Thinking Pharma

Pharma’s Future

Moving Towards

“You move towards and become whatever you’re thinking about”

Does that sound right to you?

I certainly don’t move towards anything that I’m not thinking about.

So what is your thinking moving you towards?

And what is Pharma’s thinking moving them towards?

Is your Thoughtware about your future positive?

Or does positive thinking not work for you?

Catherine Pratt lists ten situations where positive thinking doesn’t work.

The one I like the best is ‘Focusing on what you don’t want’

The others include:

When you use it to deny your fears or as a way to ignore reality

When you use it to cover up what you really feel inside

You feel that if you think positive thoughts, good things will happen without you having to do anything for it

You're really trying to prove that positive thinking doesn’t work

Your expectation is that if you think positive everything will always be smooth sailing

You believe that positive thinking means that nothing bad will ever happen to you

You don’t really know what you want, just “positive things” to happen

You expect others to take action or do things on your behalf

You're only happy if things happen exactly as you wanted

Pharma’s Palaces

Not so Shabby

Pharma constructs some great buildings for its people.

They win lots of architectural awards, so they must be good.

The people that work there would enjoy some of the best accommodation you can find on the planet.

Recently I spend a few days consulting to a mid-sized corporation that also enjoyed a great asset.

But it wasn’t their buildings.

The buildings were old, shabby and had seen many better days.

The working conditions were not too good either. The production equipment was on its last legs, and the infrastructure was pretty crappy.

So what was the asset?

It was best expressed by one of the few hundred workers that have been with the organisation for years. He said :

 

“I’d rather work in a shit-hole with a few good people, than in a palace with a bunch of pricks.”

The organisation had created an environment that produced loyalty, stability and profitability.

They had an outstanding record for retaining their intellectual property.

What were the components of that environment?

It certainly wasn’t the buildings.

So what creates, promotes, fosters, and encourages the gathering of “Good People”?

And what attracts a “Bunch of Pricks”?

 

Tweeting the Social Media of Business

Wet War Drums.

Another wet Sunday afternoon meant recourse to the Sunday papers.

 

A businessman’s ritual Sunday past-time.

 

Surprise, delight a full article on good and bad twittering.

 

So what did I learn? What thoughts were stimulated?

 

What Thoughtware was created about micro blogging, the social media phenomena of Twitter and its relationship to the world of business?

 

My anticipation was heightened when I remembered I was reading a News Corporation publication in a week in which Rupert the Bear (profiteer) and offspring had been again beating their war drums about free internet news purveyors.

 

 

Interesting Tweeting Facts

 

 

 

 

 

Social Media for Business

A Guided Tour through Social Media Space by the Thoughtware Group.

Tour Guide - Jock Macneish, Senior Vice President, Thoughtware Group.

 

Monday November 16, 2009.  9am – 1pm

Boral Offices Level 39, AMP Centre, 50 Bridge Street Sydney.

Social Media for Business - Tour Outline

1. Social Media – What is it and why does our business need to know about it?
2. What are the opportunities and traps for your business?
3. How should we incorporate Social Media into our business plan?
4. How does our business practically deploy and manage our involvement with Social Media?
5. How will we know when Social Media has made a difference to our Business?

Each of the five steps in the Tour will be illustrated by stories of other business’s experience with Social Media.

Suggested Pre-reading:

• Unleashing the Killer App – Larry Downes and Chunka Mui
• Being Digital – Nicholas Negroponte
• Wikinomics – Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams
• What would Google Do? – Jeff Jarvis
• Companies that Changed the World – Jonathan Mantle
• Mavericks at Work – William Taylor and Polly LaBarre
• Social Media Marketing – Dave Evans
• The Nature of the Firm – Ronald Coase

About the Thoughtware Group

The Thoughtware Group is a recently formed organisation comprising of expertise previously working independently and brought together through a common vision.

The vision of The Thoughtware Group is the re-definition of business through the use of 21^st Century technologies particularly in the area of business communication.

The Thoughtware Group is building its capability through an initial focus in the Pharmaceutical Industry ( www.thinkingpharma.com ) and its unique tool set for analysing voice and text communication (www.thinkinginsight.com ) The Thoughtware Group has other nascent initiatives in Thinking Oil and Thinking Property (Commercial) and is working upon plans to realise Thinking Retailing and Thinking Government.

Auspiced by SPResources

 

(Tomorrow's Post: Tweeting the Social Media of Business)

Tipping on Pharma

Here’s a tip…

There’s a lot of talk about climate change reaching a ‘Tipping Point’ after which we descend into irreversible chaos and catastrophe.

One less pessimistic view has been put together by Paul Gliding in the Cockatoo Chronicles.

Gliding writes regularly about the science of climate change, but this piece is about another critical tipping point, of a very different character – where the world’s political and business leaders turn firmly towards action. He thinks we may be at this tipping point already.

Surprise, Surprise and Congratulations.

Gliding observed changes in the business community include the following.

“While debates are raging in Western economies including in the US, Japan and Australia on climate policy, there are signs of a profound underlying shift emerging in corporate attitudes. Symbolising this in the United States is the rapid withdrawal of major companies from the US Chamber of Commerce over their lobbying against action to regulate greenhouse gases. In recent weeks, major corporates such as PG&E and Apple have resigned, Nike has quit the Board of the organisation and GE and Johnson & Johnson have both publicly distanced themselves from the Chamber’s anti-climate action lobbying efforts”.

