Thinking Pharma

Decisions – What to Do Not What to Think

Decisions, Decisions, Decisions – Life’s full of them!

Some find choosing hard! (I’m a Libran haven't we got an excuse.)

Easy decisions can be made complex – the complex easy.

  

Pharma client decision making is becoming more complex – performance pricing for example.

The World Wide Wonderland of Information can be both help and hindrance.

Information packaged as knowledge – organised to fit into a Decision Making Framework (DMF) - can enhance communication and foster decision making.

How do Pharma’s clients make decisions that favour a Pharma brand?

Is there a Pharma marketing and sales opportunity in Decision Support?

Should Pharma communication be directed towards helping people decide what to do rather than what to think?

If so then……

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.

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.

 

 

 

Pharma’s Middle Management.

A Thing or Two.

Most of middle management has been working for the Pharma organisation for a number of years. Collectively, they knew a thing or two about how the place could be improved.

They put their heads together and came up with a good plan to fix the organisations problems. It would cost a few million dollars but the saving would be many times the initial investment.

They presented their ideas to senior management who rejected them on a number of quite reasonable grounds.

1. Not Invented Here

It would threaten the security of senior management’s position if they weren’t the ones to come up with the initiative. What do people think we are here to do? Senior management is the brains of the organisation, right?

2. Lack of Strategic Focus

Anything that middle management could come up with obviously lacks the strategic focus that only senior management can provide. The outlook from board-room level encompasses a much broader perspective than anything lower down.

3. Better Things

The quality of middle management’s presentation was amateurish looking, scrappy flipcharts and unformatted text. Poor visuals and worst of all, no executive summary. Senior management were used to better things.

4   Un-hedged Risk

Middle management’s proposal contained no allowance for external review by industry consultants. The inherent risk was unacceptable. Who would wear it if things went tits-up down the track?

Pharma Pipe Dreams.

Pig Fattening

John Howard, Australia’s prime minister from 1996 to 2007 is quoted as saying “You can’t fatten the pig on market day.”

It’s an observation which he seemed to forget in the years leading up to his un-ceremonious dismissal from office.

His increasingly desperate attempts to “fatten the pig” in the run-up to his last election were pathetic and strangely sad.

He lost the election, his own seat in parliament, and what little respect he had left in the eyes of most of the Australian public.

It pays to look quite far ahead when planning a successful future.

Which is presumably why the pipeline industries like Pharma are so vitally interested in looking into the future. And trying to predict when the next big earner will come on stream.

Predicting the future of the pipeline involves looking closely at every stage, and ensuring the health of the system from one end to the other.

The diagnosis of pipeline health should reveal anomalies where they occur. Can you spot any difficulty with the pipeline in this diagram?

 

 

Matters in Hand.

It’s a Joke

I worked with a group of managers from a very large construction company last week.

They were a jolly bunch. Full of good humour and social banter.

I asked them what they knew about Social Media.

They cheerfully replied “Nothing”.

“We ban it at work,” they said, “But it’s a joke really.”

“We installed sophisticated software to prevent employees surfing the web on their company desktop computers, but the kids in the company surf all day on their mobile phones.”

“So what’s the point?”

So what is the point?

The point seems to be that large organisations like Pharma are really wedded to the idea of the status quo. Social Media is seen to threaten that status, and the behemoths act swiftly and completely ineffectively to stem the tide of change.

One interesting observation from the construction managers was the ‘kids’ ability to do their work AT THE SAME TIME as surfing the web, twittering and “whatever else it is they do with those things.”

It’s a skill that comes about with practice.

And the ‘kids’ get lots and lots of practice.

Around 27 billion hours a month.

That’s a lot of practice.

Blogs, Blawgs and Pharmablogs

Troubled Times

The legal profession is slowly embracing the idea of blogging.

Always ready with a slick phrase, the younger lawyers call their activities ‘Blawgs’.

b-LAW-gs, get it?

Tanya Skvortsova, a solicitor with Christopher Burnett Lawyers, has written of the blooming practice among particularly young members of the legal profession. Her article in the Young Lawyers Journal has an important lesson for Pharma.

Tanya explains that the blogging medium is particularly suited to these troubled times. It provides a platform for the embittered and tired legal profession to talk about what really matters. Depression, intra-firm politics and disillusion with the profession have all been the subject of anonymous blogs.

And so has the subject of firm-provided biscuits. It’s good to know what really, really matters to people.

It’s a fair assumption that there are as many embittered and tired employees of Big Pharmaceutical Companies as there are in the legal profession. Are we to see something similar coming from Pharmablog.com/plaints?

Hyping Pharma

Perception is Everything

It’s been fourteen years since Jackie Fenn created the Gartner Hype Cycle for emerging technologies.

It charts the way that the media and the public perceive technology as it makes its way into our culture.

The development of Social Media has helped accelerate the speed at which the cycle operates. And paradoxically, increased the likelihood that a new technology will become obsolete before reaching the ‘Plateau of Productivity’.

The cycle starts with a technology trigger.

Pharma’s research work makes it a prime candidate to occupy that section of the cycle.

Behavioural Economics and Human Augmentation are two areas that Pharma should be vitally interested in.

Do you image they are?

 

If Pharma’s investor briefings are to be believed, then you’d expect to see Pharma featuring prominently around the Peak of Inflated Expectations.

That’s where the height of Hype reaches its zenith.

Inflated with the hot air of financial projections, the balloon rises majestically, carrying the promise of untold riches and wonderful returns on investment.

Until the balloon goes up, following which the balloon goes down.

Fast.

Naturopathic Pharma?

Registering Disapproval

The recent moves to create a register of naturopathic practitioners in Australia is causing some alarm in traditional medical circles.

Naturopaths claim that a register would make the industry ‘safer’.

Safer for whom we wonder?

Traditional Medicine thinks that the register will have the effect of making the public think that naturopathic treatments are effective.

It’s a case of exquisite paradox.

Naturopaths also hope that the register will have the effect of making the public think that naturopathic treatments are effective.

My (traditional) GP pointed out an article in the Australian Doctor magazine in which a naturopath argued that their remedies are so diluted that they don’t really have any effect.

So what’s the point?

The point is that there’s a gulf which seems un-crossable between traditional and naturopathic medicine.

But could Pharma act to bridge that gulf?