Career Imprints
Chapter One
Introduction: Career Imprints
and Senior Executive Mobility
Baxter International, a global medical products and services
company based in Deerfield, Illinois, has spawned a disproportionate
number of top managers in the U.S. biotech industry. In
fact, the company, through those managers, has had a significant
influence on how the thirty-year-old biotech arena has evolved
and grown. Consider: former Baxter managers were on the IPO
teams of nearly one-quarter of all of the biotechnology companies
that went public between 1979 and 1996. What's more,
Baxter generated a disproportionate number of entrepreneurs in
the field-that is, people who went on to lead and manage
biotech firms after their time at Baxter.
Why has this one company had such a significant effect on the
biotech industry?
Headhunters for years have used the mantra, "if all else fails,
pick a senior executive from GE," meaning essentially that
they couldn't go wrong picking an executive developed by
such a company. Yet a fair number of former General Electric
(GE) managers have had a tough time in their post-GE
careers. As one 1998 headline from The Wall Street Journal
summed up, "A Ja ... read full excerpt from Career Imprints: Creating Leaders Across An Industry ebook
