Open Password – Monday September 13, 2021
#972
Steep templates for corporate success in 2021 – Art of decision – Best practice – Strategic business decisions – Information transfer – Information Professionals – Marc Berenbeck – AT Kearney – Sport – Team – Teaming – Added value through information – Brainstorming – Evaluation – Preparation – Analysis – Pharma & Healthcare – Healthcare industry – Motivation – Online pharmaceutical market – Knowledge experts – Product portfolio – Management consultants – Climate policy – Benjamin Frata – Big Oil – Patrick Raden Kede – Empire of Pain – Sackler Dynasty – OxyContin – Purdue Bankruptcy Trial – David Boarder Giles – Victoria Stad – Big Data – Global Agribusiness – Digital Imperialism – Green Revolution – Housing as a human right – Stefan Meyer – Homelessness – Hungary – Finland – Housing First – Austria – Federal Working Group on Homeless Assistance
Cover story
Steep templates 2021: The information broker – more than a data supplier – information professionals have a future, they are even indispensable.
But how do they do that? – Interview with through ball referee Marc Berenbeck from Kearney
Outside the box
– Management consultants as obstacles to climate policy – Empire of Pain – Big data doesn’t make the world full – Housing as a human right
Steep assists for corporate success in 2021
Online conference | October 20, 2021 | 10:00 a.m. – 1:30 p.m
THE ART OF DECISION
WELL INFORMED OR BETTER ADVICE?
Registrations: steep templates-2021.xcom.live
BEST PRACTICE I: STRATEGIC BUSINESS DECISIONS
The information broker –
more than a data provider
Information professionals have a future,
they are even indispensable. But how do they do that?
Interview with through ball referee Marc Berenbeck from Kearney
Marc Berenbeck
Let’s not talk about conveying information, but about sport. They were extremely successful in sports. What is the secret of your success? Of course, like most top athletes, I was very ambitious and determined. But I firmly believe that my recipe for success was to always see myself as part of the whole and not to focus on myself personally. I always defined my role in the team and looked at how I could contribute to the team’s success.
From my experience I can say that you can be successful within a team without jeopardizing the overall success. I learned that every team member was important in some way, regardless of their role on the team. The overall package must be right and each team member must understand, accept and ultimately carry out their role.
For the most part, we managed quite well to compensate for weak phases of individual team members with the strengths and particularly good phases of others.
What can be transferred from your sporting experiences to conveying information? I think there’s a lot that can be taken from sports. Providing information is also a matter of teaming. When it comes to conveying information, there are always colleagues with whom you communicate, discuss things and then make final decisions.
It’s not about who provides what information and how, but rather that the added value of the information is in the foreground and that you make a lasting contribution to success. In particular, we have many different processes in conveying information, most of which involve a team. Like in a sports team, the roles within a team are clearly defined and the team presents itself as a united front to the outside world.
Brainstorming, the constant exchange within the team, plays a crucial role for me.
Marc Berenbeck in action (as a roller hockey goalkeeper, 8-time German champion, medalist at the World Games and coach of the senior national team)
How did you find your way into management consulting and information dissemination and what kind of work did you initially find? Twenty years ago I applied for a working student position in the Information Research Center at Kearney in Düsseldorf. Initially I copied articles, faxed or copied pages from annual reports or statistical yearbooks and transferred data from specialist journals into tables. The development that information development has taken to date is enormous. I’m glad I’ve been able to witness this over the years.
I am now a member of the global health practice at Kearney and a knowledge expert in the global research team responsible for the pharmaceutical industry, medical technology and international health systems.
They see the information professional less as a data provider than as a market expert and knowledge expert. But you’re still collecting data. I’ve had an incredibly exciting and very intensive journey through time in information transfer and I’m still passionate about my work and the industry. We in the provision of information have our finger on the pulse of the times. For me, numbers, data and facts form the basis for market expertise and the development of knowledge.
Today I don’t see us as pure data suppliers, as the information transfer goes far beyond that. Of course, I still collect numbers, data and facts every day. In most cases, these are not only sent to my colleagues in raw form, but also
in the form of prepared slides, tables and texts. This is always a question of the time available and the scope of how far you can go in the analysis. But the real added value is that this information is well prepared and, ideally, transmitted with an initial analysis and evaluation.
