Fuld’s Competitive Musings

 While car sales are languishing, another industry – one with potentially explosive growth – the nascent Electronic Medical Records industry has adopted the same approach as car dealers.  G.E. just announced a 0% financing scheme on June 15. IBM has a very similar plan.

 What is this market about and why the aggressive financing pitch?

In our recent public war game, The Battle for Healthcare Information, we demonstrated that dozens of behemoth companies, from IBM and Microsoft to McKesson and GE, will take no prisoners when trying to sell hospitals, managed care organizations, doctors and others on the benefits of automating the now archaic world of healthcare information.  The market potential is conservatively estimated in the tens of billions of dollars.

Here’s the problem: There is no blockbuster standard technology for electronic medical records similar to other industrial technology products that might currently be offered by an Oracle, a Microsoft or an Apple. Instead, what you find are dozens of incompatible systems installed in lots of medical centers and doctors’ offices. Worse, most doctors (some estimate more than 90%) are still using paper and resist the move to electronic medical records for a host of reasons, ranging from implementation cost to the distraction they cause in serving patients.

Yes, our game predicted lots of mergers in this business over the next couple of years, which we believe will happen. And when mergers do occur, you will see dominant platforms take shape. 

What I see taking place here is no more or less then a land grab – this time for institutions and patients. If GE can effectively give away its Centricity backbone for electronic medical records to hospitals and providers, it will capture the organizations and their patients in one move. Build enough of a “network effect” and you have a strategic stickiness that will in turn attract other institutions. Before long, you will have a critical mass that may become so overpowering that other rivals will have to merge with you – at least that appears to me to be GE’s intent with this aggressive financing scheme.

Anyone interested in a late-model Centricity? Hmmm, ready to kick those tires Mr. or Ms. Hospital?

On April 3, 2009, dozens of experts from leading healthcare institutions and technology companies assembled to watch a war game unfold on The Battle for Healthcare Information. Some of the brightest business students from Columbia, MIT, Kellogg, and Wharton represented healthcare giants, Microsoft, McKesson and Kaiser Permanente. Their purpose: To stress test technology’s future role in rewriting America’s healthcare map. Tens and perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars are on the table for the company that can figure out the strategic solution.

We held this year’s event in New York City. It is the fifth national war game championship organized and run by Fuld & Company.

Teams assumed the identity of four major healthcare icons, simulating and ‘stress testing’ their anticipated strategies to determine who will profit from the adoption of Electronic Medical Records (EMRs). The Obama administration’s injecting $19 billion to kick-start this nascent electronic medical records industry just gets the players moving. It is no guarantee you will see universal adoption of electronic records in healthcare anytime soon.”

Among the predictions during this fast-paced business school war game event are:

• Entrenched interests will continue to resist EMRs for some time to come. Healthcare system change, engendered by EMR, means some interests will win dollars while other traditional players will lose - and no one wants to lose.
Physician, hospital and patient/consumer markets—are going to be major challenges for all companies in the field, the teams acknowledged. Hospitals and doctors actually can make money through these current inefficiencies and will likely resist change. Smaller medical practices may continue to resist installing such EMR systems, not wanting to invest in long-term promises while sinking lots of money into new and complicated electronic medical records systems. Emerging pay-for-performance requirements, and reimbursement incentives, may sway the thinking.

• A shortage of technical manpower will slow down the implementation of electronic medical records, no matter how much money is thrown against the challenge.

• Allscripts (and other similar pure plays, such as Epic Systems) will seek to leverage its unusually close proximity to the medical community to bring EMRs to smaller medical practices than had been reached before. In order to penetrate the small medical practice market where most of the EMR potential user base exists, it will have to form an  alliance or merge with a larger player that has a far more extensive sales force.

• The market that is driving efficiencies, such as EMRs and other scalable solutions, will act as a catalyst to force small medical practices to band together or merge in the next few years, allowing doctors to spread the cost – and the risk – of EMR implementation.

• Kaiser-Permanente seeks to lower healthcare costs by “undocking” healthcare information within its system, vastly increasing the access and portability of patient data. As a major healthcare provider, Kaiser is well positioned to set industry best-practices and influence adoption of EMR systems, rather than provide the ‘killer app’ platform itself. Kaiser will become the nexus of important alliances between government and industry to craft standards in healthcare IT—e.g., to afford interoperability of data-related tools and technologies—that have been nonexistent.

• McKesson will be working to vastly expand its healthcare IT niche through its dominance in logistics and understanding of the health value chain, data creation and data utility—with an emphasis on physician, payor and healthcare delivery applications. The company will be looking to generate synergies among all these different points of the healthcare delivery chain through information technology. MIT’s team, simulating the McKesson strategies, won the war game competition based on four criteria: the team’s strategic insight, accuracy in presenting McKesson’s strategy, creative ways it expressed McKesson’s culture and goals, and finally, its ability to project their strategic vision into the future. Last year’s war game on “The Battle for the Wireless Internet”, won by the Kellogg MBA team, successfully predicted a number of industry alliances.

When I opened my outer screen door this morning to pick up the newspapers, it sailed right over them.  Only seven or eight years ago – even in a recessionary climate – the papers would have been too thick with advertising pages to have fit underneath.

