Big Pharma R&D. How it works

Nice reading

In July, Merck announced that it was stripping layers of senior management out of its research labs, letting go executives including Roger Pomerantz, the well-known microbiologist who had previously run Merck’s anti-viral drug research – an area Perlmutter himself says is a strong suit for the company. The problem, Perlmutter says, was that the labs had becoming tied up in bureaucracy, with too many people reporting to other people reporting to other people, all of them asking each other for permission slips.

 

“What happens in any company as it grows is there’s a tendency to increase your bureaucracy and to narrow the scope of peoples’ jobs,” says Perlmutter. “People refer to this as swim lanes. Everybody stay in their swim lanes. I’m actually interested in people who want to own the pool.”