Antibiotics and Strategy: What we can learn

Last week, Bloomberg news posted an article about failed testing of antibiotics.  The graphic shows how this 50 year old process works and fails.  The remedy is to change the conditions for testing – simulate conditions more similar to the human body to ensure better results.

The business community has potential lessons to learn.  Most executives use testing approaches for their strategy that are out of date.  We look at our brands and business with approaches that measure them in isolation.  The common analytic methods are done in sterile petri dishes of historical models that cannot account for effects like viral word-of-mouth or competitor actions.  These methods lead to missed forecasts that need not occur.  By changing our approach to simulate a marketplace (the marketer’s human body), we can find the solution that is more likely to succeed and avoid the strategic antidote that does not work.