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August 2005 California Dreamer Turns into Pharma Leader
Ask an executive to tell you the secret of his or her success and chances are you’ll hear something about learning from mistakes, passion for the job, or plain hard work. Not so with Jean-Pierre Garnier, MBA ’74, who received the Business School Alumni Association’s Global Business Leadership Award at a March dinner in London. Garnier attended the Business School on a Fulbright scholarship after earning a PhD in pharmacology in his native France. Now CEO of global pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline, he is credited with managing the merger of SmithKline Beecham and Glaxo Wellcome and with restructuring and streamlining the research and development operations of the new company. Garnier’s work to combat diseases that plague developing countries has earned him international plaudits. He has championed the search for treatments for HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria and pioneered new avenues of drug design. Working with nonprofit organizations, he has created partnerships to develop fundraising, research, and clinical trials and to spread risk. For example, his company has committed $1 billion over 20 years to eliminate lymphatic filariasis, a parasitic disease that is transmitted by mosquitoes and affects 120 million people in 80 developing countries. And the secret of his success? Apparently, he’s not telling. Asked by a young reporter for London’s Telegraph how he got to the top in pharmaceutical management, he answered: “You wouldn’t understand. Your generation is different. We didn’t want to go and be responsible for anything; we wanted to remain students forever. I had a PhD in pharmacology and that was pretty much the end of the road. Then in a student nightclub I heard about this degree and it was called master’s in business administration. You could get a scholarship and study in California. California was the center of the world in the late sixties and early seventies.” The rest, as they say, is history. |
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