DigiStorm 2018 was held on 11 September at the Lalit Ashok in Bangalore. The event was headlined by Prabir Jha – President & Global Chief People Officer, Cipla. Deep Bhandari – Editorial Board Member, MedicinMan, gives us the highlights of the post-lunch session.
An interview with Salil Kallianpur - Executive VP at GSK Primary Care on the state of digital in pharma marketing and pointers for digital marketing success.
After settling down comfortably into my seat on a flight from Chicago to San Francisco, I started browsing through my digital copy of the latest issue of The Economist. Much to my surprise, I saw an article titled, The Usefulness of Managers beginning with the sentence, "Is your manager really necessary?"
Bingo!!! My mind went back to so many discussions we keep having about our Indian Pharma industry and the various arguments about line management and their contributions, role clarity, their usefulness and the often-asked question, “Are they really effective?”
When the top leadership says, that effective managers are a rare breed with comments such as, “they are the weakest link in our chain”, my mind keeps racing through with the thought as to, “if they are not, who has to be responsible to make them effective?”
Having been a line manager and climbing the ladder against odds, I can understand and empathise with both sides of this management world.
However, when these doubts and questions keep raising its head often, my curiosity quotient kept raising a question, “Are we in Indian pharma very unique to have such challenges?” A chance meeting I had with a team of Google senior management personnel based in Google’s headquarters in California during this trip gave me an interesting insight on what Google did and what it continues to do.
Much to my solace I found that their apprehensions were similar to what we in Indian Pharma face. The differentiating factor was that their "people operations" team (HR) has applied the Google Way (data analytics) to management analysis and developed a manifesto entitled Eight Habits of Highly Effective Google Managers.
Articles by Vivek Hattangadi, Raja Reddy, K. Hariram, Satish Kota, P. S. Parameswaran, Gopal Kishore, Ramandish Arora, Mohit Kumar Bhutani, Richa Goyal and Mahendra Kumar Rai