Medicine Man

What's your advice to young leaders in businesses dealing with government or regulators? You need to think of them as your customers. Now, that doesn't mean you're always going to agree with them ... But you have to, as you would with any customer, try to understand what they're trying to achieve. What's driving them? ... What are their problems? And see if you can find win-win solutions.

Has the industry done a good job of justifying its marketing costs? No. One thing that has not been helpful is the way we as an industry—and Pfizer, certainly, is no exception—have done TV commercials. When direct-to-consumer advertising was first permitted, there was a real seriousness about the ads, a real science orientation, a balance about the risks and the benefits. And over time we got a little bit away from that. We're doing everything we can to rectify that. But I think one of the things that contributed to [the problem] was a view of the industry that we were more of a marketing operation than a science operation, and that we were spending so much money on marketing that we could reduce the prices of our drugs. That's not economically factual, but I think we have, to some extent, ourselves to blame for that.

What are the most common mistakes that you see in young managers? One mistake or lost opportunity is to not look for ways of growing within your job. There's a tendency, especially in a big hierarchical organization, to feel like you can only grow if you're promoted. I don't think there's anything wrong with being ambitious in a healthy way, as long as you don't hurt other people in doing it. But if your ambition is entirely focused on "I need to be promoted," you're going to upset people and you're going to frustrate yourself over time, especially as organizations grow flatter and opportunities become fewer. So my strongest advice to people—and I frankly try to do this myself, it's one of the reasons I ended up broadening beyond where I started from as a lawyer—is, look within your own job for ways in which you can expand your contribution. And there are always a million of them, because any company is looking for smart people to help solve problems.

© 2007