Bandwidth & the BCG

As has been mentioned before, I am no longer a n=1 business.  One of my proudest achievements of the last 12-18 months is the emergence of a team of focused, committed, high-performing associates who deliver my stuff at least as well as me.  Not only do my colleagues treat the work as seriously as I ever did, their fresh eyes see innovations and opportunities that have been passing pass me by.

I deliberately hand over interesting projects and not only when I can’t be in two places at once.  In the medium term this should expand our active client base but for the moment I am embracing personal financial pain in order to radically change my working life.

I am freeing up bandwidth to chase opportunities in an entirely new domain; by this time next year I plan to describe myself as the CMO of a tech start-up.  I will still own and operate a pharma consulting company but it will no longer be the first line of my LinkedIn profile.  In BCG matrix terms I am relegating my old business to ‘cash cow’ status in order to make room for a ‘star’.

I’m excited at the prospect of solving brand new problems in an unfamiliar commercial space.  I’m looking forward to being ‘inexperienced’.

I’m reminded of advice given to me by an improviser in 1991, the year I quit working for other people...

Enjoy not knowing

A crumble rather than a collapse

As mentioned in my first post-hiatus piece, I've been traveling constantly for months now. The European countries where I've spent the most time are Spain and Germany, who are surely the large-economy yin and yang of the Euro crisis. Strangely the mood was better in Spain (but that might just have been the weather) but in both cases the sense was of business-as-usual in a regrettably tough economy.

Then again, my clients are multinational pharmaceutical companies who will almost always reduce a sales target and taken a global P&L hit rather than sack an entire sales team. This same option just doesn't exist for a local business that lives or dies by whatever revenues can be extricated from the economy in question. The Spanish employees of my clients know themselves to be very, very lucky people.

But as Europe shrinks it will be harder and harder for multinationals to give economic shelter to their staff, even in Germany. The name of the game is prescription pharmaceuticals, which in Europe means that all revenues come from the taxpayer. Theoretically this means that there'll always be a customer because there'll always be a Ministry of Health looking out for the needs of its citizens.

But at the moment Europe feels as if it's being hollowed out. The outward forms of government remain but less of the stuff that actually matters. In Greece you'll most likely still get into an oncology ward but access to those smart, low-side effect, 'tumour activated' cancer drugs is now C.O.D. The German government has a new policy whereby they'll demand a refund if a new medication fails to meet the expectations set by the pharma company (this one is really smart).

My friends working for my clients are safe for the moment and perhaps forever. It's not as if Big Pharma is diverting supplies from some other richer part of the world as a favour to Europe. Back at Global HQ they're sweating over missed targets and year-on-year declines but the governing fact is still patent expiry. Short of mothballing a promising drug until this mess is all over, my clients have no choice but to launch well in order to maximise the returns regardless of any other factors.

And 'launching well' is where I come in.

Buying time, expecting attention

In the early 90's I once worked on a project to establish a sales/marketing culture for a mid-tier pharma company establishing it's own Australian operation for the first time. Their products were important, if a little mundane and somewhat limited in scope. The company had identified that as the size of the business meant that there was almost no scope for career advancement it was going to struggle to recruit effective salespeople.

Their solution was to staff the sales force with experienced women looking to reenter the industry after having children. Prima facie it was a good fit. The company needed solid experienced performers but who weren't interested in promotion and the women wanted to rejoin the workforce but on more sympathetic, less careerist terms. With the right HR attitude to flexible working hours it looked like a 'win-win'.

For a while it worked well enough. The new team was highly energised and quickly established a healthy, credible presence in the marketplace. Sure, the job-sharing and ongoing maternity leave coverage issues required additional Head Office and sales manager admin but no more than had been anticipated.

About nine months later, after the initial euphoria of launch had died down, the mood changed abruptly. Both management and the individual salespeople were suddenly, totally disenchanted. The company expected the women to still be grateful for the opportunity to rejoin the workforce on such sympathetic terms and that gratitude to manifest itself as greater attention to detail. The women couldn't see what the problem was: they were turning up and doing the job (sick kids who needed early collection from child care notwithstanding) weren't they?

The women were selling time only whereas the company thought that their (complete) attention came as part of the package. Within a year the complexion of the team had shifted back to the usual blend of unambitious old stagers, thrusting careerists and a few women with young children but decent family support to allay the early-pick-up-from-child-care-issue.

No pregnant person can give an employer his or her complete attention. Ditto for anyone with a new baby. It doesn't matter of that baby is real or metaphoric (i.e. a nascent IOS app, a comedy career or a that business you're starting up on the side) and it's no less true if both you and your employer buy into the fiction that selling only your time will be sufficient.

Something you love more than your job is always going to take attention away from that job. Because in part that's what love is.

Embracing ever-increasing complexity

I've just finished Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants.  The central thesis of the book is that technological advance is an inevitable extension of the natural development of, well, everything.  Kelly grandly posits that technology ('the technium') should be seen as the seventh Kingdom of Life, alongside archaebacteria, eubacteria, protista, fungi, plants and animals.

Kelly describes a number of key trajectories for his technium, one of which is 'complexity': -

This arc of complexity flows from the dawn of the cosmos into life.  But the arc continues through biology and now extends itself forward through technology.  The very same dynamics that shape complexity in the natural world shape complexity in the technium.

Kelly, p.287

I've spent my entire career working on product launches; i.e. trying to anticipate the Next Big Thing the consumer wants, building that thing and making it available.  I've always believed this drive for novelty to be one of capitalism's fundamental impulses but I'd not before seen it as embedded in the very fabric of the universe.  It makes sense: increased variety engenders complexity thus life will get evermore complex, be it in the jungle, supermarket or hospital pharmacy.

Last Thursday I was discussing an upcoming oncology launch with a new client.  I made the pedestrian observation that ever-expanding choice in cancer treatments added complexity to the medicine and therefore to the marketing task also: -

Once upon a time there was no treatment for cancer at all.  Then there was surgery.  Then chemotherapy.  Then radiotherapy.  Then tumour-activated monoclonal antibodies.  And so on.

The oncologist's job has gotten more complicated at every turn, especially as alongside a dizzying variety of potential combinations, sequences and so on, the original option (do nothing at all) is still on the table and must always be entertained.

Me

Marketers charged with launching a new drug must acknowledge that they are automatically complicating the customer's working life.  Doctors understand that part of the job of medicine is to understand all of the available options, which in a launch-heavy specialty like oncology can seem like a full-time job on its own.  Time-poor doctors will often actively resent the advent of a new therapy, especially if it doesn't represent an immediate and obvious medical advance.  There has to be clear communication that this additional complexity is justified by a worthwhile improvement in clinical outcome for a sub-cohort of patients.

Inexperienced marketers tend to focus on the novelty of the treatment (hence the proliferation of messages around 'mode of action', etc.) whereas the key word is sub-cohort.  Because we now know too much about genetics to take an undifferentiated approach to therapy disease, no cancer drug will ever again be right for all patients.

We are in the business of increasing complexity in the world and we need to embrace it.  It is the inevitable consequence of a defined population of cancer sufferers getting better treatment today than yesterday.