FOR THE RECORD

[Anonymous]

.........there is nothing different between Novartis and the other pharma companies. Management must make the stock holders happy by returning profits and boosting the stock price. They do what they must to accomplish this. Joe Jimenez is the guy responsible for this. Get used to it, this is the future of pharma.

Right now if I don't miss my guess, more than a few managers are wishing they kept a few of the OLD guys, people with sales skills, knowledge, access to difficult to see docs, as the younger crowd jumps ship to companies that are hiring and there are several. Not every company is downsizing, some have strong drugs, pipelines and opportunity and they will be reaching out to whosoever they can to feather their nests. Loyalty means nothing these days, companies are not loyal to their reps and they cannot expect reps to be loyal to the company. The days of guys with 20 and 30 years of experience are gone. Asia will be the new frontier and America will become a secondary market.

One of Novartis' weak points continues to be HR, the group really responsible for the loss of dollars in big lawsuits. Hopefully someone in the upper echelon will realize this and revamp this weak link in the organization.

JMHO

 

[Anonymous]

.........there is nothing different between Novartis and the other pharma companies. Management must make the stock holders happy by returning profits and boosting the stock price. They do what they must to accomplish this. Joe Jimenez is the guy responsible for this. Get used to it, this is the future of pharma.

Right now if I don't miss my guess, more than a few managers are wishing they kept a few of the OLD guys, people with sales skills, knowledge, access to difficult to see docs, as the younger crowd jumps ship to companies that are hiring and there are several. Not every company is downsizing, some have strong drugs, pipelines and opportunity and they will be reaching out to whosoever they can to feather their nests. Loyalty means nothing these days, companies are not loyal to their reps and they cannot expect reps to be loyal to the company. The days of guys with 20 and 30 years of experience are gone. Asia will be the new frontier and America will become a secondary market.

One of Novartis' weak points continues to be HR, the group really responsible for the loss of dollars in big lawsuits. Hopefully someone in the upper echelon will realize this and revamp this weak link in the organization.

JMHO

You just hit it out of the park with your comments. Enough Said

 

[Anonymous]

Originally Posted by Anonymous
.........there is nothing different between Novartis and the other pharma companies. Management must make the stock holders happy by returning profits and boosting the stock price. They do what they must to accomplish this. Joe Jimenez is the guy responsible for this. Get used to it, this is the future of pharma.

Right now if I don't miss my guess, more than a few managers are wishing they kept a few of the OLD guys, people with sales skills, knowledge, access to difficult to see docs, as the younger crowd jumps ship to companies that are hiring and there are several. Not every company is downsizing, some have strong drugs, pipelines and opportunity and they will be reaching out to whosoever they can to feather their nests. Loyalty means nothing these days, companies are not loyal to their reps and they cannot expect reps to be loyal to the company. The days of guys with 20 and 30 years of experience are gone. Asia will be the new frontier and America will become a secondary market.

One of Novartis' weak points continues to be HR, the group really responsible for the loss of dollars in big lawsuits. Hopefully someone in the upper echelon will realize this and revamp this weak link in the organization.

JMHO

You are so right man. Those days are really gone. You may see very few reps who are proud to tell they been with the same company more than 20 or 30 years. I have been in Pharma sales 8 years have been laid of 2 times. Well Said.

 

[Anonymous]

http://www.pharmalot.com/2011/09/op-ed-pharma-layoffs-small-minded-survivors/
Downsizing Trend Leaves Pharma Without the Kinds of Employees It Needs:
By Daniel Hoffman, PhD and president of Pharmaceutical Business Research Associates
In addition to disrupting tens of thousands of lives, the substantial downsizing in pharma over the past two-and-a-half years has changed many companies for the worse. I previously wrote that the guidelines handed down from finance to HR have eliminated many of the more knowledgeable and experienced people at each layoff round because people over age 50 are among the first targets for separation packages. But the dysfunctional legacy is even more pernicious. The resulting culture has created a workforce that is almost entirely at odds with what pharma needs now.
The challenges facing pharma today go beyond the global recession and the dearth of new product development. The widespread changes to the industry’s customer base, the declining willingness of payers to reimburse me-too products, pharma’s poor public image, and increasing constraints on the ability to differentiate its products have all contributed to a situation where the entire business model has become obsolete. In such a situation, pharma needs innovative, risk-taking people at all levels across the operations spectrum.
The problem is that the dishonest and unfair approaches the industry has taken to downsizing have left it with many people who are small-minded, politically savvy and safe playing. Gone are the people who acquired the experience to know what doesn’t work after enduring years of self-serving platitudes. Those with sufficient boldness to try something outside the conventional axioms now spend their mornings expanding their Linkedin contacts.
Many of the people remaining in operations deliberately choose not to ask big or important questions, lest their colleagues perceive any fundamental doubt as a threat. The truly adept manage to avoid taking a position on even the most mundane matters, lest someone else equate perceptive questions with disloyalty. Some even find it wise to feign ignorance concerning the elephants in various rooms. The combination of such simulated ignorance, together with the genuine version among the inexperienced survivors, makes the task of determining the smartest guy in the room a purely theoretical exercise.
Of course the approach of making oneself unthreatening, wholly agreeable, blind, deaf and dumb has its limits, too. An operations manager who adopts the cheerful, compliant pose of a good administrative assistant will eventually find that he can be replaced with the real thing at less than half the salary.
So in the end, few people in senior and middle management want to make the sorts of changes pharma needs. Fewer still appear capable of doing so even if the inclination came upon them. For example, the reflexes developed from detailing physicians in onesie-twosie practices appear poorly suited for reckoning with a 2,300-physician practice chain that a major insurer will soon own.
The Greek engineer Archimedes once famously said that he could move the world if he were given a place to stand. Pharma requires some substantial movement but any insider pushing on a lever to make changes would likely find himself and his tools sinking into mush.