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Who is this new Global Head of Development for Novartis?

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Anonymous said:
He once led the NA Commercial and the Development orgs for Vaccines.
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Vaccines had over a Billion $s in losses over its history and Novartis engineered the swap of businesses with GSK so that, in effect, Novartis paid GSK $1.5B to take Vaccines of their hands.

Vaccines Development never in it entire history, released a commercially viable product.
 




Anonymous said:
We'll he must have done something right to become head of development?
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Exactly what we, at Novartis Vaccines, said when he was moved from head of the commercial division to Distribution. But no one could figure out what he did right when ran the commercial organization.

When he took over Vaccine Development there was an immediate exit of much of the top science and clinical talent. He brought with him a bunch of hangers on from his commercial days to form a extra parallel staff. Added many other additional staff. Tried several differ models, spending allot of money. Launched the biggest wet-squib of a vaccine product in the history of vaccine launches. Then he was "injected" into the Injectable business just prior to announcement of the sale to GSK.

When he was later, 1 Aug, appointed to head all of Novartis Development it was done very quietly. If you Google it, I could find an official Novartis press release or announcement. All,I found was the mention above.
 




































Anonymous said:
Don has never developed a commercially viable drug - yet he has successfully managed to milk the company for 10 years just by producing useless POCs which we were never able to replicate in a larger setting. He is a bad guy.
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Sounds like VN. Overall, sounds like a bright future for new products developed internally by Novartis. Sounds lie they need to continue to acquire their way out of this mess.
 




Anonymous said:
Sounds like VN. Overall, sounds like a bright future for new products developed internally by Novartis. Sounds lie they need to continue to acquire their way out of this mess.
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I have always thought the guy has the ability and is a smart guy. He was thrusted into a high end role much too fast, and a lack of experience and seasoning really hurt him. Would have it made that much of a difference with Vaccines? Perhaps, maybe the losses would not have been as steep as they could have had a more coherent model they would stick to rather than changing things up every 8 months that were very costly.

The real problem at vaccines that everyone saw was the talent he surrounded himself with. A lot of extremely arrogant yes men. They liked him because he was very hands-off at times and they could run wild with hiring and doing activities that benefited building up their resumes more so than benefiting the division. I would be more concerned with who he brings over from Vaccines than anything else.
 




Anonymous said:
I have always thought the guy has the ability and is a smart guy. He was thrusted into a high end role much too fast, and a lack of experience and seasoning really hurt him. Would have it made that much of a difference with Vaccines? Perhaps, maybe the losses would not have been as steep as they could have had a more coherent model they would stick to rather than changing things up every 8 months that were very costly.

The real problem at vaccines that everyone saw was the talent he surrounded himself with. A lot of extremely arrogant yes men. They liked him because he was very hands-off at times and they could run wild with hiring and doing activities that benefited building up their resumes more so than benefiting the division. I would be more concerned with who he brings over from Vaccines than anything else.
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Another post described him and AO as 2 teenagers who borrowed dad's car a brought it home wrecked. I guess that your point is that all of this was a multi Billion $ on the job training for him? Let's just say that he gets credit for 1/5 of the Novartis losses on vaccines. Fair since there was only really ever 5 positions that mattered at Vaccines. The CEO, Head of Research, Head of Tech Ops, Head of DEV and Head of Americas. And for anyone other than AO, held one or another the longest.

Novartis paid ~ $7B for Chiron. They lost ~ $200 M each year for 8 years = $1.6 B. They paid GSK ~ $1.5 B to take us off their hands. They got $1.2 B for Diagnostics.

That's a net of $ 8.8 B loss divided by 5 = ~ $ 1.8 B each.

I guess that JJ could be considering that as sunk costs in getting VN experience and hoping to recoup it later. A big bet for Novartis, hop pays off, quickly.

If things don't get better vis a vi Novartis Global DEV pretty quickly Wall Street will start asking questions and it wouldn't take an investigative reporter to quickly find out what happened here and do the same reasoning above.
 




Anonymous said:
I have always thought the guy has the ability and is a smart guy. He was thrusted into a high end role much too fast, and a lack of experience and seasoning really hurt him. Would have it made that much of a difference with Vaccines? Perhaps, maybe the losses would not have been as steep as they could have had a more coherent model they would stick to rather than changing things up every 8 months that were very costly.

The real problem at vaccines that everyone saw was the talent he surrounded himself with. A lot of extremely arrogant yes men. They liked him because he was very hands-off at times and they could run wild with hiring and doing activities that benefited building up their resumes more so than benefiting the division. I would be more concerned with who he brings over from Vaccines than anything else.
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He approved all strategies and budgets. Saying that his staff "ran wild" means what?
 




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