Dear Mr. Frazier:
I have reviewed your career as posted on the Merck website, and you appear to be a man of integrity and principle based on how you have chosen to spend your time. In each person's life there are a series of decisions that can cause their life to rise like a crescendo to one tremendous opportunity, or fall like a diminuendo into a silent boring subsistence. Perhaps your career has lead you to this opportunity.
I would suggest you take 30 seconds, and read T.S. Eliot's classic poem, The Hollow Men. (http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/784/). Merck has become The Hollow Company:
"Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;"
Perhaps you can revive the spirit and soul of this once great company: I pray you can do so.
At one time, the research labs were the life force of the company. Over the last decade, under the leadership of Peter Kim, this is no longer the case. I would urge you to do an objective review of his specific accomplishments. From a former insider, now an outsider (by MY choice), they are meager. The culture is destroyed; most innovative people have left; he has built a team that values "process" above creativity; people are not empowered to own decisions; the pipeline suffered so badly that an acquisition was required; hundreds of millions were spent on companies like Rosetta, Glycofi, Sirna, while the core competencies of the company (small molecules) was gutted and destroyed. An interesting exercise I would suggest for you - evaluate EVERY one of the pipeline programs brought in from Schering. Each existed at Merck (since Catherine Strader initiated most of them once she left Merck Rahway many years ago). Under Peter's leadership, each of them were stopped at Merck. Please do not rely on Peter's team to provide you with the data: they have a perverse incentive to tell you that is not the case, or to blame scapegoats that they have sent from the camp to slaughter.
To conclude, I believe that the single most important thing you can do is separate Peter Kim and most of his direct reports. MRL is now ready for new blood. After a decade of the experiment of taking an academic scientist to run the labs, the conclusion is clear. It has failed. It is an experiment done repeatedly through the years, and almost without exception, it has failed. The one exception that comes to mind is Fishman, perhaps. Perlmutter has succeeded once he had several years of training running Rahway.
I have reviewed your career as posted on the Merck website, and you appear to be a man of integrity and principle based on how you have chosen to spend your time. In each person's life there are a series of decisions that can cause their life to rise like a crescendo to one tremendous opportunity, or fall like a diminuendo into a silent boring subsistence. Perhaps your career has lead you to this opportunity.
I would suggest you take 30 seconds, and read T.S. Eliot's classic poem, The Hollow Men. (http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/784/). Merck has become The Hollow Company:
"Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;"
Perhaps you can revive the spirit and soul of this once great company: I pray you can do so.
At one time, the research labs were the life force of the company. Over the last decade, under the leadership of Peter Kim, this is no longer the case. I would urge you to do an objective review of his specific accomplishments. From a former insider, now an outsider (by MY choice), they are meager. The culture is destroyed; most innovative people have left; he has built a team that values "process" above creativity; people are not empowered to own decisions; the pipeline suffered so badly that an acquisition was required; hundreds of millions were spent on companies like Rosetta, Glycofi, Sirna, while the core competencies of the company (small molecules) was gutted and destroyed. An interesting exercise I would suggest for you - evaluate EVERY one of the pipeline programs brought in from Schering. Each existed at Merck (since Catherine Strader initiated most of them once she left Merck Rahway many years ago). Under Peter's leadership, each of them were stopped at Merck. Please do not rely on Peter's team to provide you with the data: they have a perverse incentive to tell you that is not the case, or to blame scapegoats that they have sent from the camp to slaughter.
To conclude, I believe that the single most important thing you can do is separate Peter Kim and most of his direct reports. MRL is now ready for new blood. After a decade of the experiment of taking an academic scientist to run the labs, the conclusion is clear. It has failed. It is an experiment done repeatedly through the years, and almost without exception, it has failed. The one exception that comes to mind is Fishman, perhaps. Perlmutter has succeeded once he had several years of training running Rahway.