Hard Charger

Jean-Paul Scheuer:
"Retreat Is For Losers" 

Despite a business degree, Jean-Paul Scheuer may owe much of his success to a simple packaged salad.
After university, the sanofi-aventis Zentiva executive spent two years selling packaged salads to markets across France.

"The salad was terrible, but I had to say it was good," he said. "With conviction, you can sell anything."
"When we studied marketing in school, I hated it.  It was awfully boring, and so I chose economics and finance," Scheuer says. "Now, I see that is boring, and I enjoy marketing much more."

Scheuer says that he learned as much about business reality by selling salads as he did in business school.
"When you leave business school, you think that you are the best at everything, because that's what everyone tells you," he said.  "When you are looking for a job, though, reality sets in."

"As a salad salesman, I was humiliated, but it's where I obtained my experience.  This is where I learned my job."   He notes, "when I talk to a medical sales representative, I know what he's doing.  It's the same process."

Scheuer eventually tossed salads aside for his first job in pharmaceutical sales.  After two years on the road, a desk job looked appealing.  He quickly became bored with office routine, though, and the road beckoned once again. 

Another pharmaceutical firm wanted a foreign product manager who spoke English.  That job sent him to North African French-speaking countries, then to Canada, Vietnam, Mexico, and into Eastern Europe.

The job wasn't his first international exposure.  The son of expatriates, he grew up in Singapore and Greece.  The peripatetic Scheuer learned to love foreign travel while still in his teens.

As regional head of global pharmaceutical giant sanofi-aventis, which combined this year with Zentiva, an important generic drug maker, Scheuer spends as much as a quarter of his time on tasks directly related to promoting his company's ever-expanding product line.  He says that, if taken in a broader sense, as much as 75 percent of his time is spent on marketing activities.

He says that he hopes that his three in-house marketing specialists view his previous marketing experience as a positive factor, rather than as interference. 

"They can bring ideas to me, and I challenge them.  I think that if I didn't have my marketing experience, I would have more problems," he said.  "I really like marketing. I am very demanding, and I expect a lot.  In a marketing plan, I want to see projects that haven't been done by our competitors."

"We need to be a leading company in terms of creativity. We need to be a leader in marketing.  I don't want to wait and see what others do."

Scheuer likes to give his marketing ream the freedom to explore possibilities.     
"I don't see myself as a very creative person.  I want my people to be creative - they are the experts - they are more able than me to make a campaign," Scheuer says, while adding that "I am the best judge of success, and can make [staff ideas] even better."

"If you give people freedom, they will generate ideas.  The freedom to create means that there is no fear of refusal of the ideas.  We cannot, of course, implement all of the ideas, but we take the best of them, and turn them into something better."

Scheuer says that the pharmaceutical business faces two marketing problems that don't affect other industries. 
First, he says, "we need to use ethical ways to promote our products, even when our competitors do not.  We need to fight the temptation to do things easier or faster by sidestepping the ethical issues." 

Second, Scheuer says that the prescription drug business "has to be one of the only industries where we don't face the end consumer - we go through a physician or pharmacist.  The consumer doesn't choose our product, it is chosen for him.  We need to convince the patient that a drug is good without talking to him directly."
Scheuer expects to spend three more years in Ukraine. 

"I love this country, I love the challenges here, and we have a good team," he says. 
While Scheuer acknowledges the economic crisis and the pain it has inflicted on many Ukrainians, "we can't hide behind it," he says.

"If you can still be ambitious, even in tough times, with a clear vision of what you want and where you want to go, you will continue to move forward," he says.  "Moving forward is not important - it's the only thing to do.  Staying the same is not interesting. Retreat is for losers."

After all, the lifelong traveler says, "if you know where you are going, you have the best chance to arrive."