0
0
was successfully added to your cart.

All Posts By

MSC Nordics

February 27, 2019
0

A day in the life of Tobias, CEO at MSC

By | Company update | No Comments

At the end of any job interview it’s the interviewee’s turn to ask the questions, and a recurring theme among these candidate questions is what a typical day at Monocl Strategy & Communication is like. So we decided to do what we do best and provide some insights. As all of us have our own daily routines and schedules, we are going to follow a number of us around in this A day in the life of… series starting with our Chief Executive Officer, Tobias Thornblad.

Tobias, please describe your job, what’s your role in the company?

I’m one of the two founders of Monocl Strategy & Communication (MSC) and have been the CEO since the company started in 2014. In the beginning, we were only two people with a business idea but have since then built a strategy consulting business from an early embryo to the 10 people team that drives it today. Essentially, my job description is to achieve growth and to support our clients in the best possible way. This entitles a lot of things, like hands-on management consulting where I work directly with clients to help them strike strategic partnerships and attract investments, business development for MSC, and supporting my team in their professional growth through finding exciting projects, facilitating knowledge sharing and allocating the right expertise to the right assignments.

What is the best thing about your job?

The absolute best thing is that I on a daily basis get to interact with some of the sharpest minds in the Nordic life science industry. I consider it an honor to be considered a confidant in crafting business strategies and prepare deals alongside these pioneers in medicine.

What is the worst thing?

When short deadlines come in the way of delivering at our best. I hate settling for average.

“Essentially, my job description is to achieve growth and to support our clients in the best possible way.”

A day in the life

Now that we have straightened out who Tobias is and what he does, let’s take a look at a day in the life of the CEO of MSC.

05.45 The alarm goes off. I get out of bed, get dressed and pick up my computer and a sports bag while I head for my car.

06.35: Diving into the cold water of an Olympic pool in the city center for a morning swim. The swimrun season is almost here.

08.05: Breakfast meeting at a nearby hotel with an international client in the respiratory space who is temporarily Gothenburg. We discuss fundraising and plan for an upcoming project before parting. His next meeting is on the way to our office, so I drop him off on the way back.

09.15: Back at the office I join our COO, Tove, who is in the midst of briefing our newest team member, Paula Salme. Paula Salme is joining us from Berlin as a Business Analyst (BA), and I make sure that she has everything that she needs to get started.

10.15: After excusing myself I leave Tove and Paula Salme to join our Project Director Julia, Senior Business Analyst Paola Jo and Senior Management Consultant Okee for a status update on an ongoing oncology market analysis project. We align tasks and calendars and agree upon the next course of action.

10.35: I spend 25 minutes on catching up with my inbox, responding to urgent client requests and structuring my notes for our weekly MSC meeting.

11.00: Meeting time. For once, 9 out of 10 team members are physically present and the last person join us through Zoom. We spend a full hour going through all the ongoing projects, our pipeline and recruitment processes and, since we have a new team member joining us today, we decide to eat lunch together to get to know each other a little bit better and continue our discussion.

13.00: I run a telephone conference (TC) with the CEO and CFO of a client company. We discuss how we’re going to handle some recent news that shook the industry and agree upon an action plan. To convince the board of directors of the company about the plan the client needs some decision-support material, which I promise that we will deliver before the end of the day.

13.40: I brief Tove and our Communication Account Associate, Elisabeth, on what decision-making material is needed and we coordinate tasks to ensure a swift delivery.

14.00: A client has requested our help in identifying potential therapeutic companies to acquire that fits strategically with their current portfolio and we run a TC with the CEO and the Chairman of the company to discuss our findings. Julia presents each company and we discuss how to select the most important criterions for making a final decision, as well as which candidates the client would like to have more information about.

15.00: After the TC we have an internal briefing on the outcome of the call and allocate resources for the necessary subsequent tasks such as search strategies and database selection.

15.35: Tove and Elisabeth delivers the needed decision-making material for the client from the 13.00 TC. I read through the material one final time and then forward it to the client.

16.05: I coordinate with our Intern Analyst, Robert, about an internal project where we are analyzing launch curves and market uptakes of different drugs. Robert has made some really interesting findings and together we plan the next steps, which we agree is to analyze how revenues decline as patent expiration erode sales. 

