Endo Pharmaceuticals CEO Carol Ammon has the brains and bucks, but not the big head

This article was originally published on Jan. 15, 2005.

The spring of her senior year, Carol Ammon and a few friends from New Hyde Park High School sneaked onto the roof of a terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport. They were hanging out, watching planes land, when they heard someone coming.

Her friends ducked under a turnstile to escape. Ammon took a running start and hurdled over it. She fell, breaking two fingers and loosening every tooth in her head.

She needed her two front teeth replaced, her mouth wired, and her fingers splinted. And that’s how she went to her senior prom.

The pattern holds.

Ammon, now 53, is the CEO of Endo Pharmaceuticals Inc. in Chadds Ford. In 2003, when she was named an entrepreneur of the year by Ernst & Young, Ammon gave her acceptance speech in a body brace, having fractured her spine riding in a boat in the Bahamas.

Over the last decade, Ammon also has broken a shoulder on the ski slopes, cracked two ribs riding a horse, and torn her hamstrings waterskiing.

“It’s a good thing I have a job that keeps me busy,” she says. “Otherwise, I’d probably be dead.”

Besides inspiring a lot of jokes about a woman whose company makes painkillers, her injuries make her seem accident-prone. In fact, they’re more a consequence of spunk. Willing to take risks, persistent, and — if her friends and family are to be believed — indomitable in spirit as well as body, Ammon has played hard as she patiently worked her way to the top of a heavily male-dominated field.

How heavily?

There are only eight women CEOs in the Fortune 500, and none in pharmaceuticals, according to Catalyst, a group that studies women and minorities in management.

In 2003, Ammon was the highest-paid businesswoman in the region, earning $8.7 million in salary, bonuses and stock options. In December, the company projected net sales next year to be as much as $660 million.

The daughter of an elementary schoolteacher and a newspaper engraver, Ammon started her career in 1973 as a laboratory technician at DuPont’s pharmaceutical division in Garden City, N.Y.

“I realized my life’s quest was not going to be making the next lifesaving discovery,” she said, so when the company offered her an entry-level management job, she took it. She’d been working on a master’s degree in biochemistry, but switched to earn an MBA at Adelphi University.

At the time, Ammon said, “the industry was still typecasting women into traditional female roles.” At first, she was directed into less prestigious departments and asked to take notes at meetings. Even after she’d been promoted, she once walked by an office and a guy stuck his head out and said, “Excuse me, dear. Would you mind making me a few copies of this?”

“So I did,” she said. She got a charge out of the look on his face when he showed up to find her running the meeting.

Her strategy, she said, was to gain experience in as many areas of the company as possible. By 1996, she’d become president of DuPont’s U.S. Pharmaceuticals Division and went to Harvard for an advanced management course. On her return, she was asked to evaluate DuPont products that weren’t being actively marketed, and identified a group of pain medicines whose value, she said, would decline if they were left to languish.

“It was during the O.J. trial,” she recalled. “When I presented my findings I wanted to say, ‘If you will not invest you must divest.’ " Prudence prevailed, she said. She simply advised the company to either market the drugs or sell them off. When DuPont decided to sell, Ammon seized the opportunity she had helped to create.

She asked two colleagues to join her in risking their jobs and much of their money to start a firm specializing in pain management. They accepted. One, Mariann MacDonald, retired in 2003 a multimillionaire. The other, Louis Vollmer, had left earlier. Ammon won’t discuss the split, but praised Vollmer as a “fabulous employee.” Vollmer, who now lives in Georgia, did not return phone calls.

In 2002, the company paid off its debt and is now worth about $3 billion on the stock market, ten times its value when Ammon started it.

As Endo has grown, Ammon, whose childhood dream was to be either a first baseman for the New York Yankees or a quarterback for the New York Jets, has been raking in honors like an MVP.

This month, Ammon will receive two awards: the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce’s Paradigm Award, to women who “serve as a model for success,” and the Woman of Spirit Award from the Greater Delaware Valley Chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. In 2004 she was named CEO of the year by the Eastern Technology Council.

Ammon appears to have accomplished all of this without the coldness, ruthlessness or arrogance that often paves the way to the boardroom.

