Age: 58.
Family: married with two daughters aged 29 and 28, and a 23-year-old son.
Background: grew up in a small town on Long Island, the only member of his generation in the Gilmartin family to go to college (all of the next generation have done so); undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from Union College in New York State in 1963; worked for three years for Eastman Kodak as a development engineer; then went to Harvard Business School where he completed his MBA in 1968; spent eight years as a consultant with Arthur D. Little; joined medical devices company Becton Dickinson in 1976 as vice-president corporate planning and by 1994 held the posts of chairman, president and CEO; this was his first introduction to Ireland through the company's manufacturing operations in Dun Laoghaire and Drogheda.
Current position: was head-hunted to the post of president and CEO of Merck & Co in 1994; initially refused to be considered for the job on the grounds that he was happy with what he was doing and "felt a responsibility to people around" him; reconsidered after discussing the matter with his wife and concluding that he was "violating a cardinal principle" in acting as though Becton Dickinson would "fall apart" if he left; elected Merck chairman in November 1994.
What he brought to the job: "I had experience. . . of knowing that even in an intensely competitive environment, that if you think in terms of generating resources through productivity gains and manufacturing, you can invest those resources to grow the company by investing in more research and marketing. . ."
Regrets: "None"; "It's been tremendous".
Management style: "What I strive to do is to really take full advantage of all the talent and knowledge and expertise around me. I do not see myself as the hero figure or the hero CEO in the company."
His record: "Look at it over a five-year period. We have split the stock once. On a post-split basis, the value of the company stock when I arrived was about $14-$15 a share. Today we are about $69 (€65.2). That's off a little bit from where it was at the start of the year by a small amount - 5 or 6 per cent. And last year in 1998, stock appreciated about 40 per cent. So the share price performance has been quite strong. Over the past couple of months, the pharmaceutical industry in general has, compared to what it had been doing in previous year, been off some. That could be due to a number of factors, some of which may be that others have seen better investment opportunities in some of the stocks that were being ignored. But in the last week or so, it seems like there is renewed interest in the pharmaceutical stocks."
His affiliations include: being immediate past chairman of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the representative body of the industry in the US ("The primary activity really is to argue our case in Congress and with the administration"); he is also chairman of the Board of Associates at Harvard Business School and is vice-chairman of the Healthcare Institute of New Jersey.
