Well we have to be positive. We all need jobs and we need to make Merck the best company it can be starting with the employees. We can't change the management, but we can try to exceed in our work and be the best. Stop complaining and start working! Schering was a great company that had great talent. Let's see if we can save this sinking ship.
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What the hell happened to us??
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I swear she was at our region meeting a few years ago to present thus silly add-on to help us to know who our docs hang with. I think they bury her pretty deep in somewhere at West Point with a desk job where she does not have to interact with the reps directly.
Did you feel like Fred Hassan sell you guys out? Or he knew something about SP that you don't and so he got the deal done, got paid and moved on?
It was obvious from the day that Fred showed up that he would sell the company. His contract and the contracts for his gang all but guaranteed that. He did jack up sales in some legacy products, rode the zetia thing for all it was worth, took credit for and used as cover the consent decree work, and had a good position on Centocor products if someone wanted to take the chance. He was obviously keeping the company fat for the butcher, however. No surprises with him. He was obviously not to be trusted. Sold to Merck seemed to be a good thing until it became obvious that Merck was all reputation and little substance. Especially for S-P colleagues with prior Merck experience who expected the arrogance but were shocked and saddened by how incompetent Merck had become.
Yes, Fred sold us out. More or less thru us under the bus. But he did make us a stronger company since Merck bought SP. He did set a tone for many to try to exceed expectations. I think he made the company in whole believe we were worth more. In the end, sold us all out. But we knew that was his job. Thought we had a few more years.
Thanks! That article was excellent! Merck leadership was really screwy then, still screwy now.
They all do that. Those guys that convinced the stockholders at Chrysler to okay a merger with Daimler sold them out too. It was a mess and then Daimler unloaded Chrysler. Those fat cats retired with huge bonuses claiming the merger was a "success". Fred's job is always a problem fixer. Fatten the calf for slaughtering. I don't think he is a peace time CEO. Merck is always cash rich, thus the arrogance. May be we bought SP so we can go through and shred the Zetia files.
During the post-Vagelos era, the company put too much energy into talking about how good we were and too little energy into actually continuing to further improve. We got fat and lazy & have never recovered. I'm a retiree who is embarassed by what this company has become. You can't follow a true innovator and leader like Vagelos by failing to perform due diligence in the hiring of his replacement. Gilmartin, Clark etc. PUHLEEZE !
It's tough for all of us to accept; but as one of you has said, we're really nothing more than a third tier company with no hope for returning to the "exciting days of yesteryear". It's just a damned shame!
It's tough for all of us to accept; but as one of you has said, we're really nothing more than a third tier company with no hope for returning to the "exciting days of yesteryear". It's just a damned shame!
The real damage was done by Gilmartin....never forget, Clark was only hired to be the "Executioner"!
Gilmartin was a touchy feeling type of guy which has no place as a CEO for a Fortune 500 company. Thinking about it...you may be right he was the beginning of us becoming a shitty drug company. In another ten years Merck would be like a Riker Lab, an Endo Lab, or a Frederick Purdue. A doctor would look at a Merck business card and says, "Merck is still around? Is it part of Pfizer? They used to come up with a lot of great products."
I say the same thing about it being a damned shame that Merck went down the shitter. We had a piss-poor Board that settled on Gilmartin as Vagelos' successor. What a mistake as history has taught us. Just a damn shame...
All true. Competitors such as yourself, became real friends. Reps in those days were considered by docs to be a true asset. MSD was a remarkable company. Keyword here is "was". The industry in the U.S. is done.
As I have watched the steady decline of Merck from a great company to a mediocre company, I am impressed by the number of individuals that have been revealed to be nothing more than hangers-on. So many of the energized do-ers, thinkers, originators are gone - either from an ousting, through retirement, or from have left out of frustration and disappointment. The role of mover and shaker is missing and conformity and obedience is the preferred style. They were essential in making Merck great and have not been replaced. The mentality that they bore has certainly not been cultivated or encouraged at the present-day Merck. While the hangers-on were not making the real difference between great and good, they were hard workers and carried a lot of water for making progress; they were a necessary part of the success as well. But without true original leaders to show the worker bees where to go and how to do, and how to adjust to a changing landscape, followers, hard-working or not, are just going through the motions and making up busy work to feel fulfilled. They will not create progress only through busy work.
