Pharma Veterans

CEOs at Work – Part 5 – Other factors – Pharma Veterans’ Blog Post #543 by Asrar Qureshi Dear Colleagues!  This is Pharma Veterans’ Blog Post #543. Pharma Veterans welcome sharing of knowledge and wisdom by Veterans for the benefit of Community at large. Pharma Veterans Blog is published by Asrar Qureshi on WordPress, the top blog site. Please email to asrar@asrarqureshi.com for publishing your contributions here. Continued from Previous…… Much of other findings in Nohria-Porter study do not resonate with Pakistan landscape. We may have large corporations by our standards, but we do not have large corporations operating globally. Some groups in Pakistan are really big in turnover, but their management practices are not at the same level as those of global CEOs. Our challenges are that we still work with tools, thinking and methods which date back from a long time. We are not even desirous of changing it. The biggest argument against change is that our employees also live in old tim...

CEOs at Work – Part 5 – Time Allocation – Pharma Veterans’ Blog Post #542 by Asrar Qureshi Dear Colleagues!  This is Pharma Veterans’ Blog Post #542. Pharma Veterans welcome sharing of knowledge and wisdom by Veterans for the benefit of Community at large. Pharma Veterans Blog is published by Asrar Qureshi on WordPress, the top blog site. Please email to asrar@asrarqureshi.com for publishing your contributions here. Continued from Previous…… Nitin Nohria and Michael Porter study [link appears at the end] is a very revealing study, and we need to dig more into it. Let us look at some further findings. Emails CEOs are incessantly copied in emails. Most of these are supposed to be for information only. A small percentage really requires some action. However, the CEOs may feel pressured to respond because ignoring would appear to be rude. The risk in unmeasured response is that it may draw them unnecessarily into certain operational matters which they should not otherwise get entangled...

CEOs at Work – Part 4 – Time Management – Pharma Veterans’ Blog Post #541 by Asrar Qureshi Dear Colleagues!  This is Pharma Veterans’ Blog Post #541. Pharma Veterans welcome sharing of knowledge and wisdom by Veterans for the benefit of Community at large. Pharma Veterans Blog is published by Asrar Qureshi on WordPress, the top blog site. Please email to asrar@asrarqureshi.com for publishing your contributions here. Nitin Nohria Michael E. Porter Continued from Previous…… Nitin Nohria, a dean at Harvard Business School, and Michael E. Porter, a professor at Harvard Business School, are well-known to management students and practitioners. Several years ago, both launched a study to understand what CEOs actually did on and off job.  The study design was to track the entire activities of a CEO 24/7 at 15 minutes intervals for 13 weeks. It was a tall order, but they were able to enlist a number of willing CEOs and their executive assistants. Porter and Nohria collected 60,000 hour...

CEOs at Work – Part 3 – Time Spending vs Effectiveness – Pharma Veterans’ Blog Post #540 by Asrar Qureshi Dear Colleagues!  This is Pharma Veterans’ Blog Post #540. Pharma Veterans welcome sharing of knowledge and wisdom by Veterans for the benefit of Community at large. Pharma Veterans Blog is published by Asrar Qureshi on WordPress, the top blog site. Please email to asrar@asrarqureshi.com for publishing your contributions here. Continued from Previous…… There is a huge body of work on CEOs, on their role, leadership, style, time management, effectiveness, inspiration, and much more. The reason for extended focus is because the role of CEO is extremely important. In today’s post, I shall present to you some findings from a survey published in Harvard Business Review in October 2017. [Link appears at the end] The survey was conducted by Oriana Bandiera, Stephen Hansen, Andrea Prat, and Raffaella Sadun. They have done plenty of work on this subject and we referred to one of their r...

