International Opportunities

The other day, Medco announced that they were going to work with Apoteket to develop a drug safety system for Sweden.  Apoteket currently manages all the pharmacies there, but they are going to be deregulated in 2009.
It’s not likely to make a financial difference for Medco, but I think it’s an interesting step.  US healthcare [...]

Future of Marketing and Advertising

Here is an interesting presentation on a view of marketing from outside healthcare.  I think it is a healthy way of thinking of the challenge.

Mistake or Deliberate?

I must admit that I tend to be pretty compulsive about spelling and other mistakes.  I can’t read a book without circling errors or correcting grammar.
So, I found it intriguing when visiting a company’s website that they talked first about the confidentiality of their clients, but all the links have the clients names in the [...]

Data Power

Communications and data provide us with a valuable tool.  How to leverage facts and put them forward in a way that drives a response.  For some that is getting people to buy a magazine (e.g., 82% of Americans do X…read the article on pg X to learn more).  For others, it is to drive them [...]

Healthcare Decisions

I will get this roughly right, but I was talking with a non-healthcare person a few days ago.  He has built several successful companies and was studying the healthcare industry.  He described healthcare decision making as “passively aggressive, supposedly consensus driven”. 
As anyone in the industry knows, it is not always a logical process given all [...]

Making Good Decisions

This is a classic article that I have reused several times.  The article “Great Escapes” by Michael Useem and Jerry Useem appeared in Fortune (6/27/05) on pg. 97.  It is about thing to use to avoid typical decision making problems.
These are all relevant for anyone in business or healthcare, but with the massive amount of [...]

Communications

I can never stress the value of communication skills to anyone I met regardless of the path they want to go down in life.  I have had the luxury from an early age of public speaking beginning with something called Model United Nations (MUN) where you represent a country in mock-simulations of the UN process.  [...]

Working With Clients: Some General Thoughts

One of the best discussions I have heard for account management was by Andrew Sobel. I was digging through some files today and came across some of my notes. I thought I would share a few of my takeaways which I think are good general advice.

It is essentially to be trusted.The four attributes [...]

A Great Communication Example

Don’t get.  Don’t worry.  You’re probably not the target.  This is a Google recruiting advertisement that they put up a few years ago.  It led you to a website which had another puzzle for you to solve.
Why is this so great?  It’s targeted exactly to the niche of engineers that they wanted to have apply [...]

Another CEO Interview - ABC

I think a lot of times when I quick say ABC company people think I just mean any “generic” type company (i.e., typical MBA case study speak), but in healthcare, we have AmerisourceBergen Corporation which some people (probably no one in their corporate marketing) refer to as ABC.  It competes with Cardinal Health and McKesson [...]

Setting Healthcare Goals

I have always been a big believer in using New Years as an excuse to think about my goals – what did I accomplish last year, what do I hope to accomplish in 2008, and what are my 5 and 10-year goals. With the exception of a few years, I have done this for most [...]

Are You Growing Your Vegetables

I read this interesting analogy this morning about marketing and comparing it to gardening.  I think the author’s points are very relevant when you think about patient retention within healthcare.  A few of the points that come through in the blog entry are:

 It takes effort.  (i.e., vegetables don’t just grow by themselves)
You have to be [...]

When Leaving a Message Isn’t Optimal

I heard two quick examples yesterday that seemed relevant to share.  Sometimes it is good to learn through others mistakes…

An executive at a company decided that they didn’t want to fill a particular drug since they were losing money per prescription.  After the decision was made, he called the CEO of the manufacturer and left [...]

BAH on Demographic Changes

BAH (Booz Allen Hamilton) has a business publication called Strategy and Business which has some great research.  I found this recent article on the changing demographics worldwide to be interesting and relevant to what we see in the US (which has a big implication on healthcare).
Here are a couple of quotes and facts from the [...]

Student Ideas

When I got my MBA at Washington University, we had a business plan competition.  [Which I won one year and took second the other year.]  It was fun and challenging.  You got to present to a group of CEOs at the end.  (Mine included Chuck Knight (Emerson Electric) and Andy Taylor (Enterprise Rent-a-Car)  But, it [...]

What Have You Failed At Today?

