The pharmaceutical industry currently faces unprecedented challenges, the biggest being the urgent need to reinvent itself, its business model, and its ways of both creating value and holding values. At the same time, the turnover of CEOs at the top
companies has never been more rapid. The specific question this article sought to answer was, Is the “new” leadership truly new? That is, do these chief executives possess the necessary qualities to take their conservative, self-satisfied firms in hand, shake them up, and make them new, nimble, and responsive to a radically different environment? And if not, what kind of leader should a board of directors be looking to recruit? After interviewing some two dozen analysts, consultants, academics, and four Big Pharma CEOs, the writer found a consensus that the task of transforming the industry was beyond any single CEO’s capability and that even expecting such a model of leadership was a symptom of the failed “old” paradigm. Current CEOs were viewed as transitional figures who would be successful if they could make the “hard decisions” required in an industry in recession. Expectations were that genuine industry transformation would take a decade or more and would most likely be implemented by a series of short-term leaders instituting incremental innovation. A board of directors would be well advised to look outside the pharmaceutical industry and among a younger generation of managers for CEO candidates. In sum, this was less a roadmap to a future leader than a sweeping repudiation of recent industry leadership and practices
