| Tobias was the youngest vice-chairman at AT&T, after several years working with the company prior to and throughout its break-up with Bell Systems. His experience of dealing with the sudden change and hubris of management shake-ups probably partly led to his unexpected 1993 appointment to Lilly. His very popular predecessor, Vaughn Bryson, had resigned after intense pressure from the board of directors, which, in turn, elected an outsider that could bring about a concrete vision of change and strategic movement for the international pharmaceutical giant. It could not have been a worse time to enter Lilly: antagonism from employees towards "the telephone guy", the steady decline in the company stock price and market value, and a fresh new crisis of several patients near death after having sampled a trial drug for treating hepatitis B. How Tobias overcame this litany of challenges to win collective trust and respect is worth reading. The reader should not miss the chapter of Lilly's ultimately ineffectual and ill-timed, but well-reasoned response to the 1993 Clinton universal healthcare proposal, which would have sounded the death knell of the pharmaceutical industry. |
| Being the CEO of a large pharmaceutical company is hard enough, and Tobias had to undergo personal upheaval early on in his tenure when his first wife, Marilyn,committed suicide, leaving behind two adult children. Marilyn suffered from severe clinical depression at a time when the disease was not understood and few methods of treatment available. From this tragedy came the launch of Prozac, the anti-depressant developed by Lilly that changed the face of mental illness in society. Tobias muses how Prozac came too late to save his wife, but he managed to turn his misery into a motivational tool to achieve a cure for depression, thereby possibly saving other lives. |
| Tobias stresses the value of a succession strategy, recalling the harried, somewhat arbitrary circumstances of his ascent to the post of CEO. While he had several years to go before mandatory retirement at the age of 65, he took the decision to leave after just five years at the helm. Lilly was doing very well in terms of shareholder value, R&D prospects, overall employee and client satisfaction, and immediate crises. In other words, Tobias felt it was the best time to depart gracefully and ensure a smooth, uneventful transition for the successor. This he did by letting the board be privy to his plans one year ahead of time, and withdrawing gradually, giving everyone, from the new CEO himself to shareholders and the media, ample time to adjust. |
| A good chunk of the book is purely autobiographical, with detailed yet readable accounts of his childhood in small-town Indiana, university life, and two years in the US Army Reserves during the Vietnam War, and working at AT&T. Tobias attributes his values, ethics and central thinking to his bosses, school music teachers, and his parents. |
| The book is often overanalysed and hackneyed in places. The appendix, "Tobias' Lessons in Leadership", is unimaginative and has little new to offer. Most of the one-liners in that appendix are of four sentences, and hardly catchy or memorable. Some parts are annoyingly self-congratulatory, accompanied by laudatory testimonials from Tobias' co-workers and supervisors. Tobias could have achieved the essential premise of the book by laying out his story and allowing the reader to gather, absorb and learn his lessons of leadership. It becomes apparent that Tobias is trying to emulate Jack Welch, whom he admires and whose autobiography was a bestseller, but does not quite cut the mustard. |
| PUT THE MOOSE ON THE TABLE LESSONS IN LEADERSHIP, A CEO'S JOURNEY THROUGH BUSINESS AND LIFE |
| Randall Tobias with Todd Tobias East West Books; 265 pages; Rs 295 |
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