For those of you who haven't worked in pharma..
Apr/03/2007 03:02 Filed in: Pharma
Business
When I first arrived at Eli lilly in Indianapolis I was given a booklet on leadership that was written by our CEO Sidney Taurel. I enjoyed reading the book and made the mistake of trying to embrace some of his principles including the need to "implement with speed". I know that speed is a competitive advantage and organizations have to review processes to streamline them so that they can in fact implement faster. What I found was resistance at every level of the organization and my manager even told me to "slow down" to allow people to catch up with me.
Then there was a forum that was help on DTC. While at this forum I was told by a Director that I had to learn more about DTC and I responded "DTC needs to learn more from consumer marketers" upon which there was a loud round of applause from the rest of the audience. When I worked on the Cialis launch team I observed first hand how data was manipulated to show the results that supported more money for television while leaving the Web behind. To this day the website has not changed since I left the company and they are still spending money on TV while the Web site suffers from neglect. By the way 85% of the visitors to our website the first year came from online ads and search engines not TV although I am sure that the two worked together to drive traffic.
Another accurate picture of working in pharma is the endless meetings. Death by meetings is a great way to characterize the atmosphere. Calendars are often booked for weeks at a time and God forbid you just stop bye someone's cube to talk over an idea? For vendors it's even worse with endless presentations and dollars used for trips to Indianapolis only to be told that we had decided to use someone else.
So could it get worse? Well yes....there are a great number of people who I know got promoted to Manager at Lilly that were promoted because of "who they know or how they act" rather than what they did for the company and the brand. This while very talented people continue to transition from careers to jobs and collect paychecks and go through just enough to survive. One author calls them the walking dead and there are a lot of them within pharma. A good leader can transform the WHOLE organization with a vision not just words but I am afraid that this doesn't happen much at big pharma. Companies like Amgen, which had and edge as a biotech company, are hiring more and more people from big pharma as they make the transition to execute by endless meetings and at a snails pace.
Think that this is not true? Ask anyone who works in pharma and chances are that you will hear the stories of long meetings and twisted data (400% ROI on a TV campaign for example). I still believe that out there there are some companies that believe they are in business to help their customers but it looks like that is getting harder to find. Maybe I'm an idealist or maybe I just believe that we can be successful by providing patients with the drugs they need to continue to lead productive lives.
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