Take the Phone Call: How Unexpected Conversations Create Opportunity with Jason West

But sometimes, you know, before the product sort of, you know, we're talking about pharmaceuticals before it reaches the market.

What are the challenges? You know, what kills a great product or a great idea before it comes, you know, into the market? Maybe you'd like to share that?

Yeah, it's a whole host of different things.

There's probably a million different ways to fail and very few ways to succeed.

And that's true across industries, I believe.

Um, but I think that, you know, when it comes to pharmaceuticals, it really is very simple.

It's does the molecule work and if it's safe to, to, for people to take, and that's eminently practical, obviously, and probably obvious, but, uh, at the end of the day, it's very difficult to find a molecule that actually does have both safety and efficacy.

Um, you know, the, there's plenty of molecules that can kill cancer in a Petri dish.

But when you put it into a human body, it's going to cause problems.

And so you have to be thinking about the practicality of that molecule actually in a human system like ours.

But I think more broadly, if the question is why, why would a good idea fail in business in general? You know, I think a lot of times if there's been failures in the past and there's been plenty, I should say, it was probably a lack of courage and a lack of vision.

And so we may have had a good idea, but failed to execute because we failed to have a really clear vision of where we were trying to go or what we were trying to accomplish with that product.

And so, you know, we had, or product or idea, I should say, I'm thinking about, it's probably a silly example, but there was this time when I was designing a bonus program.

for all of our sales force.

And at the time we had a fairly sizable organization.

I think we were around 725 employees.

And so our people were spread out all over the United States and we were trying to come up with ways to incentivize.

On paper, the bonus program that I came up with was probably really good but it failed because it didn't, it was way too complicated.

And so I fell into that trap of being too complex.

And people really struggled, I think, to kind of understand how it fit into their daily lives.

So it was a failure in that respect.

And I didn't do an adequate job of sharing the vision of what we're trying to accomplish and how this connects to what they're doing every day.

in their various different roles.

So it was a lesson for me.

Definitely.