People forget that when Vagelos came in to Merck the industry was about to face a down-turn from a scarcity of ideas. He came there with 20 years of research knowledge and excellent technical credibility along with a team of researchers that applied a new paradigm to developing medicine. He also came with personal and professional credibility that attracted the best. With all due respect to operational folks, professional management, lawyers, and even sales and marketing professionals, what is missing in this industry is new ideas and new means to get to new medicines. Because Boards of Directors are notoriously inept, the company will reflect what the soul of the leader contains. You get Hassan, you don't get technical excellence and you sure as hell don't get trust. You get Gilmartin and everything looks like sales and marketing and you don't get technical excellence. You get Clark and, well basically you get some operational experience and nothing else - ceertainly not technical excellence. You get Frazier and everything gets worked out in the deal or the courtroom but you don't get technical excellence. These guys are excellent hangers-on worker bees - just like thousands of scientists in R&D may be hard working but also without the capability or spirit necessary to break out of these present-day no-products doldrums.
Merck missed out on the Biotech (Amgen and Genetech) game because it failed to see that this was a new technical paradigm worth leading. Instead of Gilmartin it would have done well to get a respectable leader, specialized in that technical area, that could have introduced this new paradigm to its technical portfolio and at the same time served as the magnet for thousands of entreprenurial thinkers.
Merck needs new leaders right now. It only has professional followers (however worthy and nice) who have entrenched themselves in their day-to-day world of PowerPoint and Excel and SAP. A return to the spirit of leadership through technical excellence is needed to get new leaders and new ideas and new medicines so that those hard-working followers have something meaningful to do. And selling new products is a more optimistic job than staying busy watching the company stagnate and die. Activity is not progress and time is wasting.
People forget that when Vagelos came in to Merck the industry was about to face a down-turn from a scarcity of ideas. He came there with 20 years of research knowledge and excellent technical credibility along with a team of researchers that applied a new paradigm to developing medicine. He also came with personal and professional credibility that attracted the best. With all due respect to operational folks, professional management, lawyers, and even sales and marketing professionals, what is missing in this industry is new ideas and new means to get to new medicines. Because Boards of Directors are notoriously inept, the company will reflect what the soul of the leader contains. You get Hassan, you don't get technical excellence and you sure as hell don't get trust. You get Gilmartin and everything looks like sales and marketing and you don't get technical excellence. You get Clark and, well basically you get some operational experience and nothing else - ceertainly not technical excellence. You get Frazier and everything gets worked out in the deal or the courtroom but you don't get technical excellence. These guys are excellent hangers-on worker bees - just like thousands of scientists in R&D may be hard working but also without the capability or spirit necessary to break out of these present-day no-products doldrums.
Merck missed out on the Biotech (Amgen and Genetech) game because it failed to see that this was a new technical paradigm worth leading. Instead of Gilmartin it would have done well to get a respectable leader, specialized in that technical area, that could have introduced this new paradigm to its technical portfolio and at the same time served as the magnet for thousands of entreprenurial thinkers.
Merck needs new leaders right now. It only has professional followers (however worthy and nice) who have entrenched themselves in their day-to-day world of PowerPoint and Excel and SAP. A return to the spirit of leadership through technical excellence is needed to get new leaders and new ideas and new medicines so that those hard-working followers have something meaningful to do. And selling new products is a more optimistic job than staying busy watching the company stagnate and die. Activity is not progress and time is wasting.
The old MSD reps were trained so well that they were like little professors. The new Merck reps are walking boobs.
When did "MSD" get phased out of US? Perhaps no coincidence in that being about the same time we began the downhill slide?
Damn! This is so good, so very good, and so very right. We have substitued activity for productivity and as we all know, have nothing to show for it. But aren't we busy....
You morons arguing that diversity toppled a pharma giant must be Ken&Barbie malcontents. Every company in the industry embraced diversity initiatives...why didn't they all crash like Merck?
I'm from Merck Sharp & Dohme Class of 1985. I would have to agree that the slide started after Vagelos. Drunk on its mid eighties success, Merck struggled to adjust to managed care, made lots of marketing mistakes and some spectacular blunders on the research side.
* Flooding the sales force with college grads transformed the rich corporate culture of the sales force over night into one big frat/sorority party. Many of these 'pups" made DM and higher nearly overnight.
* After building a tremendous brand with VASOTEC Merck management gambled and lost by introducing PRINIVIL and licensing it as Zestril to another company in exchange for a diabetes drug that never panned out.
*Research/innovation changed to me-too factory (BLOCADREN, VASOTEC, PRINIVIL, PEPCID, ZOCOR, VIOXX)
*Marketing misfires: TONOCARD, PRIMAXIN, PROSCAR, NOROXIN, VIOXX
*Merck buys Medco ????
*Merck management allows Diovan to eat COZAAR's lunch
Many factors, but in the end, management is to blame.
Class of 1982 speaking here. All you stated are correct. The Ken and Barbie influx simply contribute to this whole mess. Bringing in "good-looking" people with no brain is not gong to stop the downward slide of everything you have stated.