Brennan Gets Mad at Town Hall Question!

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An excerpt from the article. So, he got "agitated" over one question! So much for being candid at town hall meetings!! Ms. Budd is doomed for having said this in the article. She better pack her bags and hit the road. They NEVER want to hear anything that might be even a little negative!


David Brennan couldn’t sit still. During a meal of beef and potatoes at AstraZeneca Plc’s drug research center near Stockholm in October, Brennan, the company’s chief executive officer, grilled six drug-development managers over a concern raised by a laboratory scientist.

That morning, the newly recruited researcher told Brennan during a town hall-style meeting that he didn’t have the freedom he would have in academia to pursue unusual ideas. Brennan wanted to know why.

“It was quite amazing to see how agitated he was over one question,” recalls Samantha Budd, who left her own lab in San Diego 10 years ago to head neurological research at AstraZeneca in Sweden.
 




Read the article again. He was mad because the researcher said "he did not feel he had the freedom he was accustomed to when he worked in academic research setting". He was not angry with the researcher but rather the culture in research. Brennan needs understand the cultural problem is systemic.
 




Anonymous said:
Read the article again. He was mad because the researcher said "he did not feel he had the freedom he was accustomed to when he worked in academic research setting". He was not angry with the researcher but rather the culture in research. Brennan needs understand the cultural problem is systemic.
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LOL. The government and our tax dollars funds academic research which is why the NIH hasn't produced one useful compound in decades and billions invested. They study everything from Elephant vocabulary to how tree frogs mate. Most of the research going on in our universities is total self indulgent worthless bullshit that nobody cares about or could possibly benefit from. When you come to work for a company that actually has to make a profit to stay in business, the rules should change. That is what Brennan should have said to address the question. But judging by the shape the company is in, maybe he thinks it is OK to simply do research for the fun of it.
 




Hell, he had better be more worried because they have totally blocked our ability to sell a damn thing out here with all their compliance BS!! Is he really this clueless about the culture here at AZ?????????? Talk about being out of touch with the troops!! He needs top come down from his ivory tower sometime, and allow people to openly speak about what it is that is killing this company from within.
 




Anonymous said:
LOL. The government and our tax dollars funds academic research which is why the NIH hasn't produced one useful compound in decades and billions invested. They study everything from Elephant vocabulary to how tree frogs mate. Most of the research going on in our universities is total self indulgent worthless bullshit that nobody cares about or could possibly benefit from. When you come to work for a company that actually has to make a profit to stay in business, the rules should change. That is what Brennan should have said to address the question. But judging by the shape the company is in, maybe he thinks it is OK to simply do research for the fun of it.
Click to expand...

Dead wrong on every point. You are a fool with a computer.
 




"That morning, the newly recruited researcher told Brennan during a town hall-style meeting that he didn’t have the freedom he would have in academia to pursue unusual ideas. Brennan wanted to know why."

To which the researcher replied... well, because I am forced ranked against my fellow scientists, I can't think out of the box, I have to constantly update and explain my scorecard, follow metrics for research and development as well as personal development, check my progress...

Sorry... couldn't resist :)
 








Anonymous said:
"That morning, the newly recruited researcher told Brennan during a town hall-style meeting that he didn’t have the freedom he would have in academia to pursue unusual ideas. Brennan wanted to know why."

To which the researcher replied... well, because I am forced ranked against my fellow scientists, I can't think out of the box, I have to constantly update and explain my scorecard, follow metrics for research and development as well as personal development, check my progress...

Sorry... couldn't resist :)
Click to expand...

Outstanding retort.
 




Anonymous said:
Dead wrong on every point. You are a fool with a computer.
Click to expand...
Really? Then name something, anything of value that has come out of academic based research in the last five years. Just name something. Anything. If I was Brennan I would have sent that researcher packing back to the university world they came from where people draw large salaries to mostly play on the internet all day. Which by the way is a very short day. If you want to play with your test tubes or prove that Elephants can talk to people, then you belong in academia where there is zero accountability and the money flows from the poor taxpayers who are unaware of the waste and fraud. By the way they are more than willing to take handouts from the Pharmaceutical industry that they are supposed to despise.
 




Anonymous said:
Hell, he had better be more worried because they have totally blocked our ability to sell a damn thing out here with all their compliance BS!! Is he really this clueless about the culture here at AZ?????????? Talk about being out of touch with the troops!! He needs top come down from his ivory tower sometime, and allow people to openly speak about what it is that is killing this company from within.
Click to expand...

I feel your pain regarding "compliance BS."

I also do not like being able to do nothing but regurgitate a scripted message.

Where we disagree is that you seem to think there is a possibility this could be changed for the better if only leadership would wake up and make the changes needed.

On the other hand, I believe this is the new pharmaceutical sales road map. dictated by government regulation, company legal departments, and CIA's.

And where the road map takes us is to smaller sales forces. We are more and more restricted on what we can do by our own companies and by our customers. That being the case, there is not a business need for sales forces as large as we have now.

Loss of patents, pipeline failures, profit hits are also major factors.

Bottom line: There are forces at work that are going to radically change the pharmaceutical industry. Many of the negative effects of these changes will be borne by US sales forces. We have no control over the forces at work, we can only have a plan for dealing with them on an individual basis.

