Why curricular design is not pretty

Curricular design and sausage making are very similar.

Lay out your main ingredients

A bushel of faculty members with different agendas
A fond memory of the good old days of pharmacy education

Add spices and other ingredients

Put people in charge who do not have sufficient training and/or authority to manage the different faculty agendas.
Give inadequate guidance.
Use anecdotal evidence to decide what works and what does not work.

Grind all of the ingredients into a casing and call it a curriculum.

Marketing doesn't hurt people -- people hurt people

I love to read the comics each day in my local newspaper -- yes, that thing that used to be "black and white and read all over" but is mostly just "black and white" now.

One common stereotype seen in comics is that marketers are useless, lazy, carbuncular, and so on. The reason this stereotype is so funny is that it is often true.

Nevertheless, just like with handguns and pitbulls, marketing is only bad because people who use marketing are lazy, stupid, careless, unethical, and sometimes even criminal.

In other words, "marketing doesn't hurt people -- people hurt people".

Marketing is just a tool. And as we know, a tool can be used for good or evil.

People who learn the proper philosophy and practice of marketing can do good and change the stereotype of marketers.

But I won't hold my breath.

Four stages of competence

Young people think they know everything.

Of course, that is a wild exaggeration, but many younger people are more confident about life than they should be. That is because many are unaware about how much they do not know. That knowledge tends to come with age and maturity.

In psychology, Abraham Maslow (Yes, the hierarchy of needs guy) stated that we go through 4 stages of competence.

The first is Unconscious Incompetence where we don't know what we don't know. In this stage we are highly confident in our ignorance.

The next stage is Conscious Incompetence where we realize our ignorance, but don't know how to address it. We have not yet learned.

The third stage is Conscious Competence where individuals understand and know how to do things -- but only with conscious effort.

The last stage is Unconscious Competence. At this stage, competence is so ingrained that it is "second nature" and internalized.

When students in the Unconscious Incompetence stage are taught by professors in the Unconscious Competence stage, it can sometimes be a case where a person who thinks they know it all is being taught by someone who has so internalized his knowledge that he can't teach it every well.

This is not the case in all educational situations but it is more common than desirable.

You don't negotiate? It'll cost you!

National Public Radio recently broadcast a piece about a subject near and dear to my heart -- negotiation. The piece was titled "Ask For A Raise? Most Women Hesitate" and it can be found at www.NPR.org.

My interest in negotiation was peaked after reading the book, "You Can Negotiate Anything" by Herb Cohen.

When I talk about negotiation with my students, I tell them that if they apply the basic principles of negotiation, they will be $100,000 richer by the time they retire. I now realize that I may have underestimated the benefits of negotiation.

According to economist Linda Babcock of Carnegie Mellon University, "by not negotiating their job at the beginning of their career, they're (women in particular) leaving anywhere between $1 million and $1.5 million on the table in lost earnings over their lifetime,"

And women are FOUR TIMES LESS LIKELY TO NEGOTIATE than men. Why don't women negotiate? The reasons are complicated but according to Babcock, "women often just don't think of asking for more pay. If they do, they find the very notion of haggling intimidating, even scary."

Now this is a complicated topic and can't be covered in a single blog post. I will periodically talk about negotiation in upcoming blog posts. Stay tuned.

How pharmacists can become indispensable

The key to survival in pharmacy practice is to never be comfortable with the status quo. If you are a pharmacist, you should try to work toward being indispensible to your employer by doing the following:

1. Be the one the patient asks for when they visit the pharmacy. If you develop a strong patient clientele, employers will see you as an asset more than an expense.

2. Generate business. If you aren't generating revenue, you are generating costs.

3. Don't be a jerk. You have to generate a lot of revenue to overcome the negative impact on your career of being a jerk. Even high earners are dispensible if they are big enough jerks.

The Colbert Report -- Giving a shout out to CVS

Tasing a CVS customer in the parking lot.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Current Events - Innocent College Student & Wildlife Taser
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

Pharmacy and Beer -- Never Fear

In a previous post titled "Beer and Pharmacy -- Two of my favorite things" I talked about how a Duane Read Pharmacy in New York is now serving BEER. The beer is a microbrew that sounds pretty tasty.

Not to be one-upped by any New York pharmacy chain, Walgreens has introduced their own beer brand called "Big Flats". As made clear in my previous post, I am not against pharmacies selling beer. I am just against pharmacies selling bad beer.

I have some expertise on this topic because Walgreens pharmacies in Chicago used to be my beer supplier back in the 80's. I clearly remembered that their beer tended to get skunky -- meaning that it got stale setting on the shelf for way too long.

I think that selling bad beer can hurt the Walgreens brand. I am not accusing "Big Flats" beer of being bad because I have never tasted it. I do know someone who HAS tasted "Big Flats" beer (see the clip), and he does not think too highly of it.