Take quick steps
It didn’t take long for the first stiff gust of change to hit Higgins. Within several months of taking over the top spot, nearly every member of his dozen-member management team left the company. Nine of 10 directors on the company’s board also stepped down.
Most of the high-ranking executives and board members were jumping ship due to the uncertainty of the company’s future direction. While change at the top is a fact of life with many new CEOs, Higgins saw a red flag: With a lack of confidence at the top levels of Ligand, the morale of the work force could suffer, and the company could spiral downward even faster.
“It was pretty obvious that there was a new CEO and new leadership, but there was a bit of uncertainty about how long it would take to make decisions about what areas we would fund and whether there would be any staff cuts,” Higgins says. “I realized I needed to very quickly figure out the two or three core things at the company that we were going to build the business around, then get the team in place that was going to help drive that business forward.”
It’s a process that should have taken several months in a company the size of Ligand. But faced with slumping morale and a cost-revenue imbalance, Higgins didn’t have that kind of time. Instead of taking two or three months, Higgins compressed the time frame down to two weeks.
“My thinking is that it was more important to move decisively and move quickly to get 90 percent of the plan in place than it was to take more time and try to get 100 percent of the plan buttoned down,” he says. “There are always midcourse corrections or some refinement that you are going to have to make under any scenario, so the need to move quickly and give certainty to the team was something that I thought was vital.”
Higgins compressed the time frame by immersing himself completely in the project.
“It was a process that was just very intense and hands-on,” he says. “I was brand new at the firm; I had no loyalties to anybody or any program. I brought my own areas of operating expertise, but the benefit I had was I didn’t have loyalties or baggage that connected me to any particular program. I could come in with a clear mind in terms of what is the core foundation, what are we doing well, what are the elements of Ligand moving forward?”
Higgins conducted a number of meetings with senior management and held additional discussions with the board of directors and investors. He gauged everyone’s areas of interests and what they wanted to see from Ligand moving forward. Based on the dialogue from those discussions, Higgins and his leadership team began to formulate a future for the company’s core research businesses.
