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What the hell happened to us??

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Anonymous

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I still ponder at how we went from all those consecutive 'most admired' years down to this most 'mired' shithole existence we've been swirling in for the past 10 years. Does it all rest on management's shoulders? Greedy executives?? Piss-poor MRL productivity??? I have to agree with the retiree who said he knew it was time to leave when that "for the people feeling" was lost. That's got to be a leadership issue. Is there any pharma company left that has their reputation intact and is looked up to by customers and employees alike? I don't think so.
 






Have you looked at the friggin management tree at Merck lately! We hired so many women to be diverse and of course you can't really manage women reps like you could with WWII vets and guys, so we went nuts! Look now we are so diverse that we can't even do business and nothing works well at Merck! Blame it on whatever you want but there does not seem to be a good set of balls at Merck and I think that's the way management wants it with nobody to challenge dumbass decisions and poor marketing! The whole real issue with Vioxx was managers doing things that should not have even been managers..we grew too big too fast and did not pay attention to details and we got rid of the Kellers, Emmons and other real leaders with market savy for what Mike McClintock, Jervay McKinney, Patty Drake etc. not enough real pirates and too many HoHoHo's!
 




From what I was able to gather, everyone in R&D had bought into the world pretty much ending on May 21 and figured what the hell, why bust my hump just for nothing. Well, it didn't happen and, after taking a week to kind of get in the mood, they are working their butts off filling the Merck pipeline. Stick around for 6-7 years and you will see what I mean. With them getting into high gear - most admired is coming back.
 








Yes, blame it with that touchy feely modern man Mr. Gilmartin. With the new crop of Barbies you cannot honestly provide suggestions as a colleague should or risk being called insensitive or sexist. All they (at least my female colleagues) want to do are after-hour get-togethers with horny doctors. Then they get upset when you ask why, after a year of that, there is no increase in sales. Now they get even more pissed off that I ask.
 




Anonymous said:
From what I was able to gather, everyone in R&D had bought into the world pretty much ending on May 21 and figured what the hell, why bust my hump just for nothing. Well, it didn't happen and, after taking a week to kind of get in the mood, they are working their butts off filling the Merck pipeline. Stick around for 6-7 years and you will see what I mean. With them getting into high gear - most admired is coming back.
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6-7 years is a long time especially with all the overhead costs we have. R&D is dead in the water right now (as you can tell by the current pipeline). That could be management or corporate culture. The clay is too hard to work with now and the water is poisoned. . We need to pillage talent from other companies. There is a great deal of talent out there and we need to come up with strong packages to get them here. R&D is an extremely tough job. It is easy to get burnt out because the rewards take a very long time. If you pick a date and a magic switch turn on you could not be more wrong. Also stop with the purchasing of new companies. The good people who you acquired leave because the Merck pay scale is low in comparison to other big pharma companies. Merck 20 years ago kicked ass. We were paid well, had more freedom to think, innovate, and chase down ideas that made money. It was fun and challanging Was everything big money? No, but we would go after the low hanging fruit to pay the bills for the quick pipeline infusion and then go long with the blockbuster drugs. Now everything changes month to month and people run around in circles.
 








I would agree that Merck really lost its way with diversity, not that there is anything wrong with diversity......what went wrong was Merck's focus was on diversity for diversity's sake and the outcome of this mistake is what we have today.
 




That is exactly right. Wrong people in the wrong positions to meet quota's.

Anonymous said:
I would agree that Merck really lost its way with diversity, not that there is anything wrong with diversity......what went wrong was Merck's focus was on diversity for diversity's sake and the outcome of this mistake is what we have today.
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then it continues to this day where you have people like Tr Hoskins as a manager. he got all the reps kicked out of the hospital because of his selling style that doesnt work except to sell used carrs. he has very little qualifications to be a manager. wHen you have a whole fleet of managerrs in the field like this, its no wonder why we are where we are. assdick
 




Anonymous said:
From what I was able to gather, everyone in R&D had bought into the world pretty much ending on May 21 and figured what the hell, why bust my hump just for nothing. Well, it didn't happen and, after taking a week to kind of get in the mood, they are working their butts off filling the Merck pipeline. Stick around for 6-7 years and you will see what I mean. With them getting into high gear - most admired is coming back.
Click to expand...


