Touché

I just read this story over at Derek Lowe’s blog, In the Pipeline. It’s too good to excerpt:

I believe that this story has been mentioned in the comments here, but since I’ve heard from the actual person involved, I thought I’d pass on the canonical version. Someone I used to work with at Schering-Plough found himself (like many others in his position) out of a job in late October. He had a previously scheduled trip to Florida the next day, and as he boarded the plane, who should he see sitting in first class but Fred Hassan, the CEO of Schering-Plough who’d helped engineer the deal with Merck?

As the chemist involved put it, “After quickly scanning to make sure there wasn’t a body guard looking guy near him”, he said “Hi, Fred!” Hassan looked up and asked “Do I know you?” “Well,” said the chemist, “no, probably not, but I’m a medicinal chemist with Schering-Plough, and now Merck”. Hassan smiled and said “Great, so how are you?” The response, in a loud voice, was “Well, I just got laid off!”. He then walked on down to his seat in coach, and heard Hassan saying something about being sorry about that. And as he told me, he sat there in coach, smiling at the picture of Hassan thinking about this irate ex-employee on the plane with him for the next 2 and a half hours. . .

I can think of some other CEOs who we’d like to meet in planes.  Like Bernard Poissot, Jeffrey Kindler and all of the guys from Morgan-Stanley and Goldman Sachs who helped arrange the innovation sucking, livelihood killing mergers that resulted in the unnecessary and stupid loss of our jobs.

Now that we know that they occasionally fly commercial, we may get our chance someday  Fred Hassan has left such a trail of destruction through the industry, it’s a wonder he didn’t find a contingent of Occupy Pharma on that flight.

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Conflucian Sharon recommended this video last night.  It’s supposed to be the research version of Glengarry Glen Ross but it’s eerily accurate.

I’ve even had my share of rageaholic bosses who used to travel from Cambridge, MA to Princeton just for the purpose of screaming in our faces. He subjected my female colleague to a purple faced tirade for close to 30 minutes and it was so loud the whole floor could hear it.  Not only that but there have been instances where the guy who invented a multi-billion dollar blockbuster drug for a company was laid off with the rest of the site.  Well, after all, that was 10 years ago.  The dude probably sold that invention to the company for the customary $1.  And after billions of dollars, he gets a pink slip.  And yes, we drive Ford Fiestas, or PT Cruisers, in my case.  I once had to drive my French director to a dinner in my Cruiser and he told me in no uncertain terms how little he thought of it.  I like it.  As a single person, I need a car that has the versatility of a Swiss army knife.  Besides, if he wanted to travel in style to dinner in a BMW or a Lexus, he was hanging with the wrong crowd.  The executives up the road can afford the nice cars.

Every day in the labs that are left in America, a less noisy version of that video plays itself out.  Your job is constantly on the line.  There is no time for thinking problems through thoroughly, no money for the iterations of experiments that are necessary to crack the problem.  Your colleagues become your competition for a vicious game of full time position musical chairs.  Every year, there’s a new hairbrained scheme from the MBA class that never sets foot in a lab.  One of the most idiotic is to have each department bid for another department’s work.  Yes, let’s treat each of our former seamlessly integrated pieces of the research puzzle as potential contract resources complete with competitive bidding with the outside world and all of the time wasting paperwork that goes with that. And no one is allowed to feel “good enough”.  If you don’t have a PhD, you’re dirt.  If you don’t have a PhD from a prestigious university, you’re barely tolerable.  If you haven’t published 2 papers per year in Nature as first author, your job is in jeopardy.  Steak knives?  Unheard of.  You’re lucky if you still get free coffee.   And your pension is not safe no matter how many years you put in.

So, it only looks like comedy until you have to live it.  Oh, I could tell stories that would make your hair curl.  This is the way we treat our best and brightest.