Unfortunately leadership does not have control over these forces either. So don't look for them to make the changes you want to see. All you can expect is that they will do what they believe will save their own skin.

If that means cutting your job to hit their profitability targets, oh well...
 




Anonymous said:
LOL. The government and our tax dollars funds academic research which is why the NIH hasn't produced one useful compound in decades and billions invested. They study everything from Elephant vocabulary to how tree frogs mate. Most of the research going on in our universities is total self indulgent worthless bullshit that nobody cares about or could possibly benefit from. When you come to work for a company that actually has to make a profit to stay in business, the rules should change. That is what Brennan should have said to address the question. But judging by the shape the company is in, maybe he thinks it is OK to simply do research for the fun of it.
Click to expand...

What you say about the NIH is very true. I worked in a university setting for years and so much of our research was purely experimental. Our mission was to ask a question and answer it. The end product was "information". There was no specific question to be explored. For example, we could inject lidocaine into a rat's brain to see what happened. Your tax dollars pay for this. So yes, industry is very different from university. A lot of scientists like that they can stroll in at 10 AM. The hard parts is that it is soft money so they have to write grants and publish.
 




Anonymous said:
What you say about the NIH is very true. I worked in a university setting for years and so much of our research was purely experimental. Our mission was to ask a question and answer it. The end product was "information". There was no specific question to be explored. For example, we could inject lidocaine into a rat's brain to see what happened. Your tax dollars pay for this. So yes, industry is very different from university. A lot of scientists like that they can stroll in at 10 AM. The hard parts is that it is soft money so they have to write grants and publish.
Click to expand...

I think the guy's post is total BS, and frankly think you responded to yourself. I worked in an NIH lab doing research funded by an NIH grant to investigate the safety of an experimental antibiotic in rats. The drug got approval, and was "developed" by a major pharma co. The US government paid for the safety research, and a pharma company profited. That's just one example.
 




Anonymous said:
Really? Then name something, anything of value that has come out of academic based research in the last five years. Just name something. Anything. If I was Brennan I would have sent that researcher packing back to the university world they came from where people draw large salaries to mostly play on the internet all day. Which by the way is a very short day. If you want to play with your test tubes or prove that Elephants can talk to people, then you belong in academia where there is zero accountability and the money flows from the poor taxpayers who are unaware of the waste and fraud. By the way they are more than willing to take handouts from the Pharmaceutical industry that they are supposed to despise.
Click to expand...

Get serious or stay off the board please.
 




Anonymous said:
What you say about the NIH is very true. I worked in a university setting for years and so much of our research was purely experimental. Our mission was to ask a question and answer it. The end product was "information". There was no specific question to be explored. For example, we could inject lidocaine into a rat's brain to see what happened. Your tax dollars pay for this. So yes, industry is very different from university. A lot of scientists like that they can stroll in at 10 AM. The hard parts is that it is soft money so they have to write grants and publish.
Click to expand...

I worked for PETA and I am really upset that you would inject lidocaine into a rat's brain! How dare you! What gives you the right? Rats are people too!!! You should be ashamed!!! Stand up for rats you animal abusing foe!
 




Anonymous said:
Read the article again. He was mad because the researcher said "he did not feel he had the freedom he was accustomed to when he worked in academic research setting". He was not angry with the researcher but rather the culture in research. Brennan needs understand the cultural problem is systemic.
Click to expand...

This is it exactly!!
He apparently has NO IDEA of the systemic cultural problem......
 








Anonymous said:
I think the guy's post is total BS, and frankly think you responded to yourself. I worked in an NIH lab doing research funded by an NIH grant to investigate the safety of an experimental antibiotic in rats. The drug got approval, and was "developed" by a major pharma co. The US government paid for the safety research, and a pharma company profited. That's just one example.
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Well you just proved my point. Why should tax payers pay for research on a drug still in development by a Pharmaceutical company? If the drug was in development then the Pharmaceutical company would have been running their own safety trials at their own expense. Your example is bogus at best and another example of tax waste at its worst. What you were likely trying to do was find some reason to keep the big bad new antibiotic from coming to market at all thus denying the evil capitalist pharma any additional profits at the expense of the poor consumer. You commie academia types are all the same. My guess is that you came to Pharma to chase the almighty dollar yourself. How is that working out for you?
 








Anonymous said:
Well you just proved my point. Why should tax payers pay for research on a drug still in development by a Pharmaceutical company? If the drug was in development then the Pharmaceutical company would have been running their own safety trials at their own expense. Your example is bogus at best and another example of tax waste at its worst. What you were likely trying to do was find some reason to keep the big bad new antibiotic from coming to market at all thus denying the evil capitalist pharma any additional profits at the expense of the poor consumer. You commie academia types are all the same. My guess is that you came to Pharma to chase the almighty dollar yourself. How is that working out for you?
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I am the poster regarding lidocaine being injected in rats brains. At one point we had Perdue pharma approach us because they wanted to study Oxycontin after it was on the market. They wanted us to recruit heroin users and image their brains to see how they responded to Oxy. I did not understand the entire protocol to be honest. However, this is another example of tax dollars funding pharma work.
 




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