They know it’s not Christmas.
Yes, we know it’s not Christmas yet, but we thought you’d like a few days to arrange who you’re sending cards to this year.
These are a few thoughts about how Social Media might affect the celebrations in 2009.
Please feel free to send any or all of them on to your Christmas card list of family, friends and colleagues.
With the compliments of the Thoughtware Group, and its many collaborators, contributors and colleagues.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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?
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.
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?
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.
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?
The International Passport.
After the useful work that Peter Stuyvesant did introducing tea to the American colonies in the 1660’s he lent his name to a brand of cigarettes. American Tobacco marketed the cancer sticks as “The International Passport to Smoking Pleasure”.
As a teenager I was greatly impressed.
I learnt to smoke.
I thought it would turn a spotty juvenile into a sophisticated man-about-town.
I thought I would be admired, looked up to and most of all, attractive to women.
My International Passport failed to get through customs.
In the years that have passed, the tobacco industry has gone from a respected business champion to a social pariah.
Do you know anyone who admits to working for the tobacco industry?
Do you think Pharma will be far behind?
280 Billion Good Reasons
So far litigation against Philip Morris has cost it $280 billion.
That’s a fraction of what it would cost to restore the company to its former position.
And it’s a fraction of what the tobacco industry spent on agnotology.
Yes, agnotology, the study of the cultural production of ignorance and doubt.
#43 in the MIT LabCast series, ‘New Media Medicine,’ presents a fundamental challenge to the use of media in the shifting of the locus of responsibility for healthcare from the physician to the health consumer.
The MIT argument for such a shift in responsibility from physician to patient is powerful but doesn’t even mention the economic imperative, based upon the ageing population, for such a realignment
The LabCast also explores a number of the compelling implications given that such a shift is accomplished.
One implication identified is the availability of global patient and lifestyle data which could drive new frontiers in disease research.
Social Media, arguably the principal media technology envisaged by MIT, is founded upon appropriate principles to secure the quality data required, namely:
Ø Peering
Ø Openness
Ø Sharing
Ø Transparency
However, it is the ‘act global’ principal of social media that represents the greatest opportunity in the area of data collection for disease research.
Given such an opportunity, one would have thought that Pharma’s support for the empowerment of patients through the use of social media and an industry engagement with the technology would be a priority?
Wouldn’t One?
(Tomorrow's Post: Is Pharma Next?)
Power and Influence
Did you know that the capacity of management to exert influence decreases with age?
Not the executive’s age, (although that may be true) I mean the length of time a drug has been in development.
And the attention that management pays to a drug in development increases with age.
But the real reason that all that loving attention is lavished on the later stages of development is, of course, cost.
Looking down the barrel of the Pharma pipeline looks a lot like this:
By the time a drug is in phase 3, management might just as well pack up and go home.
Jock Macneish listens to what people say,
and draws cartoons of what they are thinking.
Be careful what you say to him, but feel free
to think what you like. Or possibly vice versa.
Rebecca Caroe is a senior member of the Thinking
Pharma Team. She is an eminent marketer,
particularly one-one. Rebecca also likes to stick her oar
in. Not only on the Thinking Pharma Blog
but on the river – we think she’s quite good at both!
