Laurence G. Poli

Pharma faces a wide array of pressing issues-almost too many to think about comfortably-from drug safety and the industry's image to intellectual property in emerging markets and the overall usefulness of marketing. To remain effectively focused on strategy, industry executives must find relations between all the individual issues and group them into larger themes. Pragmatically, we all know this is essential.

Almost $60 billion of the drug industry's global sales comes from just 10 drugs. In fact, these so-called "mega-brands" have sales so high that they are bigger than many Fortune 500 companies. So why aren't they being managed that way?