Articles by K. Hariram, Pankaj Mehrotra, Rinkesh Shah, Gopal Kishore, Amaninder S. Dhillon, Ramandish Arora, Mohit Kumar Bhutani, Richa Goyal, and Mahendra Kumar Rai
Q 1. Tell us about your journey as a pharma entrepreneur and what made you venture into pharma and stay on in pharma?
My journey started with two good decisions, one- to be a Medical Representative (MR) in Mumbai, which built a strong foundation and the other, to join Helios, a new pharma company, which was like a baptism of fire. Together, they molded me well.
I was promoted as a Front Line Manager (FLM) within a year. And after spending four excellent years in Helios, I joined Group Pharma as Product Manager (PM) and ever since, it’s been an exciting learning experience.Â
I was exposed to Pharma very early in life as my dad was in J L Morison, as part of the promoter-team of Warren Pharma. At home, I was the designated telephone operator and order processing clerk. Those were the days of trunk-calls - calling managers and distributors to note down orders. Hence, I was exposed to the excitement of targets, achievements, deficits and campaigns very early in my life. The idea of ‘work-life balance’ was not in vogue. One would look to their parents who worked long hours with pride making it something you wanted to emulate. Things have changed a lot but I would not trade the decision I made, to get into and stay in Pharma.
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
Is Pharma’s business model like McDonald’s? Doing things over & over again without innovation?
McDonald’s is famous for its Hamburger University, a training facility at the McDonald’s Corporation global headquarters in Chicago, Illinois. It instructs high-potential restaurant managers in restaurant management.
More than 5,000 students attend Hamburger University each year and over 275,000 people have graduated with a degree in Hamburgerology.
Sound familiar? Pharma’s training has been on similar lines – hire people continuously and put them through the grind of mugging up essentials of drugs for diseases that the particular company sells.
While the McDonald’s model is ideal for its business of replication, it has outlived its utility in healthcare and drug companies are in danger of being reduced to mere suppliers of drugs to new digital platform businesses unless they learn to innovate.