Fred Hassan: ‘You Make Your Own Luck’
3 CommentsBy Ed Silverman // June 19th, 2008 // 9:16 am
Having been beaten up over the Vytorin scandal, the unflabble Schering-Plough ceo offers these insights to BusinessWeek:
“Adversity is part of life and part of business. By dealing with adversity effectively, both people and organizations become stronger and better. It makes them more resilient. It makes them more confident—because they know they can prevail even in tough times.
The key is confronting the reality you face and dealing with it with courage and tenacity. Organizations and people have a hard time doing this: They tend to ignore the problem or to fall into a downward spiral of complaining and commiserating.
I’ve learned from my career that you really do make your own luck. It starts with a winning attitude, and it requires listening and learning so you can keep changing and adapting to prevail in a new situation. With those qualities you can emerge stronger.”
And you can emerge with lots of cheap stock options, too.
BDM
Fred Hassan should be smiling! He made $32 million last year! It’s easy for him to talk about the right things, but it seems he has a lot of trouble doing them. He lives highly while employees lose their jobs. History repeats itself and this is one repeat that SP could do without.
SSAM
Hassan is one big shameless con man. He recently sent emails to all the employees of Schering Plough stating how “he feels their pain” in making all the job cuts at the company. Really…
Does he actually think that noone knows about the $30 million plus he made last year???
Morale has never been lower at the company. Hard working,loyal employees dread going in and waiting for their jobs to be cut. Especially with his emphasis on cutting the jobs of “older” employees.
Lucky
Show me a Pharma CEO who does not have this kind of “attitude” and who does not have a huge paycheck, while killing people with his products and laying off his workers. If you can find one, I would be dumbfounded.