Reporting on the life and profession of Maureen Regan presents one thing of a problem. Irrespective of how laborious one may attempt to steer the dialog towards Maureen the skilled, it all the time veers again to Maureen the particular person.
The tales are legion and hilarious. There was the time she saved a shopper’s personal airplane idling on the runway so she might seize doughnuts for the flight. There was the motivational speech she gave upfront of a serious pitch, described by one one who heard it as “within the fashion of Henry V on the Battle of Agincourt.” There was the unauthorized bagpipe parade by means of the places of work of Lally, McFarland and Pantello on St. Patrick’s Day, full with copious portions of inexperienced beer.
“We had a variety of enjoyable,” Regan says with a realizing giggle. “We labored our tails off, however we have been all the time laughing. You’re working with the wittiest group of individuals on the earth — how are you going to not be laughing?”
Entertaining as they’re, these tales shouldn’t overwhelm Regan’s ceiling-smashing tenure as an company chief. The primary lady president of a serious healthcare promoting company, Regan succeeded in every single place she went, presiding over lengthy relationships with a laundry listing of A-list shoppers (Procter & Gamble, Allergan, Novartis, Johnson & Johnson and Boehringer Ingelheim amongst myriad others).
Regan charted an uncommon course to the Corridor. The daughter of Irish immigrants, Regan and her 5 sisters grew up round her father’s service station. The household enterprise, she remembers fondly, helped forge her enterprise perspective and her work ethic.
“All the things I realized, I realized in a gasoline station,” she says with fun. “The enterprise educated us and it fed us. Our lives revolved round it.” At an early age, Regan realized to roll up her sleeves and get her fingers soiled, usually actually: “If the gasoline jockey didn’t present up, properly, guess who was the gasoline jockey?”
After graduating from highschool, Regan attended nursing college, which proved a lower than splendid match from the outset. “On the time, there have been solely three professions the typical lady went into: nurse, a secretary or a instructor,” she notes. “Nursing is likely one of the best professions, however it wasn’t for me. I joke that the quite a few occasions I needed to do CPR on the road, I all the time did just a little curtsy and stated, ‘Second from the underside in my nursing class!’”
Following a brief stretch on the “insanely understaffed” Mount Sinai hospital in Manhattan (“you go from being a 21-year-old child partying up a storm to being in the course of all this trauma”), Regan briefly carried the bag for Abbott Laboratories. Her first company job was at Lally, McFarland and Pantello, the place she quickly reduce her tooth on the agency’s Procter & Gamble enterprise.
It proved a pivotal expertise. “They’d simply purchased a pharma firm, however they didn’t know the [HCP] buyer. They labored on Tide,” Regan explains. “So these extremely good individuals would take heed to all the pieces I stated. I used to be perhaps 27.”
Regan stresses that she realized extra from P&G’s individuals than they realized from her. “Between my nursing diploma and my MBA, it was like I went to industrial college,” she continues. “I didn’t know learn how to write a enterprise memo or a suggestion — properly, P&G had a system for that. I used to be a math and science lady, and that wasn’t going to get me to the place I needed to go.”
Nonetheless, her Lally colleagues acknowledged one thing in Regan from the beginning. She counts founding associate Ron Pantello, the previous chairman of Havas Well being, cofounder of the Medical Promoting Corridor of Fame (with MM+M founder David Gideon) and a 2009 MAHF inductee himself, as a mentor — and as a groundbreaking chief in his personal proper.
“At 32 I used to be director of shopper providers, and at 34 I used to be president,” Regan says. “Ron didn’t care, like so many individuals did on the time, what the gender of the particular person was. He was simply in regards to the outcomes. He gave alternatives to a variety of ladies.”
Pantello stays a superb good friend. He enthusiastically backed Regan for the Medical Promoting Corridor of Fame, joking in his nomination that “if Mo was within the room, you knew it .… There is just one Mo; perhaps that’s a superb factor.”
Regan left Lally in 1997 with two longtime colleagues, strategist Wealthy Campbell and artistic exec Brendan Ward, to type Regan Campbell Ward. “It was a bizarre time for me personally to start out a enterprise. I received married late and simply had a son,” Regan says. “However I knew I wouldn’t get a suggestion like this once more.”
The McCann-backed agency received off to a quick begin, snaring enterprise from Sanofi in its second yr and claiming Novartis as its largest shopper earlier than lengthy. Nonetheless, the work took a toll, with many late nights and weekends spent within the service of rising RCW right into a potent drive.
Regan remembers day journeys to California and Basel, Switzerland, to not point out a 72-hour turnaround to and from Japan. “When you’ve gotten a lot ardour for one factor, there’s so much you miss out on,” she says.
On the similar time, Regan jokes that her son was “sort of the company mascot,” enjoying hide-and-seek within the workplace and attending most firm events. “He hasn’t been institutionalized,” she provides brightly. “He wrote in a college essay, ‘My mother goes to California for lunch.’”
Regan’s profitable management of RCW resonated along with her feminine colleagues particularly. Charlene Prounis, a 2019 MAHF inductee who shared Regan’s nursing background, is fast to tout her private {and professional} generosity.
“After we have been seeking to begin our personal company again in 1999, she advised us about learn how to get a superb lawyer, how a lot fairness to get again, issues like that,” Prounis remembers. “Different individuals have been so secretive, however she was keen to share.”
