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Rising Star: Brad Sheares, Merck
Meet Corporate America's next generation of leaders.
 (FORTUNE Magazine) - For the entire summer of 1978, Brad Sheares guillotined rats. It was the heyday of Merck's research laboratories, and the experience left the earnest Sheares, a preacher's son from Chicago, intent on leaving Merck to pursue a career in academia. But a soul-searching chat with Roy Vagelos -- then Merck's chief scientist and later the CEO -- helped change his mind. Says Sheares: "Dr. Vagelos told me, 'If you really want to have an immediate impact on human health, come to Merck.'"
He did return after earning a doctorate in biochemistry at Purdue and pursuing post-doctoral cancer research at MIT. In 18 years at the company, which has lately been tangled in litigation over its arthritis drug Vioxx, he's risen through the lab ranks to upper management. As president of Merck's human health division, Sheares, 49, oversees Merck's U.S. sales and marketing. After all Merck (Research) has been through in recent years, he still believes Vagelos was right. "There's a core set of values here that hasn't changed," he says. The charismatic Sheares is seen as a leading candidate to run the company. He's a man who "thinks deep and feels hard," says one colleague. Though he was one of four internal candidates for the CEO job last winter, he lost out to Dick Clark, 59, who had more leadership and cost-cutting experience. Clark plans to retire in 2011, and that gives Sheares time to prove himself. And when Clark took the helm in May, he expanded Sheares's duties, tapping him to help draft a recovery plan for the company.
Outsiders, meanwhile, are beginning to notice. Sheares recently agreed to serve on the boards of Honeywell Corp. and Progressive Insurance. The only reservation Merckers seem to have is whether Sheares is too nice a guy. Maybe they don't know what he did to all those rodents in the summer of '78.
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