How did you become a market and knowledge expert and how do you define your current work profile? I was very lucky to be in the right place at the right time. I had a few people in my professional environment who saw my motivation and talent and supported me.
I was taught a lot and little by little I was able to work on increasingly complex and time-consuming tasks or topics. A former partner and head of our Pharma & Healthcare business in German-speaking countries introduced me to many new tasks and subject areas. I gained deep insights into the project work and was able to understand the overall connections in several sub-industries in the healthcare industry and thus build and expand my expertise. I was and am in a daily learning process and always realize that I never know everything and am never 100% up to date, because the speed of developments – especially in the healthcare industry – is enormous. I don’t think you have to know everything, but you should know where to get the knowledge.
I have the great pleasure of supporting project teams worldwide. Either my colleagues ask me about individual topics or I support these teams over a longer period of time with new questions. Depending on the research intensity and needs, I will also be booked on individual projects. It’s a fascinating job that inspires me every day, even after more than eleven years in the healthcare industry. This job is certainly extremely demanding and sometimes comes close to the limits of what one can handle. But if you work in or with well-functioning teams, the bottom line is that you have a lot of fun.
T he “pharmaceutical market ” seems to me to be a good example of how you can find the crucial “icing on the cake” for a customer. A few weeks ago I received an inquiry from a colleague from a neighboring European country who asked me to provide him with it to outline the addressable German “online pharmaceutical market.” He wanted to prepare for a discussion.
It would have been easy for me to provide this colleague with the market size for the German online pharmaceutical market in the form of raw data from relevant sources. Both the industry-specific specialist sources and leading analysts are currently focusing very intensively on the addressable online pharmaceutical market. But I think this very query serves as a good example of the crucial “icing on the cake” as you put it in your question.
I called my colleague and we first defined whether he would only like to look at the market for prescription drugs or whether he would also like to have the market for non-prescription drugs included. It turns out he was only interested in the prescription market, which makes a very significant difference in the analysis and elaboration.
I was able to further convince him that we should take a closer look at the market, because as I understand it, you have to break down the addressable market in detail and see which part is actually addressable and which part is not according to various criteria. And this is exactly where, in my opinion, lies the “icing on the cake”. Because as a knowledge expert for a specific industry, I see it as a must to support colleagues so that I can think for themselves and think about things. You have to question the numbers, data and facts again and again and see whether and to what extent you should take them into account for the actual question and what they ultimately say.
Can you tell me another case that you solved with data, knowledge and analytical power? For a presentation, a partner at the time asked me to show the product portfolio of a generics company on one page in the form of a complexity tree because, according to him, the company itself did not have a detailed overview of its entire portfolio. At first I thought that this was an impossible task because it could not be solved within the company.
Of course I couldn’t do magic, but after some creative thinking, I came up with the idea that I could “repurpose” a drug pricing database. Because if I get the prices for all products, pack sizes and other variants via a database, then I can draw conclusions about the portfolio. The effort was greater than expected, but I actually managed to outline the portfolio numerically on one page, so that almost a complete overview of the portfolio was shown.
While this was not a “100 percent” result, it was, at least from the customer’s perspective, a creative approach that was considered very close to reality. This means that the knowledge and understanding of data sources and their areas of application are of enormous importance to us as knowledge experts and we should also like to think outside the box.
As you move deeper into the knowledge and analysis space, you will need to balance your relationships with subject matter speakers . Or if you are all supposed to be together as a team: How does your team work, even if the boundaries between the areas of competence cannot be clearly defined? By also taking into account the intersections between the individual areas of expertise and bringing together the expertise of the various experts.
Not everything is black and white, there are always different shades of gray. If areas of competence are not clearly defined, which happens regularly with cross-industry or functional topics, then a close and close-knit exchange between the individual knowledge experts is irreplaceable.
Personal requirements for today’s InfoPro? I find it a great advantage if today’s InfoPro is interested in his area, his topic and his industry, if he is passionate about the cause. I am aware that this is a tall order, but from my experience it makes the work a lot easier. When I’m curious, when I’m interested, things become easier for me.
I also believe that today’s InfoPro needs to have a lot more knowledge about their field of responsibility, because the amount of information today goes into much more detail and the “so what” from the numbers, data and facts is more in demand than ever. The will and desire to solve new tasks every day and to constantly get involved in new topics are a very important requirement – as well as delivering punctually and reliably under time pressure.
