Articles by Vivek Hattangadi, Genesh Kuriakose, Pankaj Mehrotra, Salil Kallianpur and Jay Mehta

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.

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.

With the Second Wave hitting India, customers (patients and physicians) will continue to socially distance themselves in the foreseeable future. Pharma must use the field force for reach and relationship and digital for frequency and personalised content for better customer experience. The pandemic has made doctors adopt Telehealth in a substantial way to shore up their revenues and this will continue to be one of their channels to engage patients. Telehealth along with EMR/EHR, digital therapeutics and wearables is enabling doctors to better care for their patients. There are many ways in which pharma can support the digital evolution of doctors.

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Introduction For decades, leaders and organizations have relied on the...

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