Farewell Mr Taurel

Dec/18/2007 05:38 Filed in: Life inside pharma
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Finally ! The CEO of Lilly, Mr Sidney Taurel, is stepping down and it's long over due. When I was at Lilly and we lost the patent on Prozac Mr Taurel made a gesture by taking a $1 in paid salary. Of course his millions in bonuses more than made up for his salary cut. Under his watch Lilly lost patent protection on its best drug Prozac, had to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to settle Zyprexa and Evista litigation and had data "leak" on it's new blood thinning medication that caused Lilly stock to tank. However, the final nail in his career might have been his recent rant about the media and how they do not understand pharmaceutical product data.



Those who read my BLOG know that I had predicted that Mr Taurel would eventually step down. Lilly stock, of which I have been a shareholder, has not performed well at all but the real failure of Mr Taurel is in his leadership, or lack thereof. Let me give you an example; when I first arrived at Lilly I was given a booklet on leadership written by Sidney. One of the chapters suggested that employees needed to work faster and cut processes so that Lilly could be more competitive. I, being a new employee, took this to task and when I tried to speed up some processes I was told by my manager that I needed to slow down so that others "could catch up to me". It's one thing to write a booklet but another to implement those principles at every level of the organization.


I am sure that Mr Taurel will leave Lilly with a very nice package that will ensure he will never have to work again. Of course that is little consolation to the employees that are going to be laid off. Lilly's corporate slogan is "Answers that matter" but I can tell you it should be "answers that matter as long as there is an ROI associated with it and we don't have to be too transparent.
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