Pfizer Director, Clinical Development reviews

Now that I'm in a startup, I recognize that Pfizer suffered from a very large bureaucracy that really added inertia to all kinds of things...everything from clinical trial design to contracting to...really everything. For example, now (in a startup) I can obtain contracts myself within 2 minutes; at Pfizer it took days. Sometimes a contract-in-progress at Pfizer would disappear into a black hole (such as Legal review) for weeks, and there would be nothing I could do to shake it loose. That just doesn't happen in a startup. Another thing that really decreased morale was that it was apparent that some sites at Pfizer (Pfizer had lots of sites...fewer now) were "more equal" than others, sometimes treating those at other sites like merely "hands" and not valuing their potentially intelligent input. At an extreme, this hierarchical posturing would result sometimes in an incorrect decision (e.g., a study design) being implemented because of intersite politics: if the incorrect decision came from a "more equal" site, those from that site might be less likely to listen to critiques from colleagues at the "less equal" site. In such situations, eventually the colleagues at the "less equal" site, being told enough times to shut up and just do what they're told, would give up and just become the well-paid automatons that apparently the company wanted....or leave the project.