You should be tested for illegal substances. Merck is dead.
 




Anonymous said:
I would agree that Merck really lost its way with diversity, not that there is anything wrong with diversity......what went wrong was Merck's focus was on diversity for diversity's sake and the outcome of this mistake is what we have today.
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Exactly. I am not against diversity but to be diverse at the risk of intelligence, hard work, etc shows that diversity just to be diverse does not work.
 




Forget this diversity angle. You've got a huge plurality of ass-kissing sycophants at the VP level who, if they ever had any talent, have put it in the back of the closet. This business requires hard decisions and hard decisions will always create strong differences of opinion. Rather than mediate well-informed conflict-tolerant decision processes, this company has devolved to afollow-the-leader mentality, whether the leader is both talented and well-informed or not. Unfortunately, this company neither has nor seems any longer to attract talented and well-informed leaders. Rather it rejoices in sending them away or watching them leave. Merck is in the fight of its life and all it can put forward are a bunch of panty-waists. Think merger and this time Merck will truly be on the wrong side of it.
 




Anonymous said:
Forget this diversity angle. You've got a huge plurality of ass-kissing sycophants at the VP level who, if they ever had any talent, have put it in the back of the closet. This business requires hard decisions and hard decisions will always create strong differences of opinion. Rather than mediate well-informed conflict-tolerant decision processes, this company has devolved to afollow-the-leader mentality, whether the leader is both talented and well-informed or not. Unfortunately, this company neither has nor seems any longer to attract talented and well-informed leaders. Rather it rejoices in sending them away or watching them leave. Merck is in the fight of its life and all it can put forward are a bunch of panty-waists. Think merger and this time Merck will truly be on the wrong side of it.
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You make a good point. I've witnessed Merck make some unbelievably bad decisions and nobody dares challenge them.
 




I suspect that, as usual, in order to appear to be considered to be a number one ass-kisser, managers fell all over themselves when the top whispered some intent to diversify. Since very few of them had cultivated any sense of diversity and even fewer had cultivated leads into diverse true talent at the moment when that whisper was uttered, resultant placements that satisfied the apparent sense of the request were screwed up as per usual. There was and is diverse talent available just as surely as there is any talent out there. But it doesn't show up in the first candidate or overnight. Wishing it doesn't make it so. Right now, any talent, diverse or not, would do well to steer clear of this train wreck. Merck gives talent and diversity a bad name.
 




It's a business folks, not a school, a nonprofit or a family. We are an organization and any organization is only as good as its weakest link. A business needs customers and good products/services. Most of these big U.S. manufacturers sent everything important overseas, then decided to be lazy with all the MBAs buying compentency models for sales marketing and business to tell them how to be successful. Leadership turned into lazy well-fed sheep. They forgot about real research, viable products, longterm planning and the customer. Speaking of that, on the customer side, the new model supported having PODs with Ken and Barbie in leadership customer facing positions (thank you, Pfizer!). This was shown to drive a HUGE cash flow by making doctors write more Rxs. At the top: The Good Old Boy Network was alive and well! (Who BTW, were out golfing while paid consultants made the business decisions.)

Later Ken and Barbie became your managers. Some went to HQ and marketing. No one had any real experience actually selling or thinking or in medicine. MBAs hired more consultants and drew up more charts to track. Oops, a few years go by and there are too many unqualified people selling (term used loosely) one drug and clinical customers are voicing their unhappiness at being pestered by reps. Doors close. We invent ways to regain access with "programs and consultants" to increase and keep our business channels open. Some of our consultants were corrupt doctors and the media had a hayday. We suddenly became the bad guy. MBAs drew more charts.

