David Southwell

I'm doing the right thing.

And then all of a sudden you realize they were right all along.

And, you know, what are you going to do now?

And I think the solution to that, to the extent that there is one, is transparency, is to say to

investors, look, there's a difficult decision that I'm facing in terms of, let's just use an example, which drug we push into the clinic when we have three seemingly equal opportunities in late stage preclinical, in vivo clinical, preclinical trials.

And you sort of talk people through it and say, I'm making this decision and this is why I'm making it.

And if it turns out to be the wrong decision,

you can say, you know, you remember we talked about this and it turns out I made the wrong decision for a number of reasons.

And some of those, some of what happened are things that I really could not have foreseen back then.

But some of them are things that, you know, really I should have looked at and I didn't.

And I think to the extent that you're relatively humble and transparent, it helps.

I mean, I was talking about Sepricor.

When I joined, the stock was three.

It went down to one and a half, probably as a result of my joining.

And then five years later, it had gone on a split adjusted basis from one and a half to 140.

And then two years later, it had gone from 140 to six, and then it went from six to 60.

And what I realized is when it's 140, it's awfully tempting to be arrogant.

You know, you walk into a conference room

And the room is full and several hundred people in the room.

You have fund managers thanking you for making them so much money.