Back from Denver last night. I think more people were talking about looking for new jobs then they were concerned about the changes with the Northera support center. I took the day off to work my connections. Looking to be out of here prior to 12/01/17 when shit hits the fan. PS Do not worry the office are used to doing PA they really will not mind. OMG and LMAO
HCPs won’t prescribe a drug that takes longer than 5 minutes for them or support staff to prescribe. Especially if it’s a drug for dizziness and has the same efficacy as midodrine.
Has there been a lot of turnover in neuro judging from who was not there at the west coast meeting? East coast had a ton of new faces! We could all tell that this is as good as it gets at Lundbeck, and things are heading in the wrong direction. The new CEO will want to make a quick name for themselves, so expect layoffs/reorg to happen quickly. Maybe they will hit management/HO first. Too many ASM's with a few reps. RBD's pretending to be ASM's. Nothing of any significance to help us sell Trin and Rex since launch. Meetings where the goal is to spend money with no ROI expected. So many bad decisions have been made, maybe a CEO that really cares about Lundbeck (which Kare didn't) will help. My guess is that a huge change is coming over the next 9 months. If you are looking to leave, look harder. If you are not, you better start.
we hear from Peter "Record Profits" all time for Lundbeck All promoted drugs are behind goals. greedy Kare raised guidance to 1.5B and that resulted in our quotas being jacked for T3. If Kare left it alone we would be doing well. Call it manipulating the stock price... in the USA he would be investigated for this but not so much in the land of Denmark. He sold his 5 million in stock immediately to ensure to maximize profits and resigned a few weeks later. Lorena mentioned he's the 3rd highest paid CEO. Teva... great that's the company that will be taking all your generic profits that only keep you net cash positive. Not that 52 million was necessary to still screw Lundbeck USA any more. the telling moment was when NOBODY was willing to ask a question of Peter, the silence in the room was long and uncomfortable. Peter discussed then the concerns about the future and we got the typical brush off with nothing was going to change and in the past we have always put our people first.... this is not about history anymore. This is about business. Don't expect for a minute that the new CEO will be someone who restructures companies. The pipeline is good though. You still get let go, the company will hire when they need bodies back in cars. The reality is this is a dead company for 5-10 years. The goals and payouts will always be substandard. A 33,000 bonus payout today is like a fantasy with their inept compensation team. When we continue to see lower income year over year and hear "record profits" it really adds to the reputation of the overpaid people at the top. At this point leaving is the option on many people's minds. The greed from a select few at the top ruined this once great company.
Your company has a grand total of 1 product that “might” launch within the next 10 years. Good luck. Trust no one.
"Might launch", are the key words. 35700 is a long shot at best. If you have any researchers in your territory, ask them about it. Kare screwed us over. It's all about the money. Patients and us are last in line. I now believe that most people in the sales force, managers and reps alike, believe that our time here will be measured in months. Quotas were deliberately set too high to control payout. Hell, they won't even back out UHC from territories that have significant UHC business, knowing full well that we have 0 access to UHC patients. I think upper management is almost in a state of panic over sales that will continue to fall. Their asses are on the line too. We now are doing things that the industry did years ago, i.e. meetings devoted to detailing with nothing else. Conference calls where people are trying to kiss ass with every comment. Managers that think every call should be the same every time, and realize that managed care controls everything but are too afraid to acknowledge that fact. Their new answer is now "probing" and "closing". Their lack of understanding of this 99% generic market is strange. These are all the signs of a company that has no clue of which way to turn. No clue on how to motivate. They could "motivate" us by cancelling the national meeting and giving us a check for what it would cost to send us to Vegas! Good riddance to Kare. Good luck to Staffan, who was smart enough to know it was time to bail.
Can’t see a way out. Today was written in stone early this decade when Copenhagen concluded that vorioxetine was going to be a blockbuster and was the answer to all problems. They were so convinced they gave up most rights in US to Takeda. Everything since that time has been panic moves (Northera) and snake oil (Kare). Little of value left.
I remember reading an article predicting that Brintellix (best name!) would be a multi-billion drug in a few years...and laughing about it! It is amazing they actually believed any AD would deliver anywhere near those numbers in a 99% generic market! All 3 branded products have a combined 1% market share! 1%!!! Now these idiots think we can actually steal mkt. share from generics!!! They border on insanity! Max, the self-described vis aid genius, rearranges our original vis aid, changes a few colors and placements, and thinks he has done something miraculous! It's laughable! Guys, Kare never had any intention of staying here. It was just a stop in his plan to go on to big and better things. Mr. Lundbeck, who left with him, truly cared about the company, but cared more about his family and their future, so he left. If he thought for one second that he and his family would be better off if he stayed here, he would have never left! So there it is. Neuro has Northera and Onfi, psych AM, T, and R. That's it. Onfi, our # 1 drug, goes off patent in a year, maybe less. It's time for all of us to wake, realize what is happening, get off our lazy asses, and be proactive (not reactive) about finding somewhere else to go. No more excuses about not having the time to look, or "there is nothing out there", or "I actually like my ASM, so I will ride it out". Really? Choose to stay or go. It's that simple. Time is running out every day.
Yes bad/delusional descisions were made. It was a case of management not looking in the mirror and realizing that psychiatry was a dead space for drug development, coupled with a “Denmark first” approach that ignored the US market for far too long. Many selfish choices made by all Danish exec team. The difficult, but correct move would have been to invest heavily in acquiring mid-stage neuro assets. If they had gotten Several phase 2 ready assets 5-10 years ago we might now have something of value to sell. Instead they tried to roll with their home grown garbage which was either all preclinical or based on very shakey phase 2 data (desmotaplase and Idalopirdine) But it was easier and better for some execs wallets, careers, and egos to keep slapping each other on the back about how smart they were for developing vorioxetine. They also could have sustained their US focused orphan drug operation and continued to make SMART (I.e. not Northera) launch ready acquisitions. Instead Kare let our entire epilepsy franchise rot into the ground because he needed to boost stock price to secure his big pharma job offer by not spending a penny.
in all the years of being in pharma, kare is a special breed. Overpaid, short and quick to hop around. He did nothing for the 61% of the global market. He paid off debt. It takes debt to make money and without out it, you can't compete to acquire the next promising medication. Having only 400 million in profit isn't going to make you competitive for the long term. I'm glad he's gone, he ripped off this company far worse that Wulf ever did.
There were a lot of eyebrows raised when he came in and told his leadership team and board that the plan was for Lundbeck to only develop our own blockbuster meds. No new deals, only terminating employees. While this was totally against modern convention, we/they assumed that as a Dane he wouldn’t be willing to screw over Lundbeck and just boost the stock price for self serving purposes. No wonder he is moving out of Denmark.
