Pharmaceutical Sales and Marketing Articles

You receive a voice-mail message from senior leadership, which contains the same thing you've heard from your manager for months: "Stay focused! Don't worry about things you can't control. You are our most important resource. We are the right size to compete in today's market." Before you hang up or listen halfheartedly in disbelief, what should you do? Trust is tenuous in trying times.

Welcome to Success Stories, which explores what makes the industry's top-performing representatives so amazingly successful.

DIAGNOSIS
Winning the election to office provides opportunities to propel your career to even higher levels or bring it to a screeching halt

PRESCRIPTION
Create an intentional impression and action plan for success

When a salmonella contamination hit pistachio nuts a few months ago, FDA moved quickly to recall products and shut down processors. These days, officials are sending out more warning letters, as well as taking bolder enforcement actions and a more proactive approach to health emergencies such as swine flu.

My wife says I extrapolate too much from my own adolescence. She's undoubtedly right, but I still think my high school taught me at least one useful lesson about law enforcement: Left to their own devices, the enforcers will punish the relatively innocent and spare the truly guilty. Why? Well, obviously because it's so much easier to punish the relatively innocent. They're well-behaved.

While the current recession consumes the lion's share of intellectual energy on the part of politicians, industry leaders, and academics, it may also obscure a larger, more systemic problem. The state of US education has fallen so far behind other industrialized nations that it now threatens to alter our way of life.

When calamity strikes, Americans tend to look for a villain. This is how we regulate our industries, keep our government honest, and even how we go to war. Unfortunately, it means that many policies forged in haste end up being repealed years later, when it's clear that they were the result of overreaction.

When our publisher, Jay Berfas, first came to Pharm Exec, he brought with him a fat black portfolio. We all learned what was inside when Jay gathered the editorial team around a table and poured out three decades' worth of 3-D memorabilia—magazine covers, ads, photos, and dozens of pairs of red-and-blue glasses.

Jill Wechsler

Let's get one thing straight right up front: We're not talking about inhaled insulin. Sure, it comes out of an inhaler; yes, you breathe it in; and of course it's absorbed deep in the lungs. But please don't use those two unfortunate words. Inhaled insulin was a misguided idea—an attempt to replace needles and injections with something ostensibly more convenient.