Thinking Pharma

“NOW’S THE SEASON…..” – FOR SOCIAL MEDIA

“Now’s the season to be Jolly…” or so the seasonal ditty reminds us.

Unfortunately, for many, it will be a season without the traditional ‘Lolly’ (an English colloquialism for money)!

For many 2009 has been a tough year - caught in the after-shocks of the global financial crisis.

However, for Pharma it has not been the financial crisis that has caused corporate stresses and strains, rather it has been factors very much under its own control.

In fact, one could argue that the corporate stresses and strains faced by the rest of the business world have increased the sales of Pharma products.

Pharma’s use of Social Media, whilst not exactly increasing, has shown signs of strengthening engagement.

Pharma bodies at relevant conferences have increased and consulting dollars have definitely been spent.

So one can only hope that the New Year brings an increased practical engagement by Pharma, through Social Media, with all those other stakeholders in the Pharmaceutical industry such as Patients, Physicians, Payers and Regulators.

Thinking Pharma - Past

In the spirit of “Christmas’s Past” Thinking Pharma’s 2009 Past has been challenging, enjoyable and rewarding.

Producing a daily blog for the last 6 to 9 months has proved a challenge for the Thinking Pharma team.

Phoni Pharma’s Solutions

By Guest Blogger - Pharma Giles

The Lean, Green, Clean, Mean Machine.

Part 3.  – Treating the Pinko-Liberals

 

Phoni Pharma has thousands of gallons of waste water to deal with every day.  This water-borne waste isn’t just wholesome stuff like human or animal sewage, but wastes from the sinks of hundreds of organic chemistry laboratories or the aqueous effluent from scores of chemical manufacturing units. 

 

To handle this, Phoni have invested tens of millions of dollars in a massive biological effluent treatment plant.  Again, you can’t criticise them for putting up the cash to solve their own problems. 

 

The plant covers a couple of tens of acres of local coastline in huge grey tanks and the associated spaghetti of inter-connecting pipe-work, and is a highly visible statement of Phoni’s efforts to keep things green and clean. 

 

You can smell that effort as well, often as not.  Inside the huge tanks, the theory is that loads of little and rather special anaerobic bugs are carefully nurtured and cosseted, so that they quietly and cleanly chomp up not only all the horribly toxic nitrites and sulphides from sewage-type wastes, but also the synthetic organic waste by-products of pharmaceutical development and manufacturing as well. 

 

The trouble is that some of the chemists and building managers get lazy.  After all, it’s much easier to chuck wastes down the drain than it is to put it in drums for incineration, with all the internal paperwork that involves. 

 

No-one on site can say for certain who’s tipped what down what drain, after all.  And we’ve got an effluent plant anyway, haven’t we?

Phoni Pharma’s Burning Issue

By Guest Blogger - Pharma Giles

The Lean, Green, Clean, Mean Machine.

Part 2.  – Frying Nasties

 

Phoni has thought about the environmental effects of its activities. 

 

The site, after all, has grown to the size of a small town.  Over four thousand people spend most of their days there, and occasionally have to interrupt their labours in pursuit of “healthcare solutions” to eat, drink and, well, take a dump from time to time. 

 

Not only that, but many of these thousands of people are also engaged in the messy business of pharmaceutical development, manufacturing and testing. 

 

That in itself generates a fair quantity of less than wholesome waste, in the form of dead animals and residual animal poo, blood and chemical wastes.  Much of the latter still goes to drain and all of it has to be dealt with in some way. 

 

Even the site management at Phoni realised pretty early on that the local waste management infrastructure couldn’t handle the quantities of waste (human, animal, chemical and construction) that the growing site would generate. 

 

Phoni Pharmattitudes

By Guest Blogger - Pharma Giles

The Lean, Green, Clean, Mean Machine.

Part 1.  – Environmental Ghastliness

 

Phoni makes a great show of how its expansion has had few negative impacts upon the local environment.  I guess the definitions of “negative” and “few” are open to interpretation.  For example, thousands of cars now carry employees to work (both Phoni workers and the nearly equivalent numbers of contract support and constructions workers) instead of the hundred or so from 20 years ago. 

 

Local garages and car dealers think that’s a good thing.  Acres of coastal marshland have disappeared under tarmac, just so that these new employees can park their cars near to the huge new buildings that cover acres more. 

 

Construction and facilities maintenance companies strongly approve of this, as do the extremely well-paid Phoni employees.  The land was only a bloody swamp before, after all.  Any wildlife not tarmac-ed over often ends up as road-kill in the flood of traffic, or flies into the web of overhead power lines that have sprung up to feed the ever-increasing energy hunger of the site. 

 

The increase in the number of roadside scavengers (such as magpies or crows) has greatly offset the drop in other species of birds as a result, so that’s all right then.  Things aren’t all negative, you see?

Social Leverage in Pharma

Pulling levers

The image of the railway signalman up in his elevated signal-box controlling and directing the movement of the network is a big part of my childhood memories .

Controlling the course of a major Pharmaceutical Corporation is simply a question of pulling the right levers .

Right?

Well, it helps if you pull then in the right order.

And at the right time.

But it can’t be all that hard can it?

It’s not like doing any real work. Tote that barge, Lift that bale, Get a little drunk and you end up debarred or suspended through the FDA, or worse.

Moving the World

Archimedes is quoted as saying “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world”

Any Pharma executive worth their salt will recognise this as a typical Research and Development bid for extra funding. Stuff like that comes across their desk every day. Give me a bigger lever, give me a stronger fulcrum, and I will deliver the goods.

