Scotland the Brave?

It’s never been easy, making a living in Scotland. In recent decades, there has been the oil to hold up the economy and before that there were all those UK-based public service jobs (including the army) that provided consistent employment.

Of course, many of the Scots being fine entrepreneurs, historically it was England and the British Empire that provided many with a platform to exploit their talents (including my own ancestors).

Presumably the oil won’t last for ever, so, unhitched from England and Wales – with a YES vote looking more and more likely – their best chance would seem to be in the EU, assuming that the EU keeps them on.

Scotland the Brave? My old boss, Bill Weithas, always used to equate bravery with high risk.

It’s their choice. Roll on September 18.

Waiting for the right moment

I was shopping yesterday in the supermarket and, walking down the confectionery isle, looking for what my ten year old might enjoy, I stopped dead in front of a fairly recent new product ‒ Rowntree’s Pick & Mix.

It’s not that it’s such a radical innovation. In fact it’s a perfectly obvious one, given that the company produces Fruit Gums, Fruit Pastilles, Jellytots, Tooty Frooties etc.

The reason that I stopped in my tracks was the realisation that this was an idea that I’d vigorously proposed to the company nearly forty years ago. I thought it was a no-brainer then. But they didn’t. 

Were they right? I doubt it. By now they could have had four decades-worth of building a decent brand, with all the attendant sales and profit.

The company didn’t seem to have marked Erica Jong’s invocation:

And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.

Still, I’m happy its moment has come!

Mavericks and leadership

I was to discover rather early in life - in my teens - that having maverick tendencies is a serious barrier to being promoted to leadership positions.

I think the basic issue is that bosses can’t predict what you’ll do in any particular circumstances. Mavericks seem to them to carry more risk than reward.

And yet, when an organisation is in trouble and needs new directions, the creativity of mavericks is exactly the place that good solutions are likely to come from.

My own approach to this problem has often been to team myself with more sensible, structured, reliable partners. I think I did this for the first time at Saatchi and Saatchi. It worked well.

Are there other approaches that work?

Work in secret – even risk your own life?

A comment from Vincent Nolan on the Mavericks post reminds me of the amazing case of the breakthrough immunity-suppressant drug, cyclosporine (brand name Sandimmune®). I first became aware of this story when I worked with the company, at that time Sandoz (now Novartis), on the relaunch of the brand.

This is what happened.

In 1970, a Sandoz R&D team led by JF Borel got interested in the properties of certain fungal spores contained in soil samples brought back by team members from trips to Wisconsin and Norway. Metabolites were isolated that had anti-fungal properties – this was cyclosporine. A whole range of tests with mice were conducted to explore cyclosporine’s efficacy, but only one test showed promise – suppression of the immune system.

However, in 1973 immunosuppression ceased to be a strategic priority for Sandoz. It was a small market with apparently limited growth potential, and it was estimated that it would cost in the region of $250 million to gain FDA approval in the USA. Initially the team was allowed to carry on with its work, and in 1975 it was ready to start human testing. A separate team in Cambridge, England, successfully did heart transplants involving pigs, using cyclosporine to suppress the immune system and radically reduce rejection of the implanted organs.

Because the company no longer supported the project – actively opposing its development – further development work was conducted in secret and three of the R&D team’s members (including Borel) courageously took the new drug themselves, risking their own lives, in order to test the suppression in their own immune systems. In 1978, the first human transplants were undertaken – of kidneys. Throughout this period there are disputes as to exactly who did what.

In 1983 FDA approval was obtained and the following year synthetic cyclosporine was developed.

Meanwhile, since1967 Christiaan Barnard and others had been successfully transplanting organs. He in particular became world famous as a great pioneer in cardiac surgery. However the fact remained that the patients all died over relatively short time-spans, their new organs rejected by their own immune systems. The arrival of cyclosporine changed all that.

Of course the resulting dramatic market growth of organ transplants of all kinds (heart, kidney, liver, skin etc) led to rapid growth in sales for Sandimmune®, so that it became by far the company’s most profitable brand.

I believe there are powerful lessons for all organisations and innovators in this extraordinary case story. How does it strike you?