Information professionals have a future, they are even indispensable. But how do they do that? I am firmly convinced that our professional group has a future because the tasks and areas of application are so diverse and, in my view, numbers, data and facts are still a decisive criterion for successful and sustainable entrepreneurial and other economic decisions. But I also believe that we can only actively shape our future if we position ourselves as experts, if we gain expertise and knowledge and thus create added value for our respective employers as directly as possible in addition to all the information required. Pure research or database knowledge is no longer enough.
Outside the box:
Recommendations of the week
Management consultants as hinderers
of climate policy
Benjamin Franta (Stanford), Weaponizing economics: Big Oil, economic consultants, and climate policy delay, in: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09644016.2021.1947636
The role of particular scientists in opposing policies to slow and halt global warming has been extensively documented. The role of economists, however, has received less attention. Here, I trace the history of an influential group of economic consultants hired by the petroleum industry from the 1990s to the 2010s to estimate the costs of various proposed climate policies. The economists used models that inflated predicted costs while ignoring benefits policy, and their results were often portrayed to the public as independent rather than industry-sponsored. Their work played a key role in undermining numerous major climate policy initiatives in the US over a span of decades, including carbon pricing and participation in international climate agreements. This study illustrates how the fossil fuel industry has funded biased economic analyzes to oppose climate policy and highlights the need for greater attention on the role of economists and economic paradigms, doctrines, and models in climate policy delay
Empire of Pain
Podcast (50 minutes): Interview with Patrick Radden Kede and his new book “Empire of Pain”, in: https://soundcloud.com/irishtimes-politics/empire-of-pain-with-patrick-radden-keefe .
The book contains a detailed history of the Sackler dynasty and their role in the American Opoid epidemic. Known for dedicatin to cultural philonthropy, the family built their wealth on phamrmaceuticals, starting with tranquilisers like Librium and Valium, bfore eventually moving tot he highly addictive painkiller OxyContin. About the addiction crisis, the Purdue bankruptcy trial and the market he family left on the world.
Big data is not making the world full
David Boarder Giles and Victoria Stad, Big Data won’t feed the world: global agribusiness, digital imperialism, and the contested promises of a new Green Revolution, in: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10624- 021-09631-8 , August 19, 2021
In the face of looming environmental crises and a swelling global population, Big Data’s acolytes envision a “digital revolution” as a solution for global hunger. Interrogating this promise, we argue that Big Data’s imagined futures articulate the realms of international development and smallholder agriculture in the Global South with an ongoing digital reorganization of global capitalism—integrating farmers into new informational modes of production, and reshaping the nature of labor and human –environmental relations in the process. This reorganization must be located within a long history of crises and spatio-technical fixes for capital accumulation. More specifically, we situate the prefigurations of Big Data along a trajectory of capitalist technical innovations implied in the propagation of colonial logics, particularly through the apparatuses of international development—for example, through the technical regimes of the “Green Revolution”. The rhetoric of Big Data and its applications within global food systems both reproduce earlier logics of primitive accumulation and colonial biopolitics, and extend them into new forms of digital imperialism that, we suggest, express incipient mutations in the nature of surplus value itself as it is retooled for the Anthropocene era. Big Data therefore portends novel forms of expropriation that are at once material and immaterial.
Housing as a human right
Stefan Meyer, A world without homelessness: Housing as a human right, in: Work and Economy, August 30, 2021.
“As with many issues, the European Union is not a monolithic bloc when it comes to combating homelessness. There are already a variety of approaches. And unfortunately there are also negative examples of how inhumane action is taken against people without a permanent address. In Hungary, for example, homeless people have been facing penalties since 2018. At that time a law was created “against life on the streets”. Instead of offering state help, the state criminalizes its citizens. …
Finland can be cited as a positive counterexample. The “Housing First” approach is used there. “Housing First” means nothing more than that someone must first have an apartment in order to then be able to deal with the other problems of life. And this concept is very successful, as official figures show. …
Finland is the only country in the EU where homelessness has decreased since 2015. 32 percent fewer people have now lived on the streets since then. 7,800 apartments are available for “Housing First” in the Scandinavian country. If residents cannot afford the rent with their pension or salary, the state supports them and covers the costs.
A similar path is now being taken in this country. With the Federal Working Group for Homeless Assistance (BAWO), the Austrian state wants to make 25,000 apartments available for “Housing First” by 2025.
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