Merc21: Good post. To yours and XBL's points, I got a chuckle from this article below from the other day in Stat because it rings true whether the "commodity" is a bio-tech company, drug, equities, bushel of corn, a new app, real estate, star BBer, or whatever. That's why I figure it's important for me to at least >80% believe in some important aspect of executive mgt's mission being achievable if I'm buying into the long story - without that it's a lot of razzle-dazzle, schmazmatazzle.
What not to say at J.P. Morgan, according to a conference veteran
By REBECCA ROBBINS @rebeccadrobbins, ADAM FEUERSTEIN @adamfeuerstein, and DAMIAN GARDE @damiangarde JANUARY 4, 2019
Mike Huckman, a global practice leader at the PR firm W20
W2O GROUP
We are a few days away from the start of the biggest and most important biotech business meeting of the year — the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco. If you sit through enough presentations at J.P. Morgan, you start to get buzz-phrase fatigue. Seemingly everything is a “transformational” “holy grail” of a “game-changer,” endorsed by “key opinion leaders” with “clinically meaningful” “optionality.”
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Mike Huckman is a global practice leader at the PR firm W20, and he’s experienced J.P. Morgan from both sides of the podium, first as a biopharma reporter at CNBC and now in his career advising drug companies on how not to be boring.
That means he’s seen the industry’s addiction to jargon up close. Keeping in mind the many executives polishing up their J.P. Morgan speeches this week, STAT asked Huckman to share some tips on how to keep your audience’s eyes from rolling deep into their heads.
You put together a David Letterman-style hit list of corporate clichés that should be avoided at all costs in a J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference podium presentation. Walk us through it.
10. This has the potential to be or this is a real game changer.
9. We’re really excited about ________.
8. Blockbuster potential
7. We have a robust pipeline with multiple shots on goal.
6. We have several value-creating milestones in front of us.
5. Innovative
4. Novel, proprietary, unique MOA (That’s short for mechanism or mode of action.)
3. Sorry, but this slide is a bit of an eye chart/This is a busy slide.
2. Our goal is to become/We are a fully integrated, commercial-stage biopharmaceutical company.
1. Unmet medical need
Tell us about your No. 10 (“This has the potential to be or this is a real game changer”).
How many times do you hear “This is going to be a blockbuster” or “This has blockbuster potential”? Company executives put expectations way up there at that blockbuster threshold, and then what happens? Either it doesn’t get across the finish line or it never comes anywhere close to that level.
On behalf of those many executives now looking over their PowerPoint decks, what should you say if you want to convey that your number crunchers packed away in whatever basement have determined that you know there’s a multibillion dollar potential attached to some asset?
It’s not just the cliché but the the outsized expectation. We all know that this is an inherently risky business it’s an inherently risky but noble pursuit. My advice to our clients is to caveat wherever and whenever appropriate. So for example: Should the data continue to be positive, should we continue to generate results that showed that this experimental therapy is potentially safe and effective and we were to secure regulatory approval, all of the medical experts in this particular field are telling this telling us this could be a really important treatment option for the people they treat.”
Let’s break down your No. 7 (“We have a robust pipeline with multiple shots on goal.”). What’s with that cliché? Why do we use that?
I have no idea why we use that one. It’s like saying, hey, if this doesn’t work, don’t worry about it because we’ve got lots of other stuff that we could try to make work. It’s become ubiquitous and instead we should just be saying, We’re working on a number of different diseases or disorders using similar approaches or maybe completely different approaches. And our goal is to hopefully develop these medicines to treat the people who need them.
If you had your way, would we eliminate all sports clichés from biopharma jargon?
No. I think they’re appropriate in certain places and times, but they just get overused. There is a sea of boring sameness at J.P. Morgan. And what we’re trying to do is to help clients stand out in that sea of sameness by telling stories in a much more compelling, interesting, intriguing way.
Tell us about your No. 5 (“Innovative.”)
It’s the most overused, devalued word in corporate-speak and in life sciences-speak. Everybody says they’re innovative, and because of that, it’s completely washed out.
Break down for us your No. 3 (“This slide is a bit of an eye chart/This is a busy slide.”)