I caught this story on ABC last night about entrepreuners.  It made an interesting point about the need to fail and learn from your failure.  In summary, it was basically saying that people who took risks, failed, and spent the time to learn from their failures ended up more successful.
I think that is very relevant [...]

Text Google for the 411

Google seems to be everywhere. It is probably the one site that I have to teach my kids to know to get anywhere. Perhaps they need a “Google Kids” which offers games, safe content, etc.
Anyways, this is more of a tip than anything about healthcare, but I was fascinated to find out about [...]

Confusing Stock Market Reaction

So, Walgreens announced that they were going to miss earnings because of generics (oh and higher expenses).   All of a sudden, the PBM stocks (e.g., Medco and Express Scripts) took a hit which makes no sense to me.  [BTW - I own none of these individual stocks although they may be in mutual funds [...]

Small Business Impact of Health Coverage

Wells Fargo and Gallup put out the results of a poll of small business owners last week that underscores just how challenging it is for them to provide healthcare coverage for their employees even though they clearly know this is an important benefit in attracting the right type of talent.
A few of the key facts [...]

Number 366

I mentioned the Top 100 Healthcare Blogs a few weeks ago.  Well, I made it to the honorable mention at number 366.  So, if you like what you read here, help me move up the rankings by:

Subscribing to the blog
Adding a link to my blog on your site or blog roll

Thanks.

New Agency Role - White Paper

“One of the great communications tragedies is to watch an organization go through a careful planning exercise, step by step, complete with charts and graphs and then turn the strategy over to the ‘creatives’ for execution. They, in turn, apply their skills and the strategy disappears in a cloud of technique, never to be [...]

New Blog

I have been blogging most of this year on the topic of Business Process Management (BPM) at BPM Business.  In doing that, I continued to go back to my previous experience in healthcare and gained a fresh perspective on the healthcare consumer and their interaction with the complex heathcare processes.  (I have always been a [...]

Myths of Innovation

Guy Kawasaki has another great interview on his blog.  This is an interview with Scott Berkun, author of “The Myths of Innovation”.  If you are fascinated with innovation, this is a good read.  I have tried innovation internally and externally.  These last few start-ups which I have worked on have been great.  This article addresses some of [...]

Picture is worth a thousand words (at least)

As a former architect, I am a big believer that pictures have significant value in the business world.  I have been asked dozens of times to take complex ideas and simplify them down to a single-frame image that people can post in their cube or use in a meeting.  These images can be powerful.
At Express [...]

Misc Articles to Read

I have been trying to keep up with my reading and falling behind.  There are a lot of articles that I skim and take something from, but that I hoped to synthesize and share.  Rather than get too far in the hole, I am going to share a few here.
Two sources I would recommend for [...]

Asking a 90-year Old to Use E-mail

You can use business rules in many ways.  I think one of the most important areas is in customer segmentation.  There is initial segmentation around which customers to target with which offering (e.g., cross-selling, multi-variate analysis).  There is secondary segmentation around which message will compel them to act on an offering (e.g., campaign management).  Additionally, [...]

The Art of Ware

I was just skimming a story from Guy Kawasaki’s blog about The Art of ‘Ware by Bruce Webster.  I was a little skeptic, but Guy always has great instincts.  I read a few of the chapters in the book and think you would enjoy it.  Especially if you work with or at a software company.
Here [...]

Generation Y Summary…for BPM

“They’re ambitious, they’re demanding and they question everything, so if there isn’t a good reason for that long commute or late night, don’t expect them to do it. When it comes to loyalty, the companies they work for are last on their list - behind their families, their friends, their communities, their co-workers and, of [...]

The McKinsey Way

You can certainly never go wrong looking at McKinsey. Their consultants are usually very top notch and their process of thinking and root cause analysis is great. Although this post is more about how you analyze a problem (i.e., business process innovation), it also makes a point about how important process and methodology [...]

5 Patterns of Extraordinary Careers

At Express Scripts, all of us on the leadership team (top 1.5%) were given the book The 5 Patterns of Extraordinary Careers.  It was a good book with several relevant tips especially for someone in the BPM space that is likely playing the role of change agent or somone whose career might include an objective [...]