The changing of the guard at Novo Nordisk took another turn this week as the company revealed that seven members of its board of directors—including the current sitting chair—are out.
Novo said Tuesday that it will host an extraordinary general meeting on Nov. 14 to elect new members to its board following an impasse in leadership discussions involving the Danish drugmaker’s chief shareholder, the Novo Nordisk Foundation.
“Following dialogue with the Novo Nordisk Foundation regarding the future composition of the board of directors, it has not been possible to reach a common understanding,” said current chair of Novo Nordisk’s board, Helge Lund, in a statement. Lund is among the handful of board members who won’t be up for election at next month’s meeting, Novo said in an Oct. 21 press release.
“The board proposed a renewal focusing on [the] addition of select new competencies while also maintaining continuity, whereas the board of the Foundation wanted a more extensive reconfiguration,” Lund continued in the release. “After thorough deliberation and considering the Foundation’s position and control of the majority of votes in Novo Nordisk, the board concluded that it is in the best interest of the company and its shareholders to convene an extraordinary general meeting to elect new board members to provide clarity on the future governance of Novo Nordisk.”
Aside from Lund, the vice chair of Novo’s board, Henrik Poulsen, is also headed for the exit, as are independent board members Laurence Debroux, Andreas Fibig, Sylvie Grégoire, Christina Law and Martin Mackay.
Conversely, Novo Holdings CEO Kasim Kutay and the employee-elected board members Elisabeth Dahl Christensen, Liselotte Hyveled, Mette Bøjer Jensen and Thomas Rantzau will remain on Novo’s board, the company said.
The Novo Nordisk Foundation already has picks in mind for the upcoming meeting, with plans to slot former Novo Nordisk CEO Lars Rebien Sørensen—who helmed the Danish drugmaker between 2000 and 2016—into the board chair role, according to a separate press release. Meanwhile, the Foundation is hoping to elect Cees de Jong, who currently serves as the chair of the board at Novonesis, as the vice chairman of the Novo Nordisk board.
The Foundation aims to have Sørensen serve in the chair role for a limited period of 2 to 3 years. Over that span, Sørensen has been handed two key directives: to support Novo Nordisk’s new management with its transformation plans and regaining growth momentum, and to identify and appoint a new chair who can lead the Danish Big Pharma into the next decade.
“Today, Novo Nordisk operates in a new reality,” Sørensen said on a Tuesday conference call addressing the board shake-up. “The company is committed to meeting patient needs and the rising global demand, but also [to] compete on a more dynamic and consumer-driven obesity market, as evidenced by the recent slowdown in the growth of the company.”
The move comes after several other notable shake-ups at Novo Nordisk this year, beginning in May when the company announced it would part ways with its longtime CEO Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen amid "market challenges” and after a steep drop in the company’s share price since mid-2024.
Jørgensen helped shepherd Novo into the current GLP-1 boom with its Type 2 diabetes med Ozempic and its obesity injection Wegovy, although as of this year, Novo has ceded its first-mover sales advantage in the U.S. obesity market to chief rival Eli Lilly. Separately, protracted shortages of GLP-1 medicines from both Novo and Lilly in recent years have given rise to a compounding industry in the U.S. that has proven resilient even as supply constraints have eased.
In late July, Novo tapped company insider Maziar Mike Doustdar to assume the role of chief executive. A little over a month into his tenure, Doustdar unveiled a sweeping plan to save around 8 billion Danish kroner (roughly $1.2 billion) annually by the end of 2026. To achieve that aim, Novo is laying off roughly 9,000 employees among its global workforce of 78,400, with many of those cuts slated to occur in Novo’s home country of Denmark.
Misgivings about Novo’s strategy—and how the board shuffle fits in—were prominently aired during the Q&A portion of Novo’s Tuesday conference call, which began with a Financial Times reporter asking whether the Novo Nordisk Foundation’s power over the board could scare off other shareholders.
“I certainly don’t hope so,” Sørensen said, noting that he himself is a shareholder. “It’s, of course, an unusual situation, which is being precipitated by the fact that we could not agree with the last board on the extent to which we wanted renewal on the board, and they elected to step down.”
Sørensen added that the new board’s ambition will be to return Novo to “business as normal as quickly as possible.”
Reflecting on the outgoing board’s handling of issues with compounding pharmacies in the U.S., Sørensen conceded that “it’s always easier in hindsight to make a prognosis of what one could have done.” Nevertheless, he stressed that the Novo Nordisk Foundation felt that “management, and thereby also the board, was too slow in recognizing these fundamental changes.”
“At the same time, the company was growing tremendously, huge amounts of staff were recruited, leading to the very, very unfortunate case that we had to redirect the company into letting go of 9,000 individuals,” he continued. “This is a huge failure.”
Sørensen said he hopes some of the new board’s operational experience at pharmaceutical companies will allow them to challenge the company’s leadership more and serve as a “valuable sparring partner for management.”
Analysts and reporters also pressed Sørensen on Novo’s appointment of a company insider as CEO, which was viewed by some industry watchers as unfavorable versus a potential external candidate.
Sørensen defended the decision, however, pointing to the “very transactional model” that is currently governing U.S. healthcare. He stressed that he believes Doustdar is “extremely well equipped” to play in that particular field. Doustdar held the role of EVP of international operations before settling into the Novo captain’s chair this summer.