Dan Haar: It looks like Boston is no cure-all landing spot

A street-level rendering of the planned new headquarters for General Electric in South Boston, which has been delayed by the new CEO as the company runs into problems in its new home. A street-level rendering of the planned new headquarters for General Electric in South Boston, which has been delayed by the new CEO as the company runs into problems in its new home. Photo: Contributed Photo Photo: Contributed Photo Image 1 of / 8 Caption Close Dan Haar: It looks like Boston is no cure-all landing spot 1 / 8 Back to Gallery

The next time a Connecticut company threatens to move its headquarters to Boston, Catherine Smith should ask a harsh question.

“How’s that working out for General Electic?” the state economic development commissioner might ask. Or, “How about Alexion?”

It could be a key business function, like, say, drug discovery at Pfizer, much of which moved from Groton and New London to Boston a five years back.

Photo: Arnold Gold / Hearst Connecticut Media. Alexion Pharmaceuticals former headquarters in New Haven, before...

None of these exits from the Land of Steady Deer in the Woods to the New England Tech Mecca have done much for the bottom lines, the output, the stock prices or the popular views of these companies.

GE has endured a disastrous 2017, a year after moving its headquarters from Fairfield to the Seaport district in Boston. Ousting former CEO Jeffrey Immelt for cutter John Flannery, a Connecticut native, has only highlighted the problems.

And Flannery, famously, has delayed construction of the glitzy Boston edifice by a couple of years amid a free fall in the share price helped along by a halving of the dividend. So much for global-scale software ambitions.

Photo: Contributed Photo A rendering of the planned new General Electric headquarters in...

Alexion hauled in more than $50 million from Smith’s department to move from Cheshire to a fancy new headquarters in a remade downtown New Haven, only to announce Sept. 12 that it, too, is tapping into the Seaport district for its head office. Amid cutting (and giving back half the state payoff), the new CEO — the third in three years after a scandal-ridden housecleaning — has seen shares fall another 21 percent in the last three months to $112, down from more than $200 in the heady summer of 2016.

On Friday, The New York Times reported that activist hedge fund Elliott Management wants Alexion to cut faster — in other words, to act more like a company whose stock multiple is coming down from the clouds. Alexion’s main product, Soliris, a treatment for a rare blood disease, remains a cash cow, but what’s on the horizon?

Pfizer, which still has about 3,000 people in post-discovery development in Connecticut, touted good news Friday in late-stage human trials of its new breast cancer drug, Talazoparib. But for the most part, Pfizer has hardly spent the last few years replacing the old blockbusters that made it the biggest name in pharma — Viagra, Lyrica, Lipitor and others.

Shares have bounced around the low to mid-$30s for the last year and still haven’t reached their mid-2016 highs even though President Donald Trump could very well unlock upwards of $80 billion for Pfizer. In other words, so far at least, the Boston-Cambridge play hasn’t worked wonders as Wall Street looks for Pfizer’s next huge acquisition as much as its next medical breakthrough.

Obviously, any of these companies could do fantastically well in Boston over time. But over the weekend I got a call from a wiseguy Connecticut executive. He pointed out, half in jest, that maybe companies moving from Connecticut to Boston are asking for trouble.

If the pattern tells us anything, it’s not that Boston is toxic, but it’s not a magic bullet, either. No place is, when it comes to corporate relocation.

In the quaint world where a lot of us grew up, people followed jobs, wherever they were. We’ve swung so far toward jobs following people that maybe it’s time for a bit of healthy balance in that world view.

“We haven’t found that there’s a shortage,” said Ben Berkowitz, founder and CEO of SeeClickFix in New Haven, who grew up in the Elm City (and was not my caller). “We’ve been able to hire engineers.”

He’s the first to say Connecticut needs to make its urban culture more magnetic for young professionals. We’re never going to be Boston or New York, but hey, most likely Aetna won’t move to New York, either, if it joins with CVS.

dhaar@hearstmediact.com