Ex­clu­sive: At Hal Bar­ron’s R&D group at GSK, con­sen­sus is out, lead­ers are in and watch out for an ‘in­tense dri­ve’ to spur the late-stage pipeline

Im­age: Ax­el Hoos, Hal Bar­ron, John Lep­ore, Kevin Sin and Tony Wood John Car­roll, End­points News

Hal Bar­ron is talk­ing of­fense. He’s talk­ing teams and lead­ers. And 9 months in­to the job of a life­time run­ning a glob­al, multi­bil­lion-dol­lar R&D shop, he’s got his game plan worked out and his top crew lined up.

Al­most lit­er­al­ly, it turned out, which I’ll get to lat­er.

“I’m go­ing to em­pow­er peo­ple,” Bar­ron tells me em­phat­i­cal­ly, “and they’re go­ing to make im­por­tant de­ci­sions.”

“I feel a sense of ur­gency,” he says lat­er, re­turn­ing to a theme in our con­ver­sa­tion.

We’re in a con­fer­ence room on the top floor of an un­marked, mid-19th cen­tu­ry Geor­gian town­house that’s been re­fit­ted as a small op­er­a­tions cen­ter just off Berke­ley Square in the cen­ter of Lon­don. Bar­ron, who’s based in the Bay Area, has tak­en com­mand of it for a few days, sum­mon­ing mem­bers of the in­ner cir­cle, with roots in San Fran­cis­co, the UK and Philadel­phia.

I too was sum­moned, in a way.

Sign up to read this article for free.

Get free access to a limited number of articles, plus choose newsletters to get straight to your inbox.

SIGN UP LOG IN BECOME A PREMIUM SUBSCRIBER