Word: vasella
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Vasella came late to the business world but was introduced early to illness and adversity. Born in 1953 in Fribourg, Switzerland, the son of a history professor and the youngest of four children in a Catholic household, Vasella developed asthma at 5, then fell ill with tuberculosis and meningitis at 8, each time spending a year away from home in recovery. He was 10 when his eldest sister died of cancer; three years later, his father died from complications after surgery. But the accidental death in 1982 of his second sister, who had attended medical school with him, was most...
After marrying his high school sweetheart in 1978 and completing medical school and a string of residencies, Vasella started as an attending physician at a university hospital in Bern in 1984. Though he loved working closely with patients, it bothered him that he knew little about business, especially because he had begun to invest modestly in stocks. Four years of psychoanalysis, Vasella says, helped free him "from the rules and obligations one imposes on oneself" and give him the courage to leap into a new career. In 1987 he sought the advice of Max Link, the well-connected and accessible...
...trainee--but one with a rocket strapped to his back. A year after joining Sandoz, Vasella became product manager for a new drug named Sandostatin, approved to treat a rare pancreatic cancer. The head of Sandoz's U.S. pharmaceutical unit joked that Vasella could consider his job well done if he made Sandostatin a $5 million product, a pittance in the branded-drug business. Vasella realized that to make Sandostatin a commercial success, he had to find new uses for it. And he believed he could do that only by radically changing the game...
...Vasella changed all that. He had clinical researchers, chemists from production and marketing managers put their heads together to find profitable new uses for Sandostatin. Those exertions paid off. The drug won approval for treating the side effects of certain cancers, and sales rose rapidly, reaching $486 million last year. Vasella asked Kim Clark, then a Harvard Business School professor (and now dean), to sign on as a consultant. "He told me something that stuck in my mind," says Vasella. "He said, 'You can change an organization from top down or bottom up, but it's very hard to change...
...long. In 1993 Vasella returned to Switzerland to head corporate marketing at Sandoz headquarters in Basel. The next year he briefly led the company's global drug-development programs, and he was its chief operating officer before becoming CEO of its drug business, reporting to the chairman of the conglomerate, Marc Moret--his wife's uncle. Vasella applied the lessons he had learned while managing Sandostatin to all the company's drug-development efforts. When Sandoz announced in 1996 that it would merge with its rival across the Rhine, Ciba-Geigy, Vasella was named CEO of the new company...