Pharma Wants A Cupcake But Gets Ingredients w/ Dr. Isabelle Widmer

I mean, maybe this immediately gets to the root of some of the challenges, right? Because someone who sits in a company and identify gaps that needs to be filled and then goes and does it might normally be called quite a good employee.

Yeah.

So what do you think is going on there? Why in pharma does that equal being a bad employee, perhaps?

Well, it depends on who's looking at it, right? So I think for me, I was hired, when I started working in pharma initially, I was hired to analyze market access.

I interviewed our customers.

You give them presents, right? So back then, this was 2006, I said, and this is very manipulative and biased, but I am a physician and I'm allowed.

So this was in the Swiss market.

So I assumed the important ones are male.

And I assumed that most of them have a bad conscience because they work all the time.

This might be wrong, but there we go.

And so I said, we'll send a bunch of flowers to anybody of your choice.

Give us your name when you fill in the survey, which was useful because that way I knew who was answering.

And I also asked the company, the people in the company, what they think the doctors experience.

And there was not a match.

I said, okay, you think you know what your customers want, but actually your customers want something different and you don't actually have that match.

And that was sort of where I started.

So it was already a research consultative approach.

And the bad employee thing, as I think it's maybe bad is wrong.

Maybe it's slightly uncomfortable.

If you're constantly looking for ways to make things better, and let's say I was young and dynamic then, so you don't have the political lingo.

Either you just go, oh, there's a gap, let's fix it.

And there's the awareness of how do I communicate that to people and how do I not step on toes? I think that that is the bad piece, but also you challenge people, right? You're saying, isn't there a better way? And maybe a better way means you have to work differently.

Maybe you have to talk to different people.

Maybe you have to, I don't know, just readapt in some ways.

And that's not that people don't want to do it, but they don't like somebody else who doesn't know anything about their area coming and going, I think I see a gap here.