Glaxo chief has no regrets on pay

IT IS hard to think of anyone at the top of British corporate life who has enjoyed a worse recent press than Jean-Pierre Garnier, chief executive officer of GlaxoSmithKline. There was last year's row about his $18m (£9.7m) salary and options package, set to rear its head again at the shareholders' meeting in May.

Then there's the continuing niggle that he doesn't care much for Glaxo's British heritage, preferring the United States. Doesn't he worry about the coverage and its effect on the company? No. 'It's Disraeli, yunno? Don't explain and don't complain.'

But as head of a public company with shareholders who have valid interests, doesn't he have to be responsive to their needs too? 'You have to be very focused on the end goal, and the end goal is to make a huge difference in the lives of millions and millions of people.

'When you discover a new drug or vaccine, it makes a huge impact. I was telling Gordon Brown yesterday that in the 10 minutes I was talking to him, over 200,000 children will be protected for life, thanks to vaccine from GSK. Two hundred thousand. That's huge. The point is, you cannot have maximum profits as the single goal; you have to do something society wants and you'll be paid off.'

That's why he says he has given his life to working in pharmaceuticals because, as he puts it, it has an end point beyond 'Let's sell a few more cases of Coca Cola'. 'I don't need to work. Financially, I am OK. I work for the ends I want to achieve ... And if I believed I couldn't affect things, then I would retire. The irony is that, actually, I don't enjoy the day-to-day, it's a very tough life. But there is enormous satisfaction in the fact that I can make a difference.'

He gives an example. His scientists told him that they might, with sufficient investment, develop a vaccine for malaria. 'That would have a huge impact on the two million people who die of malaria every year,' he says. The problem: it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, no government was going to pay for it and there was little chance of making the money back.

So what should GSK do? 'We would have to swallow a big loss, so that's where we have to be creative. So I called the richest man on earth and begged.' Bill Gates? 'And he said yes, so be thankful.'

It's a theme of his: big business doesn't do enough to help others. Companies, he says, have to give more of their profits away. 'GSK is the most generous company in the UK, but it is also one of the most generous in the world. We give away 4.6% of our profits and I don't think that is enough.'

So how can he square that with the salary farrago that just made everyone think he was greedy? 'OK, let's talk about it. This company is based in Britain, but global in nature. I don't set my salary, you'll have to talk to Chris [Hogg] and others.

'My role is to make recommendations to the board about compensation philosophy and how it's applied to 600 key executives, who operate in a global environment, not all here. And we need to maintain a competitive framework that is attractive to those people; otherwise, they will go and work for Pfizer and Merck and Novartis.

'That's the equilibrium we have to reach, maintaining our competitiveness while pleasing investors, who happen to be 65% British-based, with their own views on compensation. It would have been easy for us to be popular here but that would have undermined the company and, ironically, the institutions that criticised us would have suffered from it.'

In short, he has to pay a lot to attract the others. As he puts it: 'You don't hire David Beckman [sic] at the price of a second-league player; you have to be realistic and find a balance between what you think is right and the market mechanism.'

And the reports that he dislikes Glaxo's British roots and is pulling work away from here? 'That's absolutely not true and anybody who works for me will tell you that,' he says emphatically. Most bosses would have left the denial there. Garnier weighs in with a qualification. 'But I am a very international person and that does make some people in the UK uncomfortable. I have lived in many countries, and I can compare best practices and take a perspective on that.

'What makes people uncomfortable is that they feel their country is the best on all counts. But I am not French, I am not British, I am not American, I am all of them, and I have a genuine liking for all of those countries. Check my travelling schedule if you don't think I am in the UK enough.'

He does admit, though, that the travelling is the toughest part of his executive lifestyle. 'What distinguishes me from the average person is that I am constantly travelling. Not many people travel 80% of the time. It requires a different energy and resilience. You can't be jetlagged or too tired to make a speech, and you can't look too grumpy, which happens.'

How does he cope? 'I get grumpy! No, the anchor of my life is home, yunno?' He makes sure, wherever he is in the world, he is at home for the weekend. And he takes his holidays, three weeks in the summer, at his retreat in the Alps and a trip somewhere interesting every Christmas with the wife and kids. Last year, it was to the jungle in Belize.

'Success is not just about success in your job,' he says. 'It's also about success in every bit of life.' But what he needs most of all, he adds, is resilience. 'It's the number one quality you need today to be a chief executive officer. I have a lot of smart people who couldn't last in this job. It's about being hit and being able to stand up again, because the job of chief executive is mostly bad news coming across your desk.'