Thinking Pharma: "What Would You Prescribe For a Sick Organisation?”

If you were the physician and a Pharmaco was your patient, what would you prescribe?

As you know, in reaching your diagnosis it is important to understand the psychology of the patients if the treatment is to be truly sustainable.

Reviewing the case history, as an iterative process, and providing a Thoughtware framework are highly relevant to avoiding mis-diagnosis.

So let us consider an appropriate Thoughtware framework for an ailing Pharmaco.

The Pharmaco as an Empire

When the first multi-national organisation sailed onto the scene in 1602, it started out as a trading network, but grew to thinking of itself as a ‘Colonial Empire’.

That conceptual framework guided the organisation through a couple of hundred years, till corruption and lax management sent it into bankruptcy.

A Pharmico…..

A Pharmico surely could never reach such an ignominious end – could it?

In it’s day, the United East India Company (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie) contributed ten percent to the Dutch national income.

The thinking that characterizes a Colonial Empire embraces exclusivity, exploitation and territorialism. It selects and promotes those who thrive in situations involving conflict.

A Pharmaco would never do that – would it?

What could those corporate thinkers in their coffee houses have done differently to avoid that multinational organisation’s ignominious end?

The ‘Colonial Empire’ concept was later supplanted by the idea of a multinational organisation as a ‘machine’.

The Pharmaco as a Machine

Fredrick Winslow Taylor and others introduced the concept of scientific analysis to the business of work and the Engineers became the high priests within the organisation.

For a Pharmaco would that be the researchers or those in a more rarified atmosphere?

Problems that developed with operating the ‘machine’ were presumed to have a technical solution.

Measure, analyze, apply logic, divide it up into small bits and mend it.

Sadly, ‘Taylorism’ is seen today as the division of labour pushed to it’s logical extreme, with a consequent de-skilling of the worker and dehumanization of the workplace.

Is the Pharmaco business environment grinding towards a Taylorist outcome?

What could the engineers and technocrats have done differently to avoid the failure of great multinational organisations like General Motors – did they even have a say?

A Pharmaco as an Organism

Inspired partly by the systems-thinking of the Tavistock Institute, the socio-technical perspective on organisations is that they behave like living creatures.

The organisation is viewed as an organism. To survive, an organism needs to renew and refresh itself or it will stagnate and die.

The same is true for organisations, especially large ones.

Clearly the Pharmaco position?

Struggling for a Diagnosis

Pharmaco’s are experiencing a few difficulties with their health.

Does the patient think of themselves as a ‘Colonial Empire?’

Or an out-of-tune piece of machinery?

Do Pharmaco’s think of themselves as a sick organism and are looking for a medication that will get them back on their feet again.

Or are they living their organisational lives in the past when they were younger and fitter – when illness was just not on the agenda?

What is the Orgware thinking that characterises a Pharmaco?

Is it the sort of thinking that will help them get back to health?

Or do they need an injection of a different sort of Thoughtware?