What does this have to do with electronic medical records, the subject of next week’s public war game we are running among the nation’s leading business schools? Everything.  The ever thinning newspapers declare the inevitable march of information from the paper world to the virtual world.  That is the same direction the medical establishment much take – perhaps kicking and screaming – over the next decade. The UK’s National Health Service has already embraced electronic medical records. The U.S., with a push from the President and agreement by Congress, will move in the same direction.

Inevitable does not mean painless or thoughtless.

Aside from needing to agree on both technical and medical standards- daunting enough…just look at the companies we are representing in the war game: Google, Kaiser, McKesson, AllScripts – all concerned parties must ask themselves how will government and commercial interests handle privacy and identify theft? 

Just this morning, the Boston Globe reported that an administrator at the Massachusetts General Hospital lost 66 records on a commuter train on the way to work.  This is just paper, you say. If these were electronic records, you can always retrieve them. Yes, but…

The bigger the system the greater the potential information loss. In 2007, someone from the Veterans’ Administration lost a hard drive that contained over one million health records.  One million could easily become tens of millions of records as storage technology improves. Around that same time period, thieves stole credit card identification from over 40 million consumers who shopped over time at the TJX retail chain. 

What is my point? We cannot hide from the inevitable. Technology is driving all information – not just healthcare information – into cyberspace.  One of the greatest challenges the war game teams will encounter next week is to demonstrate that their technology does more than just work. It must also work smartly and be able to secure the information that hospitals and patients put into it.

In his February 24th address before Congress, President Obama threw down the gauntlet.  “Our recovery plan will invest in electronic health records and new technology that will reduce errors, bring down costs, ensure privacy and save lives…So let there be no doubt: health care reform cannot wait, it must not wait and it will not wait another year.”  Again on March 5th at the first Healthcare Reform Forum the President made it clear, “…decision should be made based on evidence, data, and what works.”

On April 3, 2009, we intend to run a war game that will explore how various corporate interests hope to cash in on the billions of dollars this administration will throw at the problem.

Can the President’s daunting initiative succeed in truly making the healthcare system both safer and more efficient? Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy tried to reform healthcare in the 90’s by taking on insurance companies and managed care organizations, only to be beaten back by Congress.  This administration is taking on an even broader agenda of moving US healthcare to a position of paying for what works through understanding what works best and for whom. In order to do so, the President proposes to unify and make useful for research as well as for care delivery all information collected from patients, insurance companies, and clinical encounters, including genomics.  What makes this initiative so bold is the push to make all this information transparent while at the same time promising to protect the privacy of all Americans.

The companies whose current strategies and market positions we are going to test include Microsoft, McKesson, AllScripts, and Kaiser Permanente.  Each of these four companies represent different camps. Each wants to capture a large part of the multi-billion dollar pie being placed on the table.

Microsoft, already at the heart of many corporations’ IT infrastructure, has partnered with Johnson & Johnson and the Mayo Clinic to launch its HealthVault product. Allscripts, a highly focused and relatively mature rival in this nascent market, has over 150,000 doctors and 700 hospitals using its technology. McKesson, while far from a household name, has become the nation’s largest healthcare company and one of the largest players in the electronic medical records market. Kaiser Permanente is the country’s largest non-profit healthcare system with 8.7 million members in eight regions; Kaiser also operates HealthConnect, the world’s largest civilian electronic health record, a milestone that places the organization well ahead of other hospital-based organizations.

No company is likely to go in with a winner-take-all approach. Witnesses to this emerging electronic medical records industry will continue to see lots cooperative and co-opetition agreements, all marching towards creating “the” standard, or the key resource. We are currently completing the briefing book the teams will use as they prep for the game. The business school students have begun to huddle.  MIT, Columbia, Wharton, and last year’s winning school, Kellogg have begun to study the nuances of each rival, speeches and pronouncements made by each of the players.
 

Tune in over the next few weeks, as I begin to discuss some of the issues these business school teams will confront, the barriers they will encounter to achieve success,  as well as the nature of  the electronic medical records initiative – the brass ring at the end of the contest.
 

I’d like to meet Harry Markopolos. Not because The Boston Globe called him a whistleblower for attempting to alert authorities of Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme as far back as 2000 (He’s not a whistleblower, by the way. A whistleblower is someone who often risks his job and career by disclosing company wrongdoing while working inside that organization). Markopolos is an outsider but a very bright and insightful one.

Why would I like to meet him? Because he is very good at searching for the unvarnished truth about a corporation.  I would like to hear from him how it felt to be ignored when he knew Madoff’s investment operation was built upon lie after lie.  I have had many such conversations over the years, conversations that start out, “But I knew something was wrong, when I figured out…” 

I make my living learning about other companies and teaching others how do so, legally and ethically.  Markopolos’ job is similar.

Here’s the rub.  Knowing the answer doesn’t mean people will believe you.  Life’s not that simple.  Human nature being what it is often is suspicious at the wrong times and in blissful denial when alarm bells sound.

Prior to the Enron meltdown I heard from at least a half-dozen