Medtech’s version of Cornell Woolrich (“Time is the killer who never gets caught”) continues his series of brief articles on things in business that don’t add value, are not cost-effective, and generally take you down a road of fail.
Did you ever see the film Glengarry Glen Ross, about an estate agent business in the USA? It opens with a training session. The failing company has hired a sales guru, at great expense, to share his dynamic wisdom with its employees. The maestro’s presentation boils down to an acronym: “ABC – Always Be Closing.”
Sales and marketing in the medtech industry calls for skill, dedication and knowledge. It calls for training and teamwork. What it doesn’t call for is empty slogans imported from the showbiz world of the ‘business guru’. These overpaid fakers and their bestselling self-help books are providing the business equivalent of snake oil. They offer short cuts and platitudes to reassure the lazy and the inadequate that they, by buying a book or signing up to a ‘life-changing’ course, can get ahead of the pack. They make millions of readers feel special.
In a sector where bogus medical devices and false marketing sometimes threaten to undermine the legitimate industry, the last thing we need is a business placebo. The cult of the ‘self-help book’ encourages professionals to make space in their heads, meetings and screen savers for hollow cliché and fantasy. This in turn impacts negatively on our professional relationships. Having a business discussion with a disciple of Self-Profit-Max, or whatever cult is currently in vogue, is like shaking hands with an empty glove.
The most profitable franchise in the self-help universe, of course, is New Age philosophy: a rhetoric of ‘harmony’ and ‘energy’ that encourages us to nurture the smug faker within. Author Amy Wallace (of The Book of Lists fame) has coined the phrase “a hierarchy of emptiness” to describe the castles in the air that mystics and their followers create. It’s a world of order, power and structure – but there’s nobody at home. Survivors of board meetings and sales conferences given over to ‘business philosophy’ know what it’s like to look up and realise, with a shock, that the world is still out there.
In healthcare, as we know, there are no magic solutions. Why do we allow ourselves to be fooled when it comes to our own business practices?