What Nobody Told Me About Resilience — A CFO's Hard Warning (Miguel Coego Rios)

Miguel Coego Rios has spent 20 years leading through the toughest environments in European pharma. Restructurings. Turnarounds. Investor pressure. From the outside, he looked unbreakable.

He wasn't.

In this episode Miguel does something most senior leaders never do - he talks openly about the moment resilience stopped being a strength and became a trap. Medication. Anxiety. Six months of recovery. Children he had to reintroduce himself to. And the hard realization that staying in a room that was destroying him was not responsibility. It was self-abandonment dressed up as discipline.

He also shares what finally changed. How therapy gave him back his why. How working across four continents rewired his perspective on privilege and gratitude. And why the driven, ambitious person he was at 35 needed to fall apart before he could lead the way he does today.

The second half of the conversation goes wide. Miguel breaks down why the golden era of pharma margins is over, what the access crisis in Europe really means for rare disease patients, and what kind of leadership the next decade in biotech is going to demand.

This is a rare conversation. Honest, grounded, and earned through experience.

If you have ever confused endurance with strength - this one is for you.

ABOUT THE HOST

Christian Rados is a Munich-based executive headhunter for venture-backed biotech in Europe and founder of Rados Recruiting. Since 2011 he has placed permanent and interim leaders in biotech, pharma, and MedTech, over 1,000 placements from Director to C-level and board. Every search starts with a stage-first leadership analysis: stage first, then the seat, then the human. Willing to Win is his podcast with biotech leaders who built companies against the odds.

Website: rados-recruiting.com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/christianrados-biotechdreamteams