Research only gives a pay off for the next CEO. Fuck that guy.
But the stock price moves based on the latest clinical trial results and letters from the FDA. What's a CEO to do?
ILOS: in license, out source. It's much faster to buy a promising drug candidate (in license) then to herd your own to phase II. It may also be less risky. Hence Valeant trying to buy Allergan. For your remaining pipeline outsourcing R &D to contract labs can cut your R&D budget nicely, and it's the investors looking at R&D spending as a black hole into which their money disappears that makes the CEO nervous. Though you will also lose all of the insight and acumen accumulated by the specialists you laid off when you closed that department.
You can also try lots of management tricks: give everyone metrics to measure up to so that they always look busy, the pipeline looks full, the competition creatively destructed. Just don't tell anyone the truth: the candidates you are advancing are actually shit, but you have to advance some to keep your bonus. Hey, that sort of thing worked for the Veterans Administration, should work fine for pharma.