest firms.

In that same in­ter­view with Forbes, John­son re­flect­ed on her rare po­si­tion of lead­er­ship and what it said about women’s abil­i­ty to lead a ma­jor com­pa­ny.

“With the roles that are seen as non-tra­di­tion­al­ly fe­male-ori­ent­ed, it does not have to be male or fe­male char­ac­ter­is­tics that de­fine how we do our jobs,” she said. “I learned this at mul­ti­ple places, in­clud­ing the de­riv­a­tive space, hedge funds, in­vest­ment banks, and even in risk. Ul­ti­mate­ly, it all comes back to peo­ple as every­thing we do is done through peo­ple. If com­pa­nies can fig­ure out how to con­nect the peo­ple to the work, all sorts of av­enues will open up.”

Jazz CEO Bruce Cozadd didn’t beat around the bush.

In his first video meeting with GW Pharma chief Justin Gover last July 8, he offered to pay $172 a share to get the company, which had beaten the odds in getting its remarkable cannabinoid drug Epidiolex across the regulatory finish line for epilepsy. GW’s stock closed at $129 that day.

Cozadd had already done his homework on the financing to make sure he could swing it the way he wanted. He just needed to do some due diligence before making the non-binding bid firm.

Actemra’s failure to hit the primary endpoint in a Phase III study didn’t stop the FDA from granting Roche priority review. And it’s certainly not standing in the way of a sixth approval for Roche’s IL-6 drug.

Regulators have cleared Actemra, or tocilizumab, for systemic sclerosis-associated interstitial lung disease in adult patients. Roche’s big Genentech subsidiary notes that it is the first biologic approved for this rare disease.