Healthy Skepticism Library item: 10560

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Smith RM.
Medicine man.
Newsweek. 2007 Apr 16
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17951575/site/newsweek/page/0/

Full text:

Pfizer’s CEO talks about layoffs, regulatory issues and the public’s unhappiness about drug prices.

When Pfizer’s board chose a new CEO last summer, it passed over two 30-year Pfizer veterans to pick vice chairman and general counsel Jeff Kindler, who joined the company in 2002 after stints at General Electric and McDonald’s. In the latest in his series of interviews as part of the NEWSWEEK-Kaplan M.B.A. program, NEWSWEEK Chairman and Editor-in-Chief Richard M. Smith spoke with Kindler about reinvigorating Pfizer.

SMITH: What’s surprised you most about being a CEO?
KINDLER: The job is much more complicated and broad than I even imagined. The range of stakeholders in an enterprise like this is just extraordinary, whether it’s investors, customers, employees, government officials, patients or the public. And within each of those constituencies, there are multiple additional constituencies you have to think about. What’s surprised me is the extent to which I need to spend time with, and understand, the needs of and interests of all these different constituencies.

Is it hard for someone who’s not a physician or a scientist to run the biggest pharmaceutical company on the planet?
It certainly presents challenges. I like to think my training and my background have taught me a couple of things that are useful in any job of this nature. One is to ensure that you have really talented and knowledgeable people running the different aspects of the business, including the science side of things. And the second is to ask intelligent questions, pursue ideas and encourage people to do their best.

You’ve announced plans to cut 10,000 jobs. How do you convince the remaining employees that Pfizer is a good place to be?
It is the single most challenging and important thing that I focus on and worry about. It is very, very difficult to terminate people’s jobs and to ask them to leave the company, which in many cases they’ve served for years and years. The only good thing I can say is that I have discovered that most people in this company-including some of the people who are leaving-recognize that we’re doing the things we need to do. I hear from employees who say a lot of the changes that we’re making, as painful as they are, are overdue.

How much is your business, like Hollywood, a hit-driven business, built on blockbuster drugs like Viagra and Lipitor?
There’s no question that’s true. Another analogy you could draw is oil wildcatting, where you drill a hole in the ground and nine out of 10 times it comes up dry. You hope the 10th time is a gusher that pays for the other nine. The pharmaceutical business has been highly dependent on blockbuster products and probably will be for the foreseeable future. On the other hand, I think that as medicine evolves, personalized medicine becomes a greater opportunity and we’re going to see medicines focused on populations that are smaller, but for whom we can be much more confident that the drug will be efficacious.

Has the industry done a good job of justifying the price of prescription medicines?
No, the polling is very clear that the public doesn’t accept that proposition. The number of misconceptions about our industry is extraordinary. I’ve read surveys that something like 70 percent of the American public thinks drugs are actually discovered and developed by the government, or by universities, when in fact 90 percent are discovered by the pharmaceutical industry. So we need to do a better job of communicating. But we also have to recognize that there is a fundamental societal issue here-the affordability of medicine, both of individuals to afford medicine and of society to pay for its health-care system -that we in the pharmaceutical industry have to be a part of solving.

What’s your advice to young leaders in businesses dealing with government or regulators?
You need to think of them as your customers. Now, that doesn’t mean you’re always going to agree with them … But you have to, as you would with any customer, try to understand what they’re trying to achieve. What’s driving them? … What are their problems? And see if you can find win-win solutions.

Has the industry done a good job of justifying its marketing costs?
No. One thing that has not been helpful is the way we as an industry-and Pfizer, certainly, is no exception-have done TV commercials. When direct-to-consumer advertising was first permitted, there was a real seriousness about the ads, a real science orientation, a balance about the risks and the benefits. And over time we got a little bit away from that. We’re doing everything we can to rectify that. But I think one of the things that contributed to [the problem] was a view of the industry that we were more of a marketing operation than a science operation, and that we were spending so much money on marketing that we could reduce the prices of our drugs. That’s not economically factual, but I think we have, to some extent, ourselves to blame for that.

What are the most common mistakes that you see in young managers?
One mistake or lost opportunity is to not look for ways of growing within your job. There’s a tendency, especially in a big hierarchical organization, to feel like you can only grow if you’re promoted. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being ambitious in a healthy way, as long as you don’t hurt other people in doing it. But if your ambition is entirely focused on “I need to be promoted,” you’re going to upset people and you’re going to frustrate yourself over time, especially as organizations grow flatter and opportunities become fewer. So my strongest advice to people-and I frankly try to do this myself, it’s one of the reasons I ended up broadening beyond where I started from as a lawyer-is, look within your own job for ways in which you can expand your contribution. And there are always a million of them, because any company is looking for smart people to help solve problems.