So I’m in Istanbul two weeks ago conducting an open enrolment “Innovation for Results” training program with our partner, Pelin Urgancilar. A young woman from Pfizer says to me with a beautiful smile: “I wanted to meet the father...."As she reaches out to shake my hand.
Now I’ve had some really bad cases of jet lag, but not that bad! She was referring to a policy and procedure in the Pfizer Marketing Department in Turkey.
Six years ago, when the Turkish government (the largest group buyer of medicine) made a decision to only pay generic prices for on-patent drugs, Pfizer was really hurt in that market. Unlike the generic companies, Pfizer invests in fundamental R&D, and has to re-coup the cost in some way. But the government was a key customer, so there was little they could do but hope to make up the losses through volume and out-competing the generics.
So they asked New & Improved to come in and help them create a more innovative organization. After conducting a KEYS™ assessment and some discussions with the country manager, we focused one prong of our efforts on the marketing department. As we began to work on this department’s innovation culture through coaching, training, and meeting facilitation we had the group take the FourSight Breakthrough Thinking Profile, and learned something fascinating. With only a couple of exceptions, this department of 30 or so were all Ideator-Implementers: What the instrument calls "Drivers." (For more on FourSight, go here: http://www.newandimproved.com/newsletter/1130.php)
What that meant in practical terms was that the product managers (all relatively young for such a responsibility compared to other companies we work with) who were responsible for developing marketing plans and implementing them had lots of energy for coming up with ideas, and lots of energy for putting those ideas into action, but not a lot of energy for making sure the idea was well thought through. What FourSight refers to as “Developer Energy.”
The diagnosis: The department was implementing weaker marketing plans than would be required in the new reality.
The Rx: The initial thought of the Department Heads was that they were going to need to modify their hiring practices. (Yes they were ideator-implementers too, and ready to run with that idea... they had already begun chatting with their HR counterpart) This concerned me, however, as they were exhibiting what all groups that have common style preferences or personality types exhibit: They got along very well. The department had an extremely friendly culture and high morale. I didn’t want them to threaten that. So I slowed down the implementer energy and challenged their creative thinking with “What might be all of the ways to create a department that only launches well-thought-out marketing plans?”
There were a lot of ideas, (as you might imagine... this was fun for them) but where they settled was on a tool they had learned in training with us: POINt. (See more about this tool here: http://www.newandimproved.com/newsletter/2020.php) They decided to create a policy that all marketing plans needed to go through a one day peer review, utilizing POINt (Pluses, Opportunities, Issues, New thinking) as the method for that review. This kept a friendly culture, strengthened the department’s reputation for developing great marketing professionals and product managers, and regained significant share for Pfizer.
Six years later, the POINt process is still used in this way, and Pfizer is still doing well here.
New & Improved gets credit for this still, and as the partner working with this client, I’m seen as the “father” of this policy. While I’m most proud to be the father of my children (two, to be exact, and both with my wife Sheila, thank-you very much) Innovation policy paternity is pretty cool too!
Daddy? Is that you?!
Posted by: Jonathan | 03/17/2010 at 12:08 AM