Awkward medical issues

*gasp*

Ah, fresh air.

Man, what a set of two weeks it's been. Work has been crazy - Abbott is finally getting a return on what they pay me. I say "finally" because my sales rotation didn't really count as work. Sure, I was away from home 9-5, but I never really put my MBA-honed skills to work. Business development (my current rotation that started three weeks ago), is completely different. 10-12 hour days, the constant burden of meetings and email, spreadsheet analyses, analyst reports, powerpoint hell - the whole nine yards.

On my current team, I'm the least accomplished (as well as the most recent) addition. I'm the rookie that knows diddly squat, and the Directors around me are fully aware of this fact. Their way of remedying my lack of knowledge is to hand me a project and let me sink or swim. These past two weeks I felt like I'd been haplessly treading water, barely breaking the surface enough to grab a lung-full of air before going back under. But I made it. With some much needed support from fellow newbies, I finally turned in a deliverable that did a half-way decent job of explaining why Abbott should pursue a certain business opportunity in the prostrate market. Reflecting back, I find certain things a little awkward. Like the fact that I now consider "prostrate" to be a market.

Breakfast foods is a market. Athletic shoes is a market. A man's prostrate gland? When did that become a market? But in business, as I've come to realize, everything can be packaged in a way that creates a market around it. The market for casual underwear. The market for cool whip. Perhaps even the market for toilet flush-handles. However, what makes things especially awkward in the healthcare industry is that some medical conditions can be difficult to discuss without giggling (or sometimes wincing), in front of your boss. I came close to doing this several times recently, as it is hard to discuss a man's urination problems, or the invasive surgical procedures designed to correct these conditions, without wanting to cross your legs in empathetic pain. Ouch.

But this project wasn't as bad as some of the work I did while I was at Pfizer. I distinctly remember sitting down regularly with the Viagra marketing group to see how my consulting team could assist them with their information needs. Inevitably talk would move to how effective certain ED meds were in giving men the sexual satisfaction they needed, and what side effects turned these men off, and how to measure the happiness level of spouses. The problem was that the entire Viagra marketing team consisted of women. Seven women and Faisal would sit around a conference table, earnestly discussing the sexual advantage of taking a pill that lasted 36 hours vs 3 hours, or how the quality of the erection was paramount, or how useful it was that a specific pill could also boost urine flow.

Awkward. Really awkward.