They say you know when you’re getting old when policemen start to look like youngsters. For me, it’s the CEOs of Big Pharma who are starting to look like juniors.
I would like to say congratulations to 43-year old Andrew Witty, the British wunderkind who has this week ascended to the dizzy heights of being head of one of the world’s most powerful pharmaceutical companies, GSK. I must admit to a touch of envy and a feeling that I should be in his shoes.
You see, like me Mr Witty started his meteoric rise when he took up a place on the Glaxo graduate trainee scheme back in 1985 after graduating with a degree in economics from Nottingham University. The year before I was also lucky enough to win a place on this trainee scheme, which only took on four would-be high flyers every year from UK universities.
We had to undergo a gruelling weekend of selection tests and interviews at Glaxo HQ outside London. This was a bizarre experience, very similar to the selection process for becoming an army officer, in which we had to take part in practical group leadership tests that required us to organize the crossing of an imaginary jungle river using bits of rope and planks.
I’ve often thought this situation would make a good movie – a diverse shortlist of 12 young and ambitious people all trying in various ways to outshine and outwit their fellow candidates. It was almost as if we had been assembled by a Hollywood casting agency – a languorous upper class public school type, a chippy and talkative cockney, an aggressive Scot and a cool and icy career woman – and an evasive, bolshie troublemaker who we all reckoned was a “plant” sent in by the company to eavesdrop on our true selves away from the men with clipboards.
The weekend finished off with a very unnerving one-on-one interview with a brooding Glaxo executive who with hindsight bore a disturbing resemblance to Donald Rumsfeld.
A few weeks after this selection weekend I was more surprised than anyone to receive a letter from Glaxo offering me a place on the scheme. Having no other success in the job hunt I took up the offer and found myself working as the equivalent of tea boy in the market research department, where my most important duty was running down to the West End to pick up the boss’s tuxedo from the dry cleaners. Working for Glaxo in 1984 was like working for the public service – a job for life in a self-contained institution that was half-jokingly described as “the only university quoted on the stock exchange”.
And that’s why I soon left – along with three of the four other graduate trainees that year - because it seemed a staid and insular place with limited opportunities for advancement. A bit like Reginald Perrin’s Sunshine Desserts. Despite being eventually promoted to marketing assistant in charge of hydroxycobalamin I didn’t really see any future for the humble graduate trainee at Glaxo.
They say you know when you’re getting old when policemen start to look like youngsters. For me, it’s the CEOs of Big Pharma who are starting to look like juniors. 