Yeah?

What killer drugs did Archimedes ever produce?

Where was he when the ROI was calculated at the end of the day?

Probably bathing in reflected glory from the Sales Department.

 

Pharma’s Babies and Monsters

Nice People are Dangerous

Even a casual observer of humans must have noticed how they respond to niceness. Niceness is bad for people. Nice people are dangerous.

We can all cope with nastiness. It gets us off our arses and spurs us into remedial action. It stimulates creativity, responsibility and builds character.

But niceness only excites our lazy and selfish genes.

You must know nice people who have unwittingly turned their partners into monsters by being nice to them, don’t you?

Monsters or babies.

The nice people have created an environment of perpetual forgiveness, unflinching support and total dedication. It’s a toxic brew that few can resist.

“If you are going to cater to my every wish, then my demands are only going to become more and more outrageous. More monstrous, and/or more infantile.”

What has all this to do with Pharma?

I suggest that Pharma’s monstrous behaviour has been the result of the public and the regulator’s indulgence of the industry.

Phoni Pharmarrogance

By Guest Blogger - Pharma Giles

 

Phoni’s newest and most glamorous facilities do not come cheaply.  Indeed, only a company with billion dollar profits could possibly afford the scale and sophistication of the structures that adorn (or perhaps, more accurately, disfigure) its R & D sites world-wide these days.

 

Visitors are always amazed at the space and light within these new buildings, so reminiscent of that seen and felt in large European cathedrals. 

No expense has been spared to give the impression that no expense has been spared.  It is difficult to describe how large these buildings are to anyone who hasn’t seen them, or indeed, to even understand why they should be so large, given their relatively mundane functions. 

 

One could understand a functional need for such vast corridors and indoor spaces if you are making, say, airships, but the output of offices or pharmaceutical research laboratories can hardly warrant such grandeur of construction in relation to their output.

 

The only possible explanation of the size of these facilities is that they are meant to serve as a monument to the arrogance and egotism of the CEOs and the company directors who authorised their construction.  They have certainly succeeded in that.  Or perhaps they are saying to their customers, “Hey, here’s what your drug dollars get spent on!  Up yours, sucker!” 

I was always faintly embarrassed when I received non-Pharma visitors to these buildings; you knew that they were always going to look around and then say something like “no wonder the price of medicines is so high.” 

 

And how could you argue otherwise?

Phoni Pharma Physic

By Guest Blogger - Pharma Giles

Phoni UK’s adverse effect upon the local environment isn’t just confined to its wildlife.  It’s about to devastate the local human community as well. 

 

Now this devastation isn’t going to happen as a deliberate result of Phoni’s activities.  It isn’t going to force the local population to take its toxic medicines in doses over and above what they are already absorbing from the local water table. 

 

So you can’t really blame its senior leadership for anything other than the industry-wide greed and incompetence that is leading to the collapse of Phoni in the first place.  In this case, it’s nothing personal.  But the collapse of any large employer is bound to cause a lot of hardship in the local area. 

 

It’s an exercise in social dynamics that countless communities worldwide have gone through before.  It’s just sad to see it happening to places that I know and like.  Again. 

 

Most people can see that the Phoni gravy train is coming to a grinding halt.

 

Phoni employees know things aren’t right in the company, and the locals know that as well.

 

But no-one in charge of the local infrastructure seems to be planning for the day when Phoni UK closes its gates for good and the seagulls are left to nest on the vast empty buildings in peace. 

 

Hey, Phoni has been here for fifty years, nothing will change.  Oh yeah?  Look at all of the industrial wastelands, the deserted pit villages and the ghost-towns of former dockyards that dot the UK.  Things do change, and seldom for the better.

 

The dependency of the local community has grown in proportion to the size of the Phoni site. 

 

In the pretty little village down the road from the Phoni UK site, hundreds of ugly box homes have just sprung up, just to accommodate people that now work at the Phoni site.

 

 

 

 

Who’s been Carrying Pharma?

Didn’t anyone else notice?

As a part time cartoonist I was invited to attend ‘The Stanleys’ at Darling Harbour in Sydney Australia this year.

 

It was the cartoonists’ Annual Conference, Award Night, and Community Celebration.

 

The Award has been going for some 25 years, but the Australian Cartoonists Association is much older.

 

It was founded back in 1924, and the cartoonists have been scribbling away ever since.

 

The mainstream news media were the major sponsors for the event.

 

It was a splendid occasion with much to celebrate.

 

However, I couldn't help thinking that the sponsors may not have been feeling quite so cheerful. 

 

They are dying the slow death of a billion blogs, and I wondered who will employ the cartoonists after the last edition hits the pavement.

 

 

Is Pharma Listening?

Listening for the hesitation

I admit I’m not a good listener.

If you’re like me, you listen to others just long enough to figure out you agree with what they’re saying. Then you stop listening because you know it all already.

If you don’t agree, you don’t listen to the argument. You just listen for the first hesitation so you can butt in and tell them how wrong they are.

Listening to what people are actually saying is a rare and difficult thing to do.

Maybe that’s why some people prefer to talk to answering machines.

Answering machines don’t butt in.

Do you think Pharma is a good listener?

Listening like a Dog

I recently came across a wonderful case of man’s-best-friend being used as a listener for children with reading difficulties.

Wearing a bright orange jacket bearing the words ‘STORY DOG’ this placid ridgeback delighted in being the focus of attention as the children read stories to it.

The Story Dog didn’t butt in either.