How Novartis Vaccines & Diagnostics Turned Around the Ship it Got From Chiron
establish a series of quality improvement programs, to stabilize the company’s supply channels, and establish quality controls.
By January 2008, Novartis had replaced the entire management team. Stober said Novartis Vaccines created its core operations management team through a global recruiting effort to hire executives with “a winning spirit who were willing and able to fix the airplane while flying,”
Bulk Production of H1N1 Vaccine
At the same time, Novartis also was busy filling its ranks with more technically trained employees (instead of only science-based skills). Among other things, Stober said they found in 2006 that Chiron employed just 98 engineers in a global workforce of nearly 5,500 employees. By 2009, however, the number of engineers had increased to 280.
“If you bring in 50, 60 top-flight folks out of schools from different parts of the world, bring them into your organization and do that a couple of times, people just begin to realize, ‘Wow, that guy is smart,’ and—It’s not that you’re afraid, but you just step up your game,” Stober said.
Of course, many of the former Chiron employees also were motivated to become Novartis true believers as they saw their co-workers and managers replaced. But more than 3,000 of
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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