16.40: Last minute check-in with Tove about tomorrow’s recruitment interviews before I dart out to the daycare to pick up my 4-year old.

20.15: I get back in front of the computer after a few hours spent offline on family dinner, reading about dinosaurs and playing. After having caught up on some non-urgent emails and Slack messages received during the day, I prepare tomorrow’s job interview. I finish off by working on some of slides that will be delivered to a client tomorrow.

23:10: As always, I finish my day by reading. At the moment, I’m reading Principles by Ray Dalio and probably read 10-15 pages before I fall asleep.

February 14, 2019
0

The placebo effect: How to heal a broken heart

By | What's the deal | No Comments

February 14th marks Valentine’s day, a day traditionally dedicated to lovers and a day when a recent heartbreak may feel more painful than ever. A heartbreak, or ‘unwanted romantic breakup’ as research calls it, is one of the most painful experiences there is. But the silver lining is that pain is really ‘just’ a symptom modulated by the brain, meaning that it could be impacted by the placebo effect.

For as long as medicines have existed, there have been placebo treatments. A placebo is a treatment designed to simulate a medical intervention, but lacks a biological effect. In a primitive society, this could mean that the patient was ‘prescribed’ a month of being silent. In today’s society, however, it often refers to the administration of a sugar or dummy pill, mainly within the context of clinical drug trials. As a placebo treatment doesn’t affect the disease or injury in question, logic suggests that the treatment shouldn’t affect a patient’s symptoms. But it’s not that simple.

Why does the placebo effect work?

The placebo effect is, by now, a quite well-known term. It has been scientifically proven a number of times that even though the patient takes a dummy pill, they react as though (or close to) they’ve received the real medicine. The fact is that the placebo effect exists, however, exactly why it works remain ambiguous. The effect derives from both psychological and neurobiological mechanisms. One major part of the psychological mechanisms is expectations. We expect that a certain treatment will make us feel better and thus, it makes us feel better. Most likely, this effect is also reinforced by the people around you, who too believes that the treatment will work. However, there are also neurobiological mechanisms involved, where a 2015 study found that people with higher levels of dopamine or higher dopaminergic activity tend to be more likely to respond to placebo.

Why does the placebo effect work?

Exhaustive research on the subject of what conditions the placebo effect may influence has concluded that placebos mainly influence symptoms modulated by the brain. This refers to subjective and self-appraised symptoms such as pain, fatigue, nausea and hot flashes. Placebo treatments doesn’t, however, alter the pathophysiology of a disease, meaning that they rarely cure anything i.e. a placebo treatment cannot shrink a tumor nor restore damaged cells.

This means that the pain experienced in a heartbreak is just as real as the pain after breaking a leg.

How to mend a broken heart

In 2017, a group of researchers performed a study where they aimed to explore whether a placebo treatment could ease the pain of an unwanted romantic breakup. 40 volunteers were exposed to a photograph of their previous partner before and after being treated with a (placebo) nasal spray, which the researchers to half the group said had powerful properties for reducing emotional pain. Meanwhile, an MRI machine tracked the volunteers brain activity. The study found that, first of all, emotional pain was handled by the same parts of the brain as physical pain. This means that the pain experienced in a heartbreak is just as real as the pain after breaking a leg. Secondly, the researchers found that the group who believed that they were receiving a treatment that would reduce their emotional pain indeed experienced less pain. Additionally, the parts of the brain responsible for controlling pain were activated in this group.

According to the lead researcher, Leonie Koban, the implications of the study was not only a deepened understanding of the placebo effect but also that when it comes to heartbreak. Doing anything that you believe will help you feel better after a heartbreak will likely help you feel better according to a researcher specifically looking at the topic. Over the years, the placebo effect has been shown to reduce the difficulties experienced with asthma, diminish the pain of migraine and erase the pain of an injured knee. Since 2017, the pain of a heartbreak can be added to that list.

A final question about the placebo effect

But if the placebo effect is, at least partly, about expectations, won’t me knowing that it’s a placebo treatment hinder any placebo effects? Why would I expect it to work when I know that it doesn’t? Well, in a 2016 study from Harvard Medical School, researchers found that even when the patients knew that they were being treated with placebo, they still perceived an improvement of their symptoms. Fascinating, isn’t it?

Happy Valentine’s Day!