The BOD, which is supposed to represent the owners, has been pretty much absent in most of the Fortune 500 companies and particularly so in the pharmaceutical industry. Let's face it, the drug industry has been easy pickings for decades and every aspect of it has gone through the evolution of lazy, soft, and now, incompetent. Nobody (except our future competitors) asks the fair question 'How much profit could I have achieved had I executed the strategy excellently'? I expect that nobody actually feels that money wasted is their money wasted. One of the ways to play the game is for management to avoid having the BOD ask these very questions. So these professional managers manage with short-term financial gimmickry and same-old, same-old excuses about why their efforts are not bearing the fruit that was expected when the particular investment was originally solicited. Although everybody in the industry realizes that the execution is abyssmal across the board, the performance bonuses continue to roll. Soft targets, soft people, soft results. It starts with serious targets from the BOD coupled with serious consequences for not meeting them. Merck has created a culture that favors not caring, simply because those that talk about serious, challenging, targets are the most insidious threat to the machine that pays big rewards for pretty minor accomplishments. And those that talk from the inside are more threatening simply because they probably know the score.
The reason that pharma heads want to acquire other pharmas is that they are positive that there is a lot of fat in any pharma that they acquire. And they know that down to their soul because they are living it in their own company. But they just don't care enough to clean up their own mess, it is easier to profit by trimming someone else's. In almost any other industry, this fraud would be unsustainable.