How many Kaplan–Meier curves and forest plots and waterfall plots and bar charts and spider plots have you shoved onto that one slide? The pushback that we often get from clients is well, that means I’m going to have four more slides. And I tell them it doesn’t matter. The slide count doesn’t matter. What matters is, can the audience in the room or on the webcast— and at J.P. Morgan— comprehend and digest what you’re saying? So let’s limit it to one chart per slide and eliminate the clutter and get rid of that phrase. If it’s busy, un-busy it.
Then there’s your No. 2 (“Our goal is to become/We are a fully integrated, commercial-stage biopharmaceutical company.”)? That hits so many bingo words right there.
It suggests the possibility that some companies would go on stage and say our goal is to really just sell this to whoever is willing to pay us right now.
Exactly — as if this phrase were the actual measuring stick that all investors use to determine whether they’re going to buy and/or hold a stock. Oh, are you a fully integrated commercial-stage biopharmaceutical company? Oh, good. Then you check our box and we’re going to buy your stock.
“By definition if there’s a need, it’s unmet.”
MIKE HUCKMAN
Now let’s break down your No. 1 (“Unmet medical need”). What’s so wrong with that phrase?
So much is wrong with that phrase. It is an FDA-invented phrase. No one in the outside world says that. For example, I have an unmet need to take down our Christmas tree. I have an unmet need to get to the airport to get my flight to J.P. Morgan in San Francisco. I have an unmet need to get a new iPhone. Nobody says this in the outside world. We simply say, I need a new pair of shoes. I need to eat. I need a drink. So it is pure industry FDA jargon. By definition if there’s a need, it’s unmet.
Why can’t we just say there is a big need in this patient community that we’re hoping to fill?
You probably counsel your CEO clients to not use these phrases. How successful are you in stopping them?
It is a big hill to climb. These phrases are ubiquitous, they are pervasive, but I think at an anecdotal level we’re making progress little by little. We’re trying to shift the conversation and here’s why. It’s not just CEOs who are guilty of this. I’m guilty of it. I think certain journalists who will go unnamed are guilty of it.
We’re probably all to some extent guilty. So which large pharma biotech company CEOs do you think consistently put on the best JPM presentation?
I don’t think it’s fair to single somebody out. This is pervasive. I think if we were all to sit in on as many presentations as we could possibly go to next week, we will see evidence of people who are trying to step outside the box and to approach this differently. We’re in a world now where audiences are super distracted. Attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and shorter and there’s competition from our tablets and our laptops and our iPhones. So the onus is on presenters, whether you’re the CEO of a biopharmaceutical company or you’re the CEO of a technology company or an automobile company — it makes no difference. We have to work harder as presenters to grab audiences’ attention and to keep people’s attention.
Between large-cap pharma and the army of people they have preparing their presentations and small cap biotech, which side do you think is doing a better job?
At the risk of being pejorative here, I think that it’s at the smaller emerging company level. And at the risk of bucketing people into a category or class, it is primarily the younger generation of executives that I think are doing a better job, who understand that it’s a new world and we have to communicate in new and different ways to command people’s attention. That’s where I think you see the most, if you will, experimentation going on in presentations: you see them using more videos, using more patient vignettes, using slides that look more like an infographic than they do like an eye chart.
I do think that broadly speaking, at the Big Pharma level there is a template. There is a mold that in my experience they are afraid perhaps to break out of. But at the younger company level, we’re seeing more willingness to take on that task of approaching a presentation differently and more interestingly and more compellingly.
There’s an abundance of research showing that when women speak on the same stages and platforms as their male counterparts, they’re often judged differently and oftentimes more harshly based on superficial factors like the tone or the pitch of their voice and what they’re wearing. So when you work with female biopharma executives to prep them for J.P. Morgan, how do you think about gender and the way that audiences perceive women?
To me, gender doesn’t matter. What needs to happen is a presenter has to speak with passion, with gravitas, with authority, and credibility. And to me it makes no difference whether you’re a man or a woman. I’ve worked with people who are men who also do uptalk, which some people might say is primarily a younger female problem. So there are patterns and behaviors that are really gender agnostic. It’s all about coming across with authority, like I’m in command of this stage and I’m in command of this room and I’m in command of this subject matter. But I agree with you that there is a greater onus for better or for worse that is put on women executives more than men.
This is a lightly edited transcript from a recent episode of STAT’s biotech podcast, “The Readout LOUD.” Like it? Consider subscribing to hear every episode.
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