CEOs at Work – Part 2 – Celebrity CEOs – Pharma Veterans’ Blog Post #539 by Asrar Qureshi Dear Colleagues!  This is Pharma Veterans’ Blog Post #539. Pharma Veterans welcome sharing of knowledge and wisdom by Veterans for the benefit of Community at large. Pharma Veterans Blog is published by Asrar Qureshi on WordPress, the top blog site. Please email to asrar@asrarqureshi.com for publishing your contributions here. Continued from Previous…… If you go back 50-60 years, no one knew the name of the CEOs of even very large corporations. During 1960s and 70s, we used to hear about 22 families who were dominating the business in Pakistan and were alleged to have accumulated the most wealth. The families included Saigols, Adamjees, Dadabhoys, Dawoods etc. These families were into multiple business lines. However, no one knew who the CEO of PEL or Lawrencepur mills or Dawood-Hercules were. India had its Tatas and Birlas, but it was the same situation everywhere. Jack Welch and Andy Grove a...

CEOs at Work – Part 1 - Family Firms– Pharma Veterans’ Blog Post #538 by Asrar Qureshi Dear Colleagues!  This is Pharma Veterans’ Blog Post #538. Pharma Veterans welcome sharing of knowledge and wisdom by Veterans for the benefit of Community at large. Pharma Veterans Blog is published by Asrar Qureshi on WordPress, the top blog site. Please email to asrar@asrarqureshi.com for publishing your contributions here. Statistics say that almost all businesses start as family business. Later, some choose to go public while majority stays as family business. In the US, going public is popular, but even there 90% businesses are family businesses. For example, Wal-Mart which is a giant at 485 billion US$ in turnover and 2.3 million employees, is still a family business. Recently, I came across a study survey titled ‘Managing the Family Firm: Evidence from CEOs at Work’. The authors include Oriana Bandiera of London School of Economics, Andrea Prat of Columbia University and Raffaella Sadun o...

Challenging Others – Pharma Veterans’ Blog Post #537 by Asrar Qureshi Dear Colleagues!  This is Pharma Veterans’ Blog Post #537. Pharma Veterans welcome sharing of knowledge and wisdom by Veterans for the benefit of Community at large. Pharma Veterans Blog is published by Asrar Qureshi on WordPress, the top blog site. Please email to asrar@asrarqureshi.com for publishing your contributions here. There are numerous occasions when we find that we must challenge others. These may be personal occasions, or office situations. Challenging may be done to peers, juniors and sometimes seniors as well.  Challenging means that we take a position which is different from the other persons. It may be a technical point, a factual error, or an ideological thing. Depending upon the intensity of difference, the counter argument may get heated up.  Emotions are a natural part of response to other people, and they are the reason for heating the argument. Emotions are also the reason for beco...

OBITUARY – Dr. Abdul Salam Babar – Pharma Veterans’ Blog Post #536 by Asrar Qureshi Dear Colleagues!  This is Pharma Veterans’ Blog Post #536. Pharma Veterans welcome sharing of knowledge and wisdom by Veterans for the benefit of Community at large. Pharma Veterans Blog is published by Asrar Qureshi on WordPress, the top blog site. Please email to asrar@asrarqureshi.com for publishing your contributions here. Dr. Abdul Salam Babar, our old colleague and friend passed away on Friday 10 September. Inna Lillahe wa Inna Ilaihe Rajeoon. He was diagnosed with cancer couple of years ago, which finally became the cause. I heard about someone called Dr. Abdul Salam Babar in 1995-96 when our sales teams reported that this guy was effectively taking share of our original research product ofloxacin with his generic product. Several people talked about his skirmishes and successes. We heard with concern and talked about keeping a close eye on him. Then the information stopped. Fast forward ten ...

Rise and Decline of the Titans 3 – Pharma Veterans’ Blog Post #535 by Asrar Qureshi Dear Colleagues!  This is Pharma Veterans’ Blog Post #535. Pharma Veterans welcome sharing of knowledge and wisdom by Veterans for the benefit of Community at large. Pharma Veterans Blog is published by Asrar Qureshi on WordPress, the top blog site. Please email to asrar@asrarqureshi.com for publishing your contributions here. Continued from Previous…… We paused the last post on two questions which we shall address here and add one more. What are the Implications of the MNCs leaving Pakistan Market? Six major MNCs merged to become one; the case in point is GSK. Pfizer is an amalgamate of Pfizer, Pharmacia Upjohn, Wyeth, Lederle, Parke Davis, Warner Lambert. There are several other examples also. Roche, Merck Serono, MSD, Janssen, Organon have sold their local businesses to Local investors/Pharma. There is great change in the Pharma landscape, and it has several implications. One, the MNCs were great...

