“What’s happening in the industry?”
Friends, who I bump into on occasion, ask me this question. What surprises me is how quickly they zone out when I begin a serious response. Why?
Whenever I get the opportunity to share my thoughts with executives in the pharmaceutical industry, I have a lot to say. The usual question I get asked when I meet friends or colleagues in industry conferences or in their offices is, “Hey, what’s happening in the industry today?” I do not take the question to be a ‘gossipy’ one since the people who ask me that simply don’t have the time or intent to gossip. So, I assume that they ask me this in all earnestness.
But when I answer it with the same earnestness, I notice that while people nod vigorously, I lose them very soon. It quickly becomes obvious to me that we are on different planes of thought. Busy executives who are firefighting and going from day-to-day, are always thinking about ‘how business is’, while I speak from the plane of ‘how it will be (in the near future)”. That’s why their eyes begin to glaze in a few minutes. Some of them have unapologetically shut them too!
More seriously, to hold the attention of these busy executives, I learned to compartmentalise my thoughts. I created five buckets. These buckets helped me form an ‘elevator pitch’ for someone who is listening to me for a few precious minutes as we walk the corridor or expand it into an hour-long talk over coffee, given the time and patience.
The five buckets help me keep the conversation on the listeners’ plane while gradually trying to shift them to mine. I haven’t always succeeded, but I keep getting better at it. I find it useful to use the ‘reverse Bollywood format’ – a technique I learned at a public policy think tank. This approach puts out the climax first instead of laboriously building towards it over two hours, like Bollywood movies do. Hence the name ‘reverse Bollywood’. The approach grabs the attention of the listener and gets me a bit of extra time to elaborate.
Back to the buckets.
I believe that there are five distinct trends that have emerged as the future course of healthcare. The industry is witnessing tectonic shifts as a result of these trends. Here I present the five trends/buckets to you.
Over the next few days I will elaborate on each one. I hope that you will add your experiences and perspectives to this and together we can debate on the impact these trends are creating for healthcare consumption in general and the growth of the Indian pharma industry in particular.