Remember the movie Trading Places when two rich old men put Dan Akroyd into the gutter and take Eddie Murphy out of it to figure out whether it’s nature or nurture that affects people’s outcomes?  Well there’s an equivalent going on in the Pharma industry right now. In this article, Fred Hassan’s Clean House, Forbes reports that almost all Schering-Plough’s management team have now followed him over from Pharmacia.  You may recall that Hassan went to Schering when he had a bit of free time on his hands, having very successfully sold Pharmacia to Pfizer for $58 billion in 2001. But you might also recall that at Pharmacia, Hassan had good drugs like the blockbuster Celebrex, Bextra , and some strong  therapeutic franchise’s elsewhere.

Now the whole team is over at Schering they’ll see whether they can make a success of going from the penthouse to the gutter (relatively speaking of course!).  Schering isn’t quite out of revenue or products but it will be nowhere near as easy a management job for this team as they had at Pharmacia. It reminds me a little of the Dilbert cartoon when the pointy haired boss announces to Dilbert and colleagues that "We always say that people are our most valuable asset, but I just did an audit and found that money is our most valuable asset–people came in 9th." Now Hassan and his team can prove that it is people not blockbuster product that can move the stock price.

Oh, and in Trading Places Eddie Murphy shone in the penthouse and Dan Akroyd (initially) fell to pieces in the gutter, showing that nurture or environment or, in pharma terms, product was the determining factor!