MAY 2007
A Bigger Boat to Ride out Storm
He started out as a Stanford graduate in postwar Tokyo, served as a regional manager in pre-revolutionary Iran, and in 2001 became the leader of the world’s largest research-based pharmaceutical company. But his greatest achievement as CEO of Pfizer, Hank McKinnell told guests at the dinner honoring him as the 2007 Arbuckle Award recipient, was simply “making sure that the company would live on.”
It was no small feat, said Mc-Kinnell, MBA ’67, PhD ’69, given that the threats to Pfizer were, and remain, very real. Pfizer medicines worth $14 billion, a third of the company’s total revenues, go off patent between 2005 and 2008 and Lipitor, in 2011. “We could let the good times roll and keep sailing—or we could get ready for the storm by finding a bigger and better boat,” he said. “My legacy, I hope, is that bigger boat.”
Today, the company has a broadened and growing pipeline of medicines in development, including potential breakthroughs for Alzheimer’s, cancer, infection, schizophrenia, and women’s health. Nearly all of them went into development during McKinnell’s tenure. “At its core, Pfizer has the people, resources, and pipeline to get to a new area of growth—and I hope that’s part of my legacy,” he told listeners.
The issues
that draw McKinnell’s involvement now are corporate governance and education
in the United States and HIV/AIDS in Africa. He guided the construction of a
teaching, research, and care clinic in Kampala, Uganda, for the Academic
Alliance for
Infectious Care and Prevention where hundreds of medical professionals are
to be trained annually. “I believe AIDS is the moral crisis of our time, and
I will continue my involvement,” he said.