Marketing started to guide research rather than scientific need. Profits were not where they needed to be. Bigger companies started to buy up smaller ones for their pipelines. Smaller companies learned to be deceptive and very clever in propping up their pipelines/bottomlines to appear better than they really were (SP ring a bell?). Once an acquistion or merger was made, the executive teams and stockholders made millions, but in transaction only. These large and small M&As did nothing for actual business besides make a few very rich. Now, deep cuts needed to be made to make the bottom line still look good. All hell broke loose. Relationships in the field were terminated along with thousands of good workers who had great connections. Customers felt the instability and loss of respect and cut us off completely. There was no value to them in keeping us (some new face) as a business partner. We were no longer seen as necessary or important to their business; we did not have any new products to sell to them or to benefit their patients. The consultant role died as it too became dangerous to be exposed for an inappropriate relationship.

So, now we scramble with all types of service oriented garbage (P4P and Transitions of Care) that do absolutely nothing to grow our business or enhance our bottomline just to hang on to any customer relationship even if it is a poor or unprofitable one. Reps are spread too thin with competing priorities and competencies that have no value to real business because our customer has checked out. (Elvis has left the building!) It is all an illusion of success. In the meantime, R&D is underwater and all the big manufactures are scrambling to find and acquire the new blockbuster. But it is a crapshoot because everyone is out looking at Phase I trials and small biotechs. There are only a few products that will make it. There is not enough time left to support the infrastructure of these big companies and that, my friends, is the dirty little secret: Your days and mine are numbered.

Three important links are completely broken: 1) leadership and their connection to designing innovation in tough times by generating meaningful and profitable products within a sound business structure, 2) the customer connection is severed as most of the medical industry does not want to be a consultant nor work with pharma other than to get money for their research and their own health system; some still want samples and that's about it, 3) most new products are me too drugs with few innovations and we do not have the pipeline or the connections to support the top so the bottom keeps getting cut. Soon there will be nothing but chiefs, which will distance ourselves even further from our customer, our target.

Hey, but the executives will be rich when the bridge collapses and we will be out of a career. (I wonder if the executives realize this is why no one in the field trusts anyone at the top? Obviously, if your field teams and lower ranking employees have no trust in the leadership, the customer is going to feel it.) Everyone here knows we are on the Titanic.

Move on my friend and let it go. Everything has a time and place. You really do not think the "top" is going to cut their own ranks or trim their fat to save the company do you? Just fill out the next survey, be positive or you'll be on someone's shit list.
 




You left out that while companies invested millions in the Ken and Barbie model along with useless entertainment, they invested nothing in meaningful research. A decade later and there are few compounds worth even bringing to market.
 




Anonymous said:
You left out that while companies invested millions in the Ken and Barbie model along with useless entertainment, they invested nothing in meaningful research. A decade later and there are few compounds worth even bringing to market.
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This post reminded me of the lavish entertainment we began to do when we started hiring Ken and Barbie models. Yes, many of those managers actively involved in the "educational" events, including tickets to a Rolling Stones concert, are now in the upper management. I remember stopping by a sushi restaurant to pick up an order and saw the two local Merck reps (Mr. Ken and Ms. Barbie) educating the entire office in a private room. They were walking from table to table pouring adult beverages and ordering food. It was so sad that we conducted business in such a demeaning way. Then we were told to follow those examples and match them in programs conducted or else.
 




Anonymous said:
Forget this diversity angle. You've got a huge plurality of ass-kissing sycophants at the VP level who, if they ever had any talent, have put it in the back of the closet. This business requires hard decisions and hard decisions will always create strong differences of opinion. Rather than mediate well-informed conflict-tolerant decision processes, this company has devolved to afollow-the-leader mentality, whether the leader is both talented and well-informed or not. Unfortunately, this company neither has nor seems any longer to attract talented and well-informed leaders. Rather it rejoices in sending them away or watching them leave. Merck is in the fight of its life and all it can put forward are a bunch of panty-waists. Think merger and this time Merck will truly be on the wrong side of it.
Click to expand...

Excellent summation
 




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