Rise and Decline of the Titans 2 – Pharma Veterans’ Blog Post #534 by Asrar Qureshi Dear Colleagues!  This is Pharma Veterans’ Blog Post #534. Pharma Veterans welcome sharing of knowledge and wisdom by Veterans for the benefit of Community at large. Pharma Veterans Blog is published by Asrar Qureshi on WordPress, the top blog site. Please email to asrar@asrarqureshi.com for publishing your contributions here. Continued from Previous…… We divert our focus to Pharma Industry in Pakistan. Pakistan market, like all other regional markets, was dominated by Multinational Pharma companies. They held the leadership position because only they had specialty drugs. Every MNC marketed their own research products, competing fiercely in therapeutic categories, but not infringing upon anyone else’s territory. Local Pharma had few products licensed from Europe, and their own formulas in basic categories like antibiotics, antidiarrheals, tonics and cough syrups. They also had their loyal customers ...

Rise and Decline of the Titans 1 – Pharma Veterans’ Blog Post #533 by Asrar Qureshi Dear Colleagues!  This is Pharma Veterans’ Blog Post #533. Pharma Veterans welcome sharing of knowledge and wisdom by Veterans for the benefit of Community at large. Pharma Veterans Blog is published by Asrar Qureshi on WordPress, the top blog site. Please email to asrar@asrarqureshi.com for publishing your contributions here. When I started using internet in 1994, the main search engines were Yahoo and Netscape Navigator. They were the best known and the most used. There were couple of other smaller options. Then Microsoft launched its Internet Explorer which has now been replaced with Microsoft Edge. Most popular email was Yahoo mail and for instant messaging, Yahoo messenger was used.  Sabeer Bhatia in India invented Hotmail which became hot quickly. Microsoft purchased Hotmail from him at a publicly declared price of 400 million US$ and released it in 1996. Bhatia later developed another em...

Scaling Up the Organization as it Grows 12 – Pharma Veterans’ Blog Post #532 by Asrar Qureshi Dear Colleagues!  This is Pharma Veterans’ Blog Post #532. Pharma Veterans welcome sharing of knowledge and wisdom by Veterans for the benefit of Community at large. Pharma Veterans Blog is published by Asrar Qureshi on WordPress, the top blog site. Please email to asrar@asrarqureshi.com for publishing your contributions here. Continued from Previous …… SUM UP – Last Part We discuss solutions in the major areas of People, Infrastructure, Processes, and Resources, and close this topic. SOLUTIONS – RESOURCES The last subject before closing is Resources. There is no denying the fact that adequate resources are needed for growth of any organization. It is also true that growing organizations never have surplus cash because the business and structure expansion is constantly consuming money. Another truth is that the entrepreneur also wishes to enjoy his newfound success and would like to drain ...

Scaling Up the Organization as it Grows 11 – Pharma Veterans’ Blog Post #531 by Asrar Qureshi Dear Colleagues!  This is Pharma Veterans’ Blog Post #531. Pharma Veterans welcome sharing of knowledge and wisdom by Veterans for the benefit of Community at large. Pharma Veterans Blog is published by Asrar Qureshi on WordPress, the top blog site. Please email to asrar@asrarqureshi.com for publishing your contributions here. Continued from Previous…… SUM UP We continue to discuss solutions in the major areas of People, Infrastructure, Processes, and Resources may be listed as major heads in which work needs to be done. SOLUTIONS – INFRASTRUCTURE If people are central to scaling up, infrastructure is the theme that keeps people together. Following features may be considered about infrastructure. Formality – an evolving organization which started small, has a rather informal infrastructure. The jobs are loosely defined, the hierarchy is unclear, and few people can do many things because th...