No Dull Days in Venezuela
Alison Joslyn was known officially as general manager when she headed up operations of pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. in Venezuela. But to her employees, she was known simply as "Number 31," her shortwave-radio ID. Massive strikes, demonstrations, and oil-supply disruptions had made getting to the Caracas office dicey, and telephone lines were often jammed. So at preappointed times, Merck employees got on their shortwave radios for meetings. "At the beginning we were like kids at camp, but by the end we were having incredibly efficient meetings on the radio," Joslyn recalls.
So while Joslyn may just be the only T'87 who has worked for a single employer since Investiture, her life has not been sedate. A biology major at Yale, she decided she "wanted contact with people, not rats" and left the research laboratory. Her background drew her to the pharmaceutical industry, and she started at Merck the usual way—as a sales rep. After nine months of "trundling around" to physicians' offices, she moved to headquarters, working in marketing research, promotion, and product management.
In 1994, she was promoted to group project manager in the Netherlands, marketing drugs to Dutch physicians and consumers. "In a culture where people, by definition, don't respect authority," she recalls, "I had to influence by other means—by my behavior and the knowledge I could bring." Three years later, she faced an entirely new challenge: as marketing director in Slovenia, she had to develop a young, inexperienced team from scratch. "I was literally hauling out textbooks from Tuck and teaching them Marketing 101."
Her next assignment, in late 2000, was the top position in Venezuela—no easy task, considering her lack of Spanish, her gender in a Latin culture, and the 20-fold increase in her staff to 218. But chief among her challenges were the upheavals under President Hugo Chavez. Her first years were marked by a presidential coup; multiple strikes, including one that lasted two months; currency devaluation followed by exchange controls; and violent street demonstrations. "We had to figure out not just how to do business and be profitable but also how to safeguard our physical assets," she says. (The answer: more security staff, data stored off-site, systems to let people know of impending trouble.) Eight-hour waits at gas pumps made the shortwave radios critical, and meetings with her finance director took place during walks around her neighborhood.
"I hit my stride by 2004," she says, "and crises became bumps in the road, nothing more." Her organization was producing hefty sales and exceeding all targets. It even won company awards for customer-focused innovations that Joslyn had implemented to foster collaboration and stimulate innovation.
Early this year, Joslyn returned to corporate headquarters in Whitehouse Station, N.J., to take on the newly created global brand leader position for Singulair, Merck's best-selling drug. She's responsible for the product "end to end," from basic research to regulatory approvals to marketing to extending its product cycle. "What's important to me is to keep growing and learning and contributing to the bottom line. I would hate to be in a job that felt routine or where I felt like I knew everything there is to know," she says. "I used to pray for a dull day in Venezuela, and if I actually had one, fine. But two in a row were too many!"
