Category: Big Business

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Drop and give me 1,800!

. . . words, that is. There’s only one profile remaining for me to write for the Top Companies issue: Pfizer!

(I save the biggest for last; that’s just the sorta guy that I am.)

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Mistakes were made (by me)

Here’s a neat little article on Warren Buffett’s willingness to learn from his mistakes.

 A key to investing well is a willingness to look stupid, Buffett says. “Most managers have very little incentive to make the intelligent-but-with-some-chance-of-looking-like-an-idiot decision,” Buffett wrote in 1984. Most would prefer “failing conventionally.”

He added: “Lemmings may have a rotten image, but no individual lemming has ever received bad press.”

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Pharma Phunnies

From another of my pharma profiles:

In the past year, Takeda made a splash in the U.S. with its surreal commercials for sleep treatment Rozerem. Featuring such elements as Abraham Lincoln and a talking beaver, the spots are supposed to evoke the incredibly embarrassing dream-symbols that insomniacs miss out on. Lucky them.

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The future ain’t what it used to be

A few months ago, I wrote about the Chrysler 300C, which appealed to me because it resembled the Batmobile. Over at 2Blowhards, Donald Pettinger writes about the 1950s’ dream cars, with a fantastic gallery of Cars of the Future:

With no place to go trend-wise, stylists thrashed around in search a new trends or themes. One such theme was aviation or space, already successfully tested by Harley Earl at General Motors. I’m thinking of a series of futuristic scale models that yielded the famous 1948 Cadillac tail fins. The success of Cadillac led stylists to go pretty wild exploring that theme — wild to the point where dream cars (and to a lesser degree some production models) looked less and less like cars.

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Bad Drug Joke

The following was deleted from one of my pharma company profiles: “Dapoxetine was rejected by the FDA in 2005, but if its EU filing gets approval this year, another FDA submission could be coming soon.”

The best part is that the company is Johnson & Johnson.