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 temporary lobotomy

Whilst in Sydney I endured the most banal of travel mishaps: I left my iPhone in the back of a cab.  We need not dwell on the details except to say that it was late in the evening and that wine had been taken.

My less than sympathetic mother joked that the loss was the equivalent of a lobotomy.  She was 100% correct in that I've outsourced much of my memory and lower-level mental functioning to a shiny piece of Apple.  To people of my parents' age there is still something shameful about an unnatural over-reliance on machines to assist with menial tasks such as addition, subtraction and the recall of phone numbers.  There are two responses to this: -

1. These are menial tasks.  Why expend any more effort on them than necessary?


2. Reliance on an iPhone for memory is no more unnatural than relying on a kitchen for digestion

In his wonderfully thought-provoking book What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly describes technology as the entirely inevitable next stage of evolution.  A kitchen can be thought of as an external stomach that allows mankind to extract nutrients from a much wider range of foodstuffs.  Our species' ability to survive on cooked foods that can kill us if eaten raw is the reason why we dominate the planet.

Opting out of any technology, be it cooking or iPhone apps, is willfully contrarian and silly.  Still, doubtless there once lived some paleolithic version of me whose mother joked that his preference for cooked meat was proof that he'd gone soft.

Engaging the disinterested customer

The WSJ recently ran a piece on the growth of digital marketing in American pharma.  As with so many of these articles it begins with dark portents of the death of the drug rep and then frantically rows back from there to conclude that reports of this death are greatly exaggerated.

All pharma companies now have some sort of 'digital' capability, however, the buzzword is too broad to be useful in dissecting industry trends.  Digital is employed by pharma in two broad ways: -

1. Shinier presentations on iPads given to reps
2. Websites for doctors to access information

Whilst the same eMarketing department / digital agency can handle either type of project, the underlying effect of each should not be confused: the former is an animated sales aid with an infinite number of pages whereas the latter requires the doctor to make the first click to succeed at all.  Digital is only as good as the people who see it.  A client of mine is deploring a subordinate's budget request for a medical journal (i.e. print) campaign to drive doctors towards their underused website; old media giving succour to the new.

Vast amounts of time and energy are being spent on luring doctors' eyeballs to pharma company sites, including novel and generally useful activities such as having a key opinion leader Twitter his impressions of a major congress in real time.  Yet as with any other online campaign getting potential customers to your site is a balancing act and compelling someone to visit you is rightly seen as obnoxious.  Pharma companies must be especially careful because the doctors they're trying to attract represent a relatively small and definitely finite population, pretty much all of which is valuable.  The 1% success model that drives the rest of eCommerce definitely does not apply.

The article quotes a German GP -

Christopher Luyken, a general practitioner near Cologne, Germany, says he exchanges views with other doctors online, but sees some of the industry’s online marketing as “spam.” He says he’d rather hear about new drugs from a sales rep he knows and trusts.

Online is certainly cheaper than reps; pharma sales teams are the most expensive comms channel in any form of marketing.  But reps are compelling in a way that websites can never be, especially with those customers who aren't especially interested in what you're trying to say in the first place.  Unlike markets where you really make your money just from those customers who want to buy from you, pharma success requires that everyone be aware of what your product does and for whom.  The uninterested doctor must be engaged with or patients get suboptimal care and a website cannot achieve this.

And what about all the sales reps that Dr Luyken doesn't really know or trust in the slightest?  For what is a rookie rep with a list of target doctors and a shiny new iPad if not spam incarnate?  Delicious to Polynesians but annoying to everyone else.

Standing at the intersection

This week is all about the iPad.

As an Apple loyalist I guess I'll own one sooner or later but for now it's fun watching the commentariat contorting to either damn the thing or else worship unquestioningly at the altar of Steve Jobs (the Economist cover is fantastic). Stephen Fry is an unashamed Apple fan and as a good writer passionate about his subject is always worth reading I recommend his paean to the iPad. I especially liked Fry's improvement on a Jobs quote from the launch: -

Apple stands at the intersection of Technology, the Liberal Arts and Commerce

The idea of the intersection is intriguing to a small-shop consultant like me. I arrived at self-employment by stepping off the road that everyone else was on and the only niche that I can genuinely inhabit must derive from the sum total of my experiences.

What is self-branding if not an exercise in standing proud at the intersection of your own talents, skills and experiences and convincing the world it's worth paying to spend some time with you?

Drinking the Kool-Aid

Even after the warning I gave myself previously, I ditched my old BlackBerry for a shiny new iPhone. I was partly motivated by the lack of love shown by Vodafone UK despite the gargantuan phone and data roaming bills but mostly I've become one of those sad people who use Apple to project a 'non-corporate' personality.

A week into the new regime my fear is that even once I'm through the usual teething problems (as when I switched from PalmPilot to BlackBerry) I'm going to be left with a system that is more focused on convincing me that Life Is Fun! than helping me get my work done.

First impressions: the Cloud / MobileMe set-up does exactly what it said it would so my Mac and iPhone sync in an eerily seamless manner. It's also amazingly cool how the the iPhone Googlemaps function works out where I am and how to get to any address in my database. All great and precisely what mates showed me when they were prosetylising for Steven Jobs.

Rather, it's that when Apple's beautifully shot promo pieces show you all the cool stuff your new kit can do, they don't go on to say that's about all it's can do without a lot of angst. Googlemaps isn't a proper GPS, I've yet to work out how to wrangle the iPhone into playing nicely with non-.mac email and, strangely, non-Mac apps like Things (a To Do list programme) don't synch in the same way that Mac's own software does.

And if one more person asks me if I've downloaded the 'pour a virtual beer' application I'll not be held responsible for my actions.

Decisions, decisions...

I am in Sweden to deliver a workshop. As I was in Norway earlier in the week it made no sense to travel back to London in between sessions so yesterday I had the day to myself in Stockholm.

The horns of a familiar dilemma: a day of tourism or a day of business?

Admittedly it was a happy problem to have but I am a dreadful tourist at the best of times and on my own I'm even worse; the deadly lure of the laptop and in-room Wifi trap me easily. In the past I've even been guilty (and I do mean guilty) of using the hotel gym rather than go for a walk outside. And honestly, who amongst us cannot say their working online doesn't include a fair amount of non-work surfing of sites, etc.

I managed to get enough genuine work done in the morning to tell myself that I didn't 'waste' a day. Then I got out and saw a bit of this fantastic city (including a freezing cold harbour cruise) so that I didn't 'waste' the opportunity.

I know that I still look at days like yesterday as avoiding a negative ('waste') but I am making progress. What's the point of constructing a life where you get to wake up in cities all over the world if you never see life outside the hotel?

Skype

I am a latecomer to this technology but as WiFi access heats up it has amazing potential to further lessen the competitive gap between large and small consultants, especially in the area of teleconferencing. I am in a hotel in Stockholm about to have a three-way discussion with contacts in Sydney and London.

Amazing.