Ron Feemster

Articles

Back Page: Soft Serve, Hard Lessons

At first glance, you might think Bob Miglani comes from a pharma family. He and both of his younger sisters began their careers as sales reps after college. But behind their success in big business lie formative experiences at the Dairy Queen stores owned by their uncle and parents, who are immigrants from India. Even today, Miglani, whose fulltime job is in Pfizer's public affairs department, spends some weekends serving cones at the family business. In his new book, Treat Your Customers: Thirty Lessons on Service and Sales That I Learned at My Family's Dairy Queen Store (Hyperion, 2006), Miglani, 36, shares the core values that work in small business and corporate America.

Teamsters v. Pfizer

The world's largest drug manufacturer must answer off-label promotion charges brought by a new adversary. Not FDA, with its warning letters and threats of marketing sanctions, and not the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) at Health and Human Services, which often sues for fraud, forces huge settlements, and requires companies to do business under restrictive corporate integrity agreements. Instead, the company faces a class-action civil suit from insurance companies and union welfare funds, groups that, until recently, Pfizer regarded primarily as customers-or at least people who picked up the tab for customers. Now, led by the Welfare Fund of a Teamsters local from New Jersey, third-party payers are suing under RICO, the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. If their suit is successful, payers who have covered billions of dollars worth of Lipitor (atorvastatin) over the past five years will receive treble damages for the cost of off-label prescriptions. The suit may also attract..

Gene Logic: Rescue Squad

Pharma has an enormous backlog of drugs that never made it out of clinical trials. At Gene Logic, these discontinued drugs spell opportunity. Not only are they the foundation of a new business unit at Gene Logic, such failed compounds may become the cornerstone of a new approach to R&D as the industry confronts its latest productivity crisis.