Milan "Mike" Puskar is quick to embrace the accomplishments of Mylan Laboratories Inc. the company, and to downplay those of Milan, the man who built it.
Even in receiving an honorary doctorate Friday from Duquesne University, whose Mylan School of Pharmacy bears the company name, Puskar refused to take any personal credit.
"It is Mylan the company that is deserving of this high honor," he offered in accepting the degree.
Puskar's guiding philosophy over the past 40 years has been that if you take care of your employees, they will take care of your customers. And if both of those constituencies are prospering, shareholders will naturally benefit.
"We pay our people as much as we can," he said. "You only live once, and you owe it to the people who depend on you to take care of them like they're part of your family."
Mac Haddow, a former Mylan lobbyist in Washington, D.C., said nothing gives Puskar more satisfaction than Mylan's sterling reputation for the purity of the drugs that it makes.
Puskar pointed out that fact again yesterday, reiterating that the company has never received a warning letter from the Food and Drug Administration, despite being the largest volume producer of prescription medications in the nation.
Puskar turned over the reins as Mylan's chief executive last year to Robert J. Coury, a financial consultant with the company since 1995.
"Mike has no hobby. That company has been his life," Haddow said. "He's probably going to be very lonely as his role there diminishes."
Puskar founded what was then called Milan in 1961 shortly after graduating from Youngstown State University with an Army friend of his, Donald Panoz.
What began as a drug distribution business in an abandoned roller skating rink in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., became a vitamin and antibiotics manufacturer in Morgantown, W.Va., by 1965.
Panoz left to start another company in Ireland in 1969 and Puskar stayed on to grow the business, until he, too, left in 1972 to take a job with a pharmaceutical company in Cincinnati.
"I didn't care for the direction the (Milan) board was going in, so I left," he said.
After a few years in Cincinnati, he rejoined Panoz in Ireland, whose new company, Elan Pharmaceuticals, was taking off.
Four years later, he received a call from the re-named Mylan's controller imploring him to come back, but he declined.
He did agree to talk to a new member of the board, Roy McKnight, who convinced him to come to New York to discuss strategies for reviving the struggling company.
Once in New York, McKnight prevailed on Puskar to come back to Morgantown to assess the situation on the ground. He found a company that was on the verge of collapse, and he was there to stay.
When he showed up, he said, he was thrown almost immediately into the middle of an employee walkout.
"Roy said, 'How about coming back as president. It would mean a lot to the people down there.' I said, 'OK.' We didn't talk salary or anything. The company had my name on it. That was important. Don (Panoz) said I should do what's in my heart."
Puskar took several big risks while working as one of the pioneers of the generic drug industry, Haddow said.
In the late 1980s, he and McKnight helped expose bribery within the FDA when they hired a private detective to tail an FDA regulator who was found to be on the take.
He also made a strategic decision to switch from being a private label-only manufacturer to building Mylan's own brand name of generics.
He also was intimately involved in brokering the historic 1984 Hatch-Waxman Act that governs the competition between generic and brand name competitors -- which he says the nation's big drug companies have blown open over the years with loopholes, requiring that it now be updated.
McKnight died of a heart attack in 1993, at which point Puskar became chief executive.
Puskar never took to the public side of leading a public company, Haddow said.
"That is why he and Roy, when he was alive, made such a great team, because Roy enjoyed the whole political side of the business dealing with Wall Street and politicians," Haddow said.
"But I'm convinced there wouldn't be a generic drug industry as we know it if it hadn't been for Mike Puskar. He's a great man."
