corner
Healthy Skepticism
Join us to help reduce harm from misleading health information.
Increase font size   Decrease font size   Print-friendly view   Print
Register Log in

Healthy Skepticism Library item: 11636

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

Clarke T.
Novartis has no plans to split CEO, chairman roles
Reuters 2007 Sep 28
http://www.reuters.com/article/health-SP/idUSN2820798120071001?pageNumber=1


Full text:

Daniel Vasella, the chairman and chief executive officer of Novartis AG, sees himself retaining both titles for the foreseeable future, even as other big European drugmakers move to split the roles.

“My thoughts on this are that in both models you see successes and failures and it would be a mistake to believe there is only one model for success,” he said in an interview at the launch in Boston of a new manufacturing research collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Neither does Vasella plan to step down any time soon. At one time, he had spoken of 2008 or so as his departure date. But that, he says now, was based on a rule the company once had that directors should only serve for 12 years.

That rule was implemented because a majority of the board had been elected the same time and therefore would have been required to leave en masse, he said. It was abandoned a few years ago, Vasella said.

Vasella, who has been at the head of the Swiss drugmaker since 1996, when the company was formed through the merger of Ciba-Geigy and Sandoz, says he “still has lots of ideas and energy” and shareholders have in any case elected him to another three-year term.

Vasella has come under fire from some shareholders for being an outlier in holding both top jobs amid an ongoing debate in Switzerland as to whether a chief executive involved in the day to day activities of the company can also do justice to the job of chairman.

Some analysts believe the decision by cross-town rival Roche Holding AG to split the top jobs will put pressure on Vasella to follow suit.

But Vasella said that just because something might be “fashionable” does not necessarily make it right for Novartis.

“In a succession or merger situation you may have a different model than if you are stable,” he said.

 

  Healthy Skepticism on RSS   Healthy Skepticism on Facebook   Healthy Skepticism on Twitter

Please
Click to Register

(read more)

then
Click to Log in
for free access to more features of this website.

Forgot your username or password?

You are invited to
apply for membership
of Healthy Skepticism,
if you support our aims.

Pay a subscription

Support our work with a donation

Buy Healthy Skepticism T Shirts


If there is something you don't like, please tell us. If you like our work, please tell others.

Email a Friend








As an advertising man, I can assure you that advertising which does not work does not continue to run. If experience did not show beyond doubt that the great majority of doctors are splendidly responsive to current [prescription drug] advertising, new techniques would be devised in short order. And if, indeed, candor, accuracy, scientific completeness, and a permanent ban on cartoons came to be essential for the successful promotion of [prescription] drugs, advertising would have no choice but to comply.
- Pierre R. Garai (advertising executive) 1963