New Blood Needed: Pharma R&D Leadership Tenure
Bruce Booth, Forbes Contributor and partner at Atlas Venture, was struck by the recent analysis of Big Pharma by Citi that looked at the average and median tenures of the top 20-30 R&D executives across large pharma companies:
The authors suggested that GSK should bring some new blood into the organization. What’s the right average or median tenure for a leadership team? Booth says it depends on the organization and the team’s performance. The most productive R&D organizations are often those that use externally-sourced leaders to complement their internally-developed ones.
Booth thinks a healthy R&D leadership team has a blend of external newcomers and internal leaders, which means average team tenure should be 6-8 years. The median would be much lower, since tenured 20+ year employees will pull the average up. Every situation is too different to say that R&D productivity correlates tightly with average tenure, but Booth thinks there’s probably some correlation for the companies above – so adding external talent may be worthwhile for many of them.
