Pharma Giles has sold his soul and become one of the army of hack journalists specialising in writing corporate puff pieces for the plethora of “management news” web-sites and magazine pages that seem to abound these days.
And such is the fame of Giles in the industry, that the mere mention of his name guarantees access to the mightiest of pharmaceutical industry leaders…
Johnny B. Sinister, CEO of pharmaceutical giant Phoni Pharmaceuticals, smiles as he welcomes me to his underground lair beneath the company’s vast US campus at Dry Prong, Louisiana. He has every reason to be smiling, given his recent 12.5% pay rise.
“It’s PR time,” he calls out to his diminutive second-in-command and CEO of Phoni UK, Witi-Me. “Come and meet another asshole hack.” The little clone runs over and reaches up to shake my hand. His smile is even bigger than that of his master, but then at a downturn-busting 76%, so is his pay-rise...
“Pleased to meet you, shit-head,” squeaked the one-tenth-sized monochrome replica of John Sinister, his genetic progenitor.
Johnny B. Sinister became CEO of Phoni, the world’s largest imaginary pharmaceutical company, after ousting his predecessor Frank McBushranger in a spectacular boardroom coup three years ago. And only last year, Sinister’s diminutive number two succeeded the colourful head of Phoni UK, Jean-Pierre Loonier, by winning the Phoni UK Celebrity Executive Love Island Challenge, the bizarre means by which the eccentric Gallic Gauleiter chose to select his successor.
Yet in the brief time that these two men (or strictly speaking, 1.1 men) have captained their respective operations, they have managed to transform the philosophy by which modern pharmaceutical companies operate. The Phoni board of directors certainly approve of their strategy, hence the bank-sized bonuses given as a reward.
“R & D? Who needs stinkin’ R & D?” laughs Sinister, a statement that would have been regarded as lunacy by industry leaders only a few years ago.
But Sinister is not a man who balks at sacrificing a few sacred cows. As the former General Counsel of global fast food giant McKindler’s, slaughtering cows is all in a day’s work.
“Research and development is just an expensive overhead for pharmaceutical companies these days,” he explains. “It simply doesn’t give a return on investment. In the past we’ve thrown hundreds of billions of dollars at R&D, and in return have very little to show for it - other than having our sites littered with a lot of expensive to run, poorly designed, state of the art pilot plants and laboratories all filled with smug, lazy scientists. Isn’t that right, Witi-Me?”
“Yes sir, anything you say sir,” his loyal clone replies.
Arguments that pin the collapse of R & D productivity on a lack of understanding of how to maintain a healthy pharmaceutical research culture receive short thrift from Sinister.
”The only thing that matters is profit,” he says. “Talk of future patient population needs or ten year development cycles is no use when your fellow directors and your investors are demanding huge financial returns now.”
“Lawyers, accountants and MBAs like us are like factory ships,” Sinister explains, “and when we smell money in the water, we go into a feeding frenzy. Little fish had better watch out. And that’s just what happened ten years ago when guys like us realised that the pharmaceutical ocean was awash with money. We piled in and netted everything in sight. Looking after whales such as long-term research programmes or the culture of continuity and stability that nurtures the development of a productive R & D culture was just a waste of plankton to us. Now that we’ve vacuumed the ocean for personal gain, the food chain has collapsed and it’s time to move on. Am I right, Witi-Me?”
“Yes sir, anything you say sir,” responds his tiny avatar.
Sinister and Witi-Me are well-versed in the standard industry practices of keeping leaky vessels afloat, however.
Their brief reign has seen the usual rounds of aggressive and random take-overs, mergers, spin-offs (with the inevitable mass downsizings) in a desperate attempt to prop up their collapsing stock price, coupled to illegal marketing tactics, “pay to delay” deals with generic companies, aggressive lobbying to stop healthcare reforms and the promotion of highly profitable yet known-to-be dangerous drugs.
Anything except the development of safe and efficacious new products, in fact.
Other pharmaceutical companies have seen the financial success of these tactics and have followed suit. Sinister and Witi-Me intend to remain ahead of the pack, however.
“Most other companies think they can simply shut down their own R&D and just buy in ideas from smaller start-ups” says Sinister, “and much as I approve of such short term thinking coupled to a flawed understanding of ‘risk’, we need to think bigger. Don’t we, Witi-Me?”
“Yes sir, anything you say sir,” his loyal clone replies.
“The fact is, there’s not enough money in Europe and the US to interest us any more. All of the off-shoring and outsourcing that MBA-trained CEOs like myself have undertaken, coupled with the financial crash engineered for personal gain by our board-room colleagues in the financial industry, means the First World can’t afford us any longer,” Sinister reasons.
”So we figure that if we outsource all of our manufacturing and development to the Third World, we not only get the short term gains of cheap labour and lax regulation, but we also get to build up the Third World economy to the extent that we can start raking in the cash from them instead. Makes sense, doesn’t it, Witi-Me?
“Yes sir, anything you say sir,” his loyal clone replies.
“Of course, the US and UK will descend into abject poverty as they lose all of the skills that sustain an industrial culture, but that’s just fine as far as we are concerned. Because in fifteen or twenty years time, when the Third World has become the First World and incredibly rich, we’ll just pull the plug and take all of their money, just like we’re currently doing to the US and UK now.”
“And then we’ll outsource all of our manufacturing back to the Third World that the US and UK will have become. It’s a strategy that’s indefinitely sustainable when you think about it. Aren’t we brilliant, Witi-Me?”
“Yes sir, anything you say sir,” responds his ever-faithful sidekick.
So never let it be said that today’s pharmaceutical industry executives are just short-term thinkers who interested in quick profits at the expense of tens of thousands of research workers.
”We’re short term thinkers who are interested in quick profits at the expense of millions of research workers and entire national economies,” boasts Sinister. “Isn’t that right, Witi-Me? Bwu-ha-ha-ha…”
“Yes sir, anything you say sir. Bwu-ha-ha-ha…” his loyal clone replies, raising the little finger of his left hand to his mouth and laughing maniacally in imitation of his evil master…
Of course, in the parallel universe of reality, such a cynical interpretation of the current actions of our industry’s leaders would be ludicrous…
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