Jeff Kindler has been CEO at Pfizer since mid-2006, and I think of him whenever I think about the next President of The United States. Kindler, like the person who will follow George W. Bush, took the helm from a predecessor who spent eight years at the top before leaving his situation as a mess for someone else to deal with. Jeff Kindler has shouldered much of the Wall Street blame for Pfizer's stagnant stock value, but to those on the inside, it's been evident for two years that he never really had a fighting chance.

Blame the wars. For Bush, it was Iraq. For Kindler, it was an out-of-control enlargement of the sales force (the army, if you want to call it that) which came as a flawed legacy from the man who preceded Kindler as Pfizer CEO. By the time Kindler took over at Pfizer, this pharma arms-race, characterized by escalating numbers of so-called, "detail people," was destabilizing, not just Pfizer, but the entire pharma industry. But it's worth noting in hindsight that Pfizer started it.

There are 1.4 million men and women practicing some form of medicine in the U.S. who are lawfully allowed to prescribe human pharmaceuticals. Some of these legal prescribers are dentists, some are part-timers, and some are retired. A few are actually dead, and their family members, for whatever reason, keep their DEA number active. The actual number of human physicians who write at least one prescription annually is something in the neighborhood of 900,000. This is the pool- the reservoir- of medical people that the pharma industry seeks to court. By the end of 2006, the total industry-wide number of "detail people" was 92,500. Do the math. That computes to more than one pharma salesperson for every 10 prescribers. That may not make sense to you, but in the earliest years of the 21st century, it made sense to the head of Pfizer. And when it stopped making sense, Jeff Kindler was the man left to deal with the fallout.

I've talked with physicians who tell me that- at the high point of the madness- it was not uncommon to see three different Pfizer salespeople each week. Other pharma companies joined the bandwagon and beefed-up their sales ranks as well. Pfizer's total number topped-out at about 30,000. Merck and J&J were right behind, along with GSK and others.

Taking into account a nice salary, company car, expense account, healthcare benefits, and storage rental for space to hold the astronomical quantities of drug samples, it takes about $200,000 a year to

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