And so it goes on....

US prosecutors investigating 150 cases involving alleged drug pricing fraud

A Wall Street Journal report said that state and federal prosecutors in the US are currently investigating 150 cases involving alleged pricing fraud by some drugmakers, and the cases could produce more than $1 billion in criminal and civil penalties this year, CNN Money and TheStreet report.

Once again the big news about big Pharma is the worst kind - leaving even more bitter tastes in the mouth than Merck's rather off kilter corporate attempt at misdirection. It really strikes me that the more this great industry strives to improve its relationship with the massive population it serves, the more it appears to fail.

As great economist JK Galbraith wrote wisely in the 1958 publication The Affluent Society
"...when a tree rots, it rots from the top"

Is it perhaps signalling yet again that now is a critical time for the industry to re-evaluate its entire structure and image? In a way that is absolutely focussed on the single optimal objective of removing the dead or deceitful wood and providing a framework where open-ness and honesty become key standards that are not merely expressed, but also enacted. This latest very public debacle provides further evidence that the Pharmaceutical industry is at a strategic inflection point, and that serious time and money should be invested in the discovery and management of new strategies and direction through visible and emotionally intelligent leadership. NOW. This industry's leaders self-obsessed state of insularity can no longer exist. The networks and the connectivity that is now a real part of the way we live today simply won't allow it.

Some people never learn. Others learn very quickly to forget what has always previously been considered knowledge.

Change is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better
(RICHARD HOOKER)

To try to finish on an optimistic note, this is another massive wound in the side of an industry that has surely to face up to the need for change. Not in the passionate and relentless development of better, more effective and safer medicines through innovation and technology, but in the way it is fundamentally managed and run as a business.

To quote the prophetic (and quietly optimistic) 1930's poet Louis MacNeice:

...new
Patterns from old disorders open like a rose
And old assumptions yield to new sensation;

Our business has been built on product brands. Perhaps we should be looking harder at the kind of initiatives and new behaviour/belief systems that will help to create meaningful and valued corporate brands. We have the toolkit to deliver on that.

But when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem ends up looking like a nail.