Although she admits to briefly succumbing to she-man floppy bow ties in the 1980s, she now wears pastel sweaters and tweed skirts. She helped design her two favorite rooms at Endo headquarters — the conference room with its vast Palladian window, and the company gym, a spacious corner suite, free to employees.

As a boss, Ammon is demanding but sensitive to the needs of families, says her assistant, Debra McArdle. Eighteen months ago, when McArdle’s husband was dying of cancer, Ammon made sure she was given all the time she needed to be home with him.

“She is just the nicest person,” McArdle says.

“Forty or fifty people went to her awards dinner last year. She sent handwritten thank-you’s to each one, and she signs personal cards to every employee on their birthday.”

This kind of consideration shouldn’t be unusual, says Ammon. “As more women come into leadership roles in companies, people have been allowed to show more emotion. That frees men as well as women,” she says. “The whole environment becomes a better place to work.”

Earlier in her career, a supervisor once told her never to hug anyone in the office. “He told me it showed weakness.”

Ammon blew him off. “I told him that’s just me. … If that’s going to hold me back, so be it. I can be just as hard as I need to be on people and still hug.”

“A lot of CEOs are not that accessible,” says Julie Kampf, a consultant who invited Ammon to join the board of the Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association, a national nonprofit group. “She’s the woman who proves that nice girls do get the corner office.”

During baseball season, Kampf invited Ammon to a game at Yankee Stadium.

“We were both on diets, but we got trashed on cheese fries. She’s very sisterly, she laughs a lot, you just want to be around her. I’d say she’s adorable, but I hate to say that about the CEO of a company. She just has an effervescent personality.”

After the game, Kampf says, Ammon sent her flowers. “I take CEOs out all the time. They never do that.”

Something else they never do is let you try on their diamonds.

“Did you see that ring?” Kampf asks.

You’d need to be legally blind to miss it.

Corporations can breed a kind of caste system, but Ammon has an aversion to class distinctions.

“She never forgot where she came from,” says her younger brother, Robert, a former New York City police officer who is now national account executive for Endo.

“The most important difference with Carol is that she’s a CEO without an ego the size of Texas,” said David Lee, Endo’s soft-spoken senior vice president. “Everyone always talks about being part of a team, but Carol actually means it. She actually wants to hear people’s opinions and receive their input.”

In his seven years at Endo, Lee says, “I can’t remember a time when Carol ever talked about the company as ‘I.’ It’s always ‘we.’ CEOs typically behave more like Louis XIV. L’etat c’est moi.”

Yeah, but try crossing her.

“Don’t ever be fooled by Carol,” says Kurt Landgraf, former CEO of DuPont Merck. “She is as tough a person as you’ll run into.” During the negotiations to sell the portfolio of drugs that Ammon would use to start her company, Landgraf said he tried to withhold Percocet and Percodan — the two most well-known, lucrative drugs in the deal.

Ammon won.

“She doesn’t talk in word salads,” Landgraf said. “In a very nice way, she’s very, very persistent. You just couldn’t say no to her.” (Ammon has described herself as a “very nice pain in the butt.”)

Landgraf, who is now CEO of the Educational Testing Service, says that as a corporate leader, Ammon has an unusually low threshold for bad behavior.

“If she feels you’re not 100 percent committed to the best interest of the organization as a whole, you’re history. If you cross the line, if there is any sense of dishonesty, you’re gone — she was always like that.”

Most nights, Ammon is in bed with a mystery novel and asleep by 11. Most mornings, she’s up at 5 a.m. to walk Molly, her aging yellow Lab, then work up a sweat on her spinning bikes, pumped up by the soundtrack from Flashdance.

Sitting for an interview in a hotel restaurant, nursing a cold, jet-lagged, treating herself to chicken soup, she said her sudden wealth still seems surreal.

Yes, she gets chauffeured to the airport for trips to Europe to court investors. She goes to Canyon Ranch for restorative stretches. She dines at her favorite French restaurant, the four-star Le Bernardin in New York, without worrying about the tab. But she’s still self-conscious about bad hair days and fluctuations in her weight. And she hasn’t tried to disown the Long Island accent she inherited from her parents, saying “shew-ah” for “sure” and “cauw-fee” for “coffee.”

This spring, she will trade her modest townhouse for a massive stone house near the Delaware border. (She delayed moving in to expand a ground-floor room for her gym.) The new digs include an inground pool, closets as big as guest rooms, and a major-league kitchen.

