Anyone in a romantic relationship, and certainly in a marriage, knows that the way to peace is not to be open about everything at every moment. Many thoughts, beliefs and should be kept one’s self, in the interest of peace. Did it just occur to you that tonights pot roast tastes much like the styrofoam packaging it came on? What do you really think of that new dress? As my old colleague Jim Burke would say "You are missing the perfect opportunity to say nothing." As somebody who rarely says nothing, I find this advice to be quite sage. Hard to follow, but sage.

But pharma companies, they have an entirely different problem with openness. Following the
back-to-back ethical scandals of Paxil (withholding data on efficacy in children) and Vioxx (encouraging sales reps to "dodge" direct questions from doctors about damage to the heart), the pharmaceutical industry began edging toward opening up their trial database to the public.

A couple years back, I did a project looking at potential scenarios around what openness could look like, good and bad, and discussed these possibilities in a presentation at a pharmaceutical intelligence conference and an article in the Futurist.  (Note: At the conference, there were some who looked at me like I had four heads for suggesting that the government’s requirement for openness would have implications for their business…as if it were a future so bad it were taboo.)

So greater openness is in effect, and it’s already having some real impact. On one hand, Novartis has started to open its trial databases up to the world, trying to use the networked economy effect to drive drug discovery. Cool.

But being open to the world can have drawbacks. The New York Times today ran an article about how GSK’s diabetes drug Avandia was shown to have cardiovascular risks. A doctor at the Cleveland Clinic was able to open up the trial database, do a meta-analysis on the data, and concluded definitively that there is a greater cardiac risk with the drug. Before, only the drug company would have access to those data, and heaven knows they have no such incentive to roll hand grenades onto their share price by coming forth with such analyses.

By the way, you know how many billions of dollars of revenue just got iced because of this? OUCH.

So what might openness mean to you and your organization?

-Garland

This is so cool, I gotta post in rapid succession.

Those who know me, know how much I adore playing music. This is why the music industry is one of my
favorite example of changing business models, and sometimes I think getting paid to play your guitar is an enormous scam.

However, the way record contracts are often written, it can be literally a scam.

Imagine, if you will, a mortgage by which you take out the loan, pay it back with your earnings, and then the record company still owns the house. You’d never do it, right? Well, that’s the structure of many record deals. They advance you money, which you then spend on making the record, which you must pay back. Then the record company owns the product you took out a loan to produce.

You follow that? Yes, it’s weird.

One of my all-time favorite musicians went through the meat grinder, earning millions of pounds for Virgin Records, and then somehow ending up broke. Andy Partridge is the frontman for British pop geniuses XTC, and he has been through the ringer. Ultimately, the group had to go on strike (not unlike Prince during his ‘symbol’ phase) to get out of a bad deal signed in their 20s.

Anyhow, Andy is finally leverage the Internet to start a record label that cuts musicians fair deals- deals that allow high quality music to reach the masses without being pushed through the lowest-common-denominator cookie cutter.

This, my friends, is a positive future – one where thousands of musicians make thousands of dollars, instead of a few making tens of millions. I’m sorry, but there is more artistic quality in diversity than there is in mass marketing.

Very cool.