Regan’s ardour for promoting equally left an impression on Prounis: “A media particular person interviewed us after the CEO of BMS stated, ‘I don’t consider in promoting.’ Maureen nearly jumped up: ‘You gotta promote! It’s the one factor that works!’ She was a fervent believer.”
That perception, Prounis provides, translated into all the pieces Regan did. “She confirmed how you possibly can lead a gaggle of individuals with coronary heart.”
Regan stays disillusioned about McCann’s elimination of the RCW model. “It wasn’t a call we actually had a say in. It sort of died on the $40 million level and the remorse is that we do not know the place it may need gone,” she says.
On the similar time, when she is requested to share her ideas on the state of the medical advertising company union, Regan responds, “I’m glad I’m not doing it proper now, as a result of there are lots of of companies and there aren’t lots of and lots of of medication. I’m glad I operated in a better panorama, frankly.”
As for what may come subsequent, Regan dismisses such speak, noting that “the ‘r’ phrase” is just not in her vocabulary. She lists her present occupation as “ski bum,” describing the game as “an important ardour of mine, and possibly not a sensible one at my age.”
In terms of her legacy, Regan hopes will probably be the enjoyable she helped inject right into a pressure-filled enterprise.
“That’s what enterprise on the whole, and never simply promoting, is lacking: The enjoyable,” she says. “These fake events that folks have to point out so far — is there laughter? Is there spontaneous dancing? The perfect individuals go into promoting not solely as a result of they find it irresistible, however as a result of it’s extra enjoyable than accounting.”
At a memorial service in December for Sander Flaum, one thought was expressed many times by audio system and attendees alike: He was a real mensch.
For all his skilled successes — and there have been many, in his tenures at Lederle Laboratories and Euro RSCG Becker, in addition to in his publishing and talking endeavors — Flaum was firstly one of many business’s genuinely kindest individuals.
“He all the time began conversations with, ‘How are you?’ and also you couldn’t simply say, ‘Effective.’ He needed to know the way you have been actually doing,” remembers Deb Stevens, who headed up human assets at Becker underneath Flaum’s management and remained an in depth good friend till his demise on December 11, 2022, at age 85. “There was no larger advocate for, and fan of, all of the individuals who labored with him.”
Certainly, there’s a case to be made for Flaum because the medical advertising business’s foremost mentor. Jay Carter, EVP, director of enterprise improvement at AbelsonTaylor, remembers assembly Flaum within the earliest levels of his personal profession — when Carter was, in his personal phrases, “a lowly account government” at a distinct store.
“Already a mover and a shaker, Sander made time to mentor a younger and impressionable account man,” Carter says. “Each time our paths crossed he remembered me, and was equally heat and type.”
That decency was infused in his each interplay and a substantial amount of his work. It was evident in his intensive service on the boards of The Fisher School of Enterprise on the Ohio State College, The James Most cancers Heart on the OSU Medical Heart and the Fordham College Graduate Faculty of Enterprise. It knowledgeable the books he wrote, which included The 100-Mile Stroll: A Father and Son on a Quest to Discover the Essence of Management, co-authored together with his son Jonathon, and Enhance Your Profession: The right way to Make an Impression, Get Acknowledged and Construct the Profession You Need, co-authored together with his spouse Mechele, who died in 2017. And it actually performed an enormous half in his secondary profession as an in-demand public speaker, throughout which he mentioned his overcome stuttering with grace and empathy.
“I want extra individuals knew how a lot he truly did for others, as a result of he was not somebody who put his identify on all the pieces he did,” Stevens says. That prolonged to colleagues previous and current: “If he heard any person in pharma misplaced their job, he was the primary particular person to name. I imply, I ended up writing resumes for a few of these individuals.”
A proudly type-A character who ran 5 miles a day for a lot of his grownup life, Flaum’s path to the corridor of fame began at Ohio State College (the place he dual-majored in journalism and psychology) and within the navy. Upon touchdown at Lederle, Flaum shortly turned one of many firm’s most revered in-house entrepreneurs, launching or restaging 80 merchandise over the course of 18 years.
In 1988, Flaum transitioned to the company world at Becker, the place he rose to imagine the function of chairman and CEO. Later, he based and led Flaum Thought Group and Flaum Navigators. Amongst quite a few different improvements, Flaum is credited with having devised the business’s first adherence, patient-guarantee and indigent-patient applications.
“Sander embodied the pursuit of greatness in all elements of his life and profession, and this pursuit carried him to success after success,” says Calcium founder and chairman Steven Michaelson. “Much more importantly, Sander’s ardour for greatness modified the best way the business markets its manufacturers and impressed legions of people to stay and work in accordance with equally excessive requirements.”
Coming so quickly after his demise, Flaum’s MAHF induction is tinged with bittersweet. At the same time as his well being failed him, Flaum was practising the speech he deliberate to present on the group’s annual gala. By all accounts, the consideration meant the world to him.
And but Stevens feels that the skilled honor would have paled beside the private tributes that got here with it.
“Proper till Thanksgiving, Sander was speaking about individuals and shoppers and enterprise,” she says. “I want he have been right here to listen to how a lot he meant to so many individuals throughout the business.”
From the January 01, 2023 Challenge of MM+M – Medical Advertising and marketing and Media
