Rough Clay: Don’t like change? You’ll like irrelevance even less
Pharma desperately needs new ideas, but first it needs new language in which to think about them
By on May 24, 2011Harry Frankfurt is a professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton University.
He’s been developing a theoretical understanding of what ‘bullshit’ is, an interesting problem given the spirit of our times.
We live in a political and cultural climate steaming with piles of spin, obfuscation, evasion, and illusion.
In his essay, On Bullshit, first published in 1986 by the Raritan Quarterly Review, a well-regarded literary journal from Rutgers University in New Jersey, he writes:
“One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes their share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, nor attracted much sustained inquiry. In consequence, we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, we have no theory.”
Professor Frankfurt makes the point that this form of speech reflects a process for thinking rather than an end product.
The process is shaped by the words we use to frame questions, conversations, and ideas in our minds.
And it’s this thought process that is one of the reasons why the pharmaceutical sector continues to bounce from crisis to crisis.
Drug companies have run out of ideas because the flow of language organizing the system of thinking in the industry has not changed for more than a century.
Clichés do not yield new insights to ask the kind of questions that lead to fresh ideas.
The context for strategy has shifted radically, and a fresh approach is needed to some of the big unsolved problems of our day, like economic development in emerging markets and health system innovation in practically every country in the world.
This is space where political, economic, psychological, and business factors overlap.
And this is where new growth can happen for pharma, by positioning themselves as “integrators” in health care.
In need of new ideas
César A. Hidalgo, a statistical physicist at the M.I.T. Media Lab, is one of those people working from a different process for thinking.
Hidalgo studies the structure of networks, and along with Harvard economist Ricardo Hausman, has been developing tools to help understand large and intricately connected systems, such as the global economy and the networks defined by social interactions.
One of these tools is a site devoted specifically to explore the largest publicly available dataset of disease correlations.
IMS Health predicts that global sales growth of prescription drugs will be cut in half over the next five years, as lucrative brands lose patent protection and cheaper generics and emerging markets become the only significant growth drivers.
“Past patterns of spending offer few clues about the level of expected growth through 2015,” says IMS Health. “There are unprecedented dynamics at play, which are driving rapid shifts in the mix of spending by patients and payers between products and generics.” (For more on sales growth, see ‘Patent expiration: Innovate or die’; for more on generics, see ‘Forecasting for generic erosion rates’.)
These dynamics are not unprecedented. They reflect structural transformation decades in the making.
The pharmaceutical industry has just been spectacularly unsuccessful in adapting because its process for thinking is out of whack.
It reaches for advice and solutions from the same people looking through the same lens to come up with the same set of ideas.
Like Hidalgo at M.I.T., a different mindset is what will close the conceptual gap between possibilities for new growth from new forms of interaction with the marketplace or decay from using an obsolete framework to solve problems.
The complex challenges of today—where technology, business, government, and society intertwine—require new insights to understand, new methods to address, and a new generation of ideas to experiment with.
If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.
A whole new taxonomy is needed for strategy in the pharmaceutical industry, not for its own sake, but to help drug companies shape new ideas that have the greatest power to create business value.
And this will only come when we separate ourselves semantically from the past.
John G. Singer is managing director of Blue Spoon Consulting.
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