Pfizer's Change Management: Unfamiliar Faces

The dust kicked up by the furniture movers at Pfizer Inc. still hasn’t settled as new CEO Jeff Kindler shakes up the senior office suite at the world’s largest pharmaceutical company. But the dust hasn’t obscured the basic message: Pfizer’s strategic and managerial model hasn’t worked. What’s more, the Big Pharma’s board is one of a handful in the industry coming to similar conclusions.

Pfizer’s directors had an immensely obvious measure of failure: market value. When former CEO Hank McKinnell took over as CEO of Pfizer in 2001, the company was worth $265 billion....