“Now,” she says, “all I have to do is learn to cook.”

If it seems odd for a single person to live in a palace with just her dog, Ammon doesn’t care. “I like the feel of a house,” she says. Plus, the condo association wouldn’t let Molly run in the yard.

She learned from her parents to choose her battles, she says. And sandwiched between her twin older brothers and one younger, she learned to fight hard to win.

“I always loved sports,” she recalls. At 9, she tried to join the Little League. Girls weren’t allowed.

“I was angry,” she recalls. “These were the same kids I played with all the time. I could hold my own.”

Her younger brother, Robert, says she was a feisty kid, catching blue crabs with her bare hands and at least once retaliating successfully against sibling oppression with a Wiffle ball bat.

Persistent, too. At 16, she showed up every day in the employment office of a local hospital until it agreed to hire her as a gofer on the night shift.

Ammon has never married and has no children.

“It certainly makes relocation easier,” she jokes, then says, “I am the luckiest person in the world. I enjoy my life. It feels very fulfilled.” At times she has been accused of “imbalance” for dedicating herself so assiduously to her career.

“Who defines these things?” she wants to know. “Who’s to say what is balanced?” She is a devoted aunt, loves her friends, and was very close to her parents.

Her mother moved in with Ammon for the last years of her life. In 1999, when her mother was dying of cancer, Ammon stayed home to nurse her during the final weeks.

The loss, she says, was piercing. Her mother, who read stock reports and was fascinated by business, lived long enough to see her daughter get the company off the ground, but not to witness its enormous success.

“She would have gotten a kick out of it,” says Ammon.

That, and the ring — a 4.17-carat diamond in the center with one-carat stones on either side.

From the time she was 24, her mother advised her to buy herself “a nice piece of jewelry” every year. " ‘That way,’ " she told me, " ‘you’ll have a nice collection.’ "

Ammon obeyed. In March 2004, on the first anniversary of her company’s “liquidity,” she went to her regular saleswoman at Fortunoff and described the rock she had in mind. Told that only senior staff handled that level of sale, Ammon balked.

“She cultivated me as a customer, so why shouldn’t she get to sell me the diamond?” Ammon summoned the manager. “I’m here to buy a really important diamond today,” she said, “and I won’t buy it unless Nancy helps me.” (After recounting the story, she worried that it made her sound arrogant. “I just thought she deserved the commission.”)

Ammon’s lurch into the ranks of the super-wealthy makes her feel as though she’s in a candy store. “I see it as an opportunity to do neat things with the rest of my life, to do things for people that they can’t do for themselves,” she said. “After all, you only need so much for yourself.”

She has set up two scholarships, one in her parents’ name and another in memory of a friend’s son who died young. “That one is awarded for character,” she says. “I designed how the kids write the essay.”

Ammon is often described as “a regular person,” but she is also a shrewd businesswoman in a cutthroat field.

What does she think of the current scandals rocking the pharmaceutical industry — the debacle of Vioxx; the zealous marketing of prescription drugs directly to consumers; reports that companies have fought efforts to make them more accountable; evidence that they have hidden negative results from studies and exercised undue influence on government agencies and physicians?

No matter how many times you ask, she’s diplomatically evasive.

Drummond Rennie, professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco and deputy editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, said in a recent interview: “We give the pharmaceutical companies huge tax breaks, we allow them to flood TV with ads for unsafe drugs, we allow them to buy the FDA. … Sooner or later the public is going to say, ‘We’ve had enough.’ And that’s what’s happening now.”

When Rennie’s remarks were relayed to Ammon, she punted.

“I can’t speak on behalf of the industry,” she said.

Her own company, she said, follows federal guidelines and abides by ethical principles.

“I really believe the pharmaceutical industry has enabled people to live longer, to get out of the hospital faster and to ease suffering. … "

Several drug companies have made major contributions to assist the victims of the tsunami disaster, and Endo will be among them.

“If you can make a business sustainable, you can do a lot for a lot of people. You do that by profitability.”

Is there a conflict, then, in the problem so many Americans — especially seniors — have in affording vital medicines?

“I didn’t say how much profitability,” she says. “As an industry, and a nation, we can do more.”