| I was sitting at my desk when my phone rang. I answered the phone and it was a
large pharmaceutical company who was interested in consulting services.They
started off the conversation stating that they had some problems and thought that
my company might be able to help.They had noticed a trend with one of their foreign
competitors. Every time they went to release a new product (in this case a new
drug), one of their competitors would release a similar drug with a similar name several
weeks before them and would beat them to market. If you understand the drug
industry, you’ll know that this is a serious problem.The first company to get a
product to market usually is able to obtain a higher market share and higher demand
than its competitors.Therefore, this represented a huge monetary loss to the company
and the executives were concerned.
This initially sounded like a potential problem but I needed more details. My
follow-up question was how often had this occurred and over what time period.The
executive I was talking with said it had happened eight times over the prior 12
months. I was sitting there thinking:You think there is a problem? My next question
was,“Why did you wait so long to call someone?”Their answer was,“We figured it
was just a coincidence, because the only way this could have happened was if an
insider was giving the information to a competitor and we trust all of the employees
so this could not be the case.” Over the next several months they were going to
realize how wrong that previous statement was.
I led an internal assessment team and over the course of several months found
three different groups of people (each consisting of 2-4 people), working for two
different competitors. Actually, one group was working for a foreign competitor and
the other two groups were working for a foreign government.
The fact that this story is true is scary, but what makes it even more troubling is
that this happened more than 18 months ago and I have worked on and am aware of
at least 15 other similar cases.The average monetary loss of the case I worked on was
estimated at $350 million annually. |
|
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