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Courage is an everyday virtue
Students in a philosophy class were anxiously awaiting the start of their final exam. The professor had warned them that it would be one of the most challenging tests they would ever take. The teacher wrote one question on the board and said, “This is your exam. You have one hour to complete it.” One…
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Blue Ocean Strategy – It Fits a New Pharmacy Model
Pharmacists have described the community pharmacy environment for as long as I can remember, as being restrictive and confined, no matter the physical size of the pharmacy. They call it the “four-wall syndrome” and it is, in fact, a form of depression. The one thing that characterises the profession overall is that there is little…
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Define Your Pharmacy Frustum
I was performing my regular reading of my emails when I came across the latest words of wisdom from Seth Godin. Seth always seems to read my mind, and his emails often cross over with a period of time when I may be thinking about a pharmacy problem, but finding difficulty in trying to express…
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Blackmore’s New Flagship Store – Now There’s a Model for Pharmacy!
Blackmores have designed and opened an innovative flagship store that offers the complete wellbeing experience, with rooms for private consultations with qualified naturopaths, a modern ‘Mindful Ocean’ system to assess mindfulness, the Wellbeing Bar for food and drink tasting as well as offering the comprehensive Blackmores’ product range. Located on Level 5 of Westfield, Bondi Junction, the…
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Local Education –Forums to the future
As a management consultant my objective was always to delegate an owner-manager out of their business. The process usually took two years and during that period every single staff person was retrained to a different way of thinking about their workplace through on-the-job mentoring and the process of delegation. Thus, the business owners could actually take…
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Seth Godin Clarity – as applied to pharmacy
I have long been admired the mental agility of Seth Godin, the US marketing guru who was the author of an Internet transforming book titled “The Ideavirus”. Basically, he identified and predicted what has now come to pass, in that “word of mouth” would be displaced by “word of mouse”. His words reported further along…
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Break your own rules
My friend Sam is an avid golfer. He plays every chance he gets. He also makes a practice of working out at the gym on weekends, and prefers to get an early start there. One Saturday, the forecast called for a warm and sunny morning with heavy rain developing by noon. Still, Sam kept to…
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Taking the Initiative with Co-Pay
Chemist Warehouse, as you would have imagined, has taken the initiative to discount the co-pay for PBS prescriptions by $1.00. The impact on a retail pharmacy like the warehouse model is not quite the same as for a community pharmacy, because budgets for retail pharmacies are geared for lower profit percentages combined with higher turnover…
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Shopping
In this ever-changing world we have constant disruption. Beliefs that we once held for marketing concepts are forever changing as consumers react to the environment around them. And the online environment, while having many presentations and converts, is an environment that community pharmacists have yet to fully embrace and conquer. Particularly in the portrayal of…
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Give your self-confidence the boost you need
Walt Disney used to talk about the four Cs to success in life – curiosity, confidence, courage and consistency. He believed that if you applied these four Cs to your life, you could accomplish practically anything. But there was one C that Walt said was the greatest of all – confidence. He said, “When you…