Big Pharma

[marplots]

The real issue in my opinion, is that if people are frustrated with the outcomes related to the corporate economy most are ill-equipped to understand the inter-institutional dynamics, to say nothing of the intra-institutional dynamics within a large corporation.

Most of the biggest critics of corporations I know have spent little time inside large organizations, and have little conception of how things work in large groups of groups like that.

I'm one of those outsiders. My intuition is that malfeasance is an emergent property of the corporate structure. It doesn't therefore have to be intended or identified with any particular individual.

Since I am not involved in the corporate ecology, I only interact as a customer. I would like to know how you view other corporate entities, like Microsoft or Spectrum (my local monopoly cable company), as someone in the corporate "tribe." Do you feel victimized like I do?

 

[Praktik]

The terminology you use is interesting "victimized"?

Do you feel particularly "victimized" by Microsoft or Spectrum?

I guess my first reaction is no one singled you out - your use-case for something may have fallen into a gap of business rules.

But to be "victimized" implies a conscious agency in those circumstances at the company in question which resulted in your particular frustration.

 

[LSSBB]

I'm one of those outsiders. My intuition is that malfeasance is an emergent property of the corporate structure. It doesn't therefore have to be intended or identified with any particular individual.

Since I am not involved in the corporate ecology, I only interact as a customer. I would like to know how you view other corporate entities, like Microsoft or Spectrum (my local monopoly cable company), as someone in the corporate "tribe." Do you feel victimized like I do?

To be fair, corporations have different internal cultures, and large enough corporations may have different subcultures. As an outsider you can't really get a feel for it, although enough actions by the corporation in the aggregate may give some indication.

Not all corporations have the same culture, and it often to me appears more a function of earlier and founding generations at the corporation or particular divisions who make hiring decisions and set examples that reinforce the culture. I don't think structure plays much of a role, except if it is wide or narrow, and not even too much there.

My particular experience is with two very large and well known corporations, one of which was very disfunctional.

 

[marplots]

The terminology you use is interesting "victimized"?

Do you feel particularly "victimized" by Microsoft or Spectrum?

I guess my first reaction is no one singled you out - your use-case for something may have fallen into a gap of business rules.

But to be "victimized" implies a conscious agency in those circumstances at the company in question which resulted in your particular frustration.

The reason I used "emerges" is because I'm proposing a systemic, not an agent-driven point of view. But either works from the perspective of the customer-done-wrong. The feeling is one of being bullied by a powerful, uncaring organization.

Surely this can't come as a surprise? That some people feel this way. All I was asking was how you might rationalize their sense of being victimized.

It's not a gotcha question. I'm an outsider, you are an insider. I'm curious how things look from up there on the twelfth floor.

 

[marplots]

Not all corporations have the same culture, and it often to me appears more a function of earlier and founding generations at the corporation or particular divisions who make hiring decisions and set examples that reinforce the culture. I don't think structure plays much of a role, except if it is wide or narrow, and not even too much there.

My particular experience is with two very large and well known corporations, one of which was very disfunctional.

I don't think the animus against Big Pharma is fictional. It might be largely unjustified and mischaracterize pharmaceutical companies, but the negative feelings for them are real.

Perhaps the clearest way I can capture the foreboding attached across corporations is in the catchphrase, "Don't take it personally, it's just business."

 

[Praktik]

The reason I used "emerges" is because I'm proposing a systemic, not an agent-driven point of view. But either works from the perspective of the customer-done-wrong. The feeling is one of being bullied by a powerful, uncaring organization.

Surely this can't come as a surprise? That some people feel this way. All I was asking was how you might rationalize their sense of being victimized.

It's not a gotcha question. I'm an outsider, you are an insider. I'm curious how things look from up there on the twelfth floor.

Ya so I can understand why people get frustrated, but when someone feels "victimized" they attribute an intent to their problem which most of the time isn't there.

A massive system handling millions of customers and millions of bytes of data had imperfect business rules in their system which caused your bill error or missed appointment.

At least on the initial harm there is almost certainly no intent behind it. I often feel like people think we sit in boardrooms and brainstorm ideas like "how to screw over our customer base"

The analytics revolutions has hit big business, people are doing math that shows the extra costs incurred from bad customer experiences.

People might be surprised to know how many people look at these numbers and leverage that same drive people complain about "obsessive worry over the bottom line" to find broken business processes and protect the bottom line by making happier customers that have less reason to complain.

Complaints cost money - churn, customer service agents, it all adds up really quickly.

There's a synergy between drive of wanting happy customers and protecting the bottom line.

The big problem 25 years ago is there was less math and process geared towards connecting these dots and so there was less rationale inside big companies to find broken processes - stuff was piecemeal, silos were a bigger deal and execs didn't have access to math showing them how their practises were driving so much "dirty revenue" (revenue that comes in month 1 but then erodes through complaints and churn in subsequent months)

 

[TripleScorp]

I think Big Pharma is too complex to just shuffle under the umbrella of pure evil but there is a lot of shadiness being exposed. Their (admittedly failing) attempts to stifle medical marijuana found them donating a decent amount of money to anti-marijuana organizations in Arizona last year. (I tried to link as resource but I'm too new to do that but you can easily look it up.)

I guess that's business. But with the DEA having their own interests in keeping tight restrictions on marijuana research and big pharma throwing money to stop their competition before it starts, it seems a bit shady. I mean, whether you believe marijuana can or can't be used as a medicine, the DEA won't even let us research it without jumping through some pretty tight hoops. Just look at all of the retired athletes that are strung out on opioids pretty much begging to switch over to medical marijuana because the pharmaceitical products are killing them.

 

[Praktik]

Does anyone have any good recos for good examinations, with maybe real access and interviews - with tobacco execs that wilfully hid evidence of harm, pharma execs behind rushing of dangerous drugs to market, even the enron guys?

Im really curious how the people at the center of these things really rationalized things. I know there were the key elements of self preservation and greed - but what was a tobacco exec *really thinking* about the hordes of people addicted to their product?

Were they rationalizing with tropes about "personal responsibility" and "freedom of choice" to make any worry about real health tragedies caused by their product go away?

I was just talking on a FB thread in reaction to an article about the mass "brainwashing" of society:

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160105-the-man-who-studies-the-spread-of-ignorance

And people were talking about how the "powerful" like to "use these techniques" to "control" the masses.

But how many of them are just as "controlled" by ideas and rationalizations as the general public was?

Is there ever a perfect example of the mustache twirling CEO who doesn't give a damn about anybody and is clear-headedly and consciously pursuing profit over the ruin of many lives?

I suppose I would like the answer to be no - that the evil of these kinds of things is almost produced as a matter of course from not just institutional dynamics, but base human psychology.

That it takes no special kind of evil to manifest this kind of stuff - any one of us could have been caught up in a similar situation if we found ourselves in the halls of power within these kinds of companies in these kinds of moments...