In Search of Natural Painkillers

“I felt no pain…”

I had a hangover after having a few too many drinks with my neighbour Andrew.

While quite sober, he crashed his car into a tree last year.

He was trapped inside the wreck for some time before being rescued.

With medical help he is now well on the road to a full recovery.

I asked him if he had been in pain while trapped in the car.

“Not really” he said, “I was in shock”.

So I figure this ‘Shock’ stuff must be a great analgesic.

But on closer inspection, the ‘End Organ Injury’ seems a bit alarming.

“Shock is hypotension with end organ injury: it classified as being due to malfunction of 1) the Pump (cardiogenic), 2 ) the Tubing (distributive), or 3) the Fluid (hypovolemic). There are only three types of shock, problems with the heart, sometimes called cardiogenic shock, problems vascular system, known as distributive shock, and loss of circulating volume, known as hypovolemic shock.

So it’s not such a brilliant way to treat a hangover.

I needed to look further afield.

Pharma, the Financial Crisis & Greed

Shocked.

As the dust on the Global Financial Crisis begins to settle and corporate life begins to settle, questions abound as to whether ‘Lessons Have Been Learned’?

While debate still focuses upon issues such as the ethics of corporate salaries the fundamental issue of corporate greed would appear to be slipping from every conscience.

But I was recently confronted, in the context of an innovative Pharma communications project, with a different version of corporate greed to that of ‘fat cat’ salaries.

This type of greed was the insatiable desire by big corporate to do and own everything – to just take over – to show no respect for anything but total ownership of the cake.

To give the small to medium sized organisation no hope whatsoever of a place at the big deal table – no slice of the cake – not even a crumb – starvation of the small and powerless was inevitable

I was shocked. Naïve I may be. But, I was shocked none the less.

And you know the way things happen – I then saw two TV documentaries of large US based software companies blatantly stealing intellectual property from small innovators and assuming the size of their legal war chest would quash any complaint by the technology originators and patent holders.

The twenty first-century business paradigm of Strategic Partnering seemed to be news to the large corporate juggernaut.

The economics of comparative advantage was clearly an alien concept to these corporate leviathans.

Business ethics something you studied at graduate school like Ancient Greek.

Is such greed in the interest of our society?

Is this in fact greed or something else – like misunderstood good business practice? Will it be a fact of corporate life for the foreseeable future or is there an end in sight?

 

Does Pharma have the Right People to Develop Innovation?

Indulgence.

I found myself recently indulging myself in black and white movies from the post war (that’s the second one) era on a wet, cold, totally miserable Sunday afternoon.

‘The Dam Busters’ and ‘The Glenn Miller Story’ were my indulgence.

 

The former, is the story of Barnes Wallis, who invented the bouncing bomb which caused significant strategic havoc to the Nazi war supply chain.

The latter, being the story of an American Band Leader who inspired morale by striking a new chord with American troops serving overseas.

In both cases the stories concerned an individual with vision and passion.

But the stories also highlighted the importance of the ‘chance meeting’ with a ‘senior manager’ who could see that vision, create the opportunity for its realisation, appropriately invest and take the required risks.

Clearly, the fundamentals of these stories are not new, however they did stimulate me to question whether our organisations, particularly Pharma, really fostered innovation by having the right decision makers in place.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pharma Overboard

Rescuing Pharma?

There’s a US Coastguard test to determine your survival instincts and aptitude.

It lists fifteen articles from which you must choose six, to help you survive at sea.

I failed miserably.

I am not a sailor.

But I still signed on for a two-week voyage on a tall ship, doing sea trials in the world’s most dangerous ocean.

The ship and the voyage offered many hazards, most of which I managed to survive.

The most impressive safety routine we learned was what to do in response to the call “Man Overboard!” After a bit of practice, we were able to turn the ship around and rescue the ‘volunteer’ dummy in just over three minutes.

Given the hazards that Pharma is facing in its current voyage, I wonder who might come to its rescue?

Making Excuses for Pharma

‘Did your Dog eat your Homework?’

Here is a list of the most unusual excuses employees gave for missing work, offered up by employers. These are real-life examples. Some of these do really beg for further explanation.

1. I got sunburned at a nude beach and can’t wear clothes.
2. I woke up in Canada.
3. I got caught selling an alligator.
4. My buddies locked me in the trunk of an abandoned car after a weekend of drinking.
5. My mom said I was not allowed to go to work today.
6. A bee flew in my mouth.
7. I’m just not into it today.
8. I accidentally hit a nun with my motorcycle.
9. A random person threw poison ivy in my face and now I have a rash.
10. I’m convinced my spouse is having an affair and I’m staying home to catch them.
11. I was injured chasing a seagull.
12. I have a headache from eating hot peppers.

 

The Inverse Care Law.

Back in 2003 Alan Cassels wrote a searing exposure of the operations of Big Pharma in New Internationalist. Quoting Julian Tudor-Hart Alan wrote:

“Thirty years ago the British physician, Julian Tudor-Hart published his famous ‘inverse care law’: ‘those who most need medical care are the least likely to get it.’

Modern pharmaceutical research is playing Dr Hart’s law out on a macabre global scale. While the debilitating diseases of the poor – such as malaria, tuberculosis and sleeping sickness – have few or no treatments, the drug companies are busy working on cures for a ballooning set of ‘made-up’ diseases of the rich and privileged.”