Pharmaceutical Executive, Apr 1, 2005

Features

Good News Bad News

By Stephen J. Porth , George P. Sillup

The majority of headlines opposed the industry: 57.1 percent were negative, 18.1 percent were positive, and 24.8 percent were neutral. But the headlines were less negative than the stories themselves.

MVPs

By William Roite , Daniel Williams

MVPs go beyond numbers to create extraordinary value for companies and their stockholders. They are the top two to five percent of employees. In other words, if you were to lose 100 people, which two to five would you protect at all costs?

Keys to Success

By Michael Curran-Hays , Martin Wing

Johnson & Johnson's pharmaceutical group builds team and relationship skills into performance evaluations. J&J's Robert Wills says, "Such skills are a built-in expectation. It's how people are supposed to do their job. Everyone who participates in an alliance is compensated for behaviors that contribute to mutual success."

Risky Business

By Anthony Farino , Timothy Nugent , John T. Bentivoglio , John Shakow

Every quarter, pharmaceutical manufacturers confront a dizzying array of price reporting obligations. Participation in the Medicare, Medicaid, Veterans Administration (VA), and Public Health Service (PHS) programs requires manufacturers to collect, organize, distill and manipulate vast quantities of information, and to generate from that data reportable figures that can have an enormous impact on the company's bottom line. It is critical that these figures be correct, not only to help ensure the integrity of these public programs, but because submission of false data to a federal agency is a prosecutable criminal offense, and the civil penalties and exposure can be staggering.

Patent Attack

By Gregory Glass

Contrary to myth, Paragraph IV certifications are not reserved only for blockbusters or high-volume primary care products. Three products under recent Paragraph IV challenges had sales of less than $50 million.

Columns

Marketing to Professionals: The Good and the Bad

By Willow Duttge

Companies should balance the public's need to know with the industry's right to keep strategic intelligence private.

Newer Not Always Better

By David Blumberg

Developing first-in-class therapies is riskier and more labor intensive than filling pipelines with successor drugs. Can innovation remain the cornerstone of an industry reliant on "me toos"?

Meetings: Overall Improvement

By Cindy D'Aoust

You would think that identifying where a pharma company spends its money on meetings would be simple, but at most organizations, there are no processes or systems in place to track meeting activity.

Leadership: Listen Up Leaders: Get Out of the Way!

By Sander A. Flaum

Creativity that spawns innovation transcends the daily workplace grind and shows up in unexpected areas.

Educational Exchange

By Barbara Lockee , Michelle Reece

Institutions bring value to industry not only through shared coursework or customized training programs, but also through leveraging the intellectual property of institutional personnel for corporate problem solving.

Is There Life After Big Pharma?

By Stephen Israel

You can have a biotech company with a great technology base, but if it doesn't have a product in Phase II development, Wall Street won't reward the company by increasing the value of its stock price. When products are valued over technology, there is a higher premium for commercially-focused business leaders.

Direct to Consumer: Is Branding Enough?

By Amy Lynn Tobbagi

You couldn't have missed Viagra's (sildenafil) "Devi" campaign. It's the one where the "V" in the Viagra logo turns into a pair of devil"s horns atop a middle-aged man's head. Well, FDA didn"t miss it either. Back in November 2004, the agency sent Pfizer a warning letter stating that its reminder ads for Viagra lacked risk information.

The Business Case for Diversity

By Sibyl Shalo

For the third year in a row, Abbott Labs has made it into the top 10 companies judged by DiversityInc magazine to have the most diverse workforce. According to DiversityInc co-founder Luke Visconti, that makes Abbott, number five in the ranking, extraordinary. Merck is the only other pharma company to make the cut, but comes in at number 24, and is on a downturn—it was ranked 13 last year.

Alternative Media: Cautious Integration

By Paul Buta , Tina Jacobs

Unsolicited bulk e-mail is competing with the messages that companies are sending. More than 80 percent of consumers deal with their cluttered inboxes by deleting all messages from people they don't know.

Candidate Care: A Competitive Advantage

By Robert Hennessy

World-class talent seeks its own level, so hiring companies should make sure that those involved in the interviewing process are strong employees who represent the company as leaders in their own rights.

Confessions of A Corporate Headhunter

By Denise DeMan Williams

It is unethical for a retained search firm to fill one client's needs by poaching people from another client that entrusts the firm with its searches and secrets. Partnering—and sharing fees—might be the solution.

Washington Report

Washington Report: The Little Fix

By Jill Wechsler

Reformers want to give FDA more clout, but agency officials say internal changes will help fix drug safety problems.

TOC

Cover Story

TOC

OVERVIEW

From the Editor

Building a World-Class Workforce

By Sibyl Shalo

Job candidates that evangelize a company are worth more than PR campaigns.

The Problem With Bob

By Patrick Clinton

Could it be that someone's finally going to wipe the grin off Smiling Bob's face? As we were putting this issue to bed, the Cincinnati newspapers reported that federal agents had raided the offices of Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals, a company best known for its "natural male enhancement" pill, Enzyte, and for its repulsive television commercials starring Bob. The US Postal Service led the operation, which also included the FBI, IRS, and FDA. They froze bank accounts, sent employees home, and combed records, attempting to determine whether Berkeley, which has accumulated more than 5,000 complaints with the Cincinnati Better Business Bureau and the Ohio attorney general's office since 2001, had committed mail fraud.

Special Reports

Unleashing the Promise

By Nicole Gray

Recently developed technologies produce clinical quality cells in as few as12 days. Culturing cells in petri dishes can take a month or more.

Phase Six: Regain Confidence

By Patrick Clinton

In a bright airy office above fifth avenue in New York, Lynn O'Connor Vos is talking about topics dear to her heart: trust—and how pharma can regain it—the need to put physicians back in the center of pharmaceutical marketing, and reinvention, a theme in her own life and the core to her approach to business.

World News

Global Report: Generics' New Powerhouse

By Sarah Houlton

Conventional wisdom says that generics businesses are a drain on valuable resources. But these units are much less prone to the disastrous drug safety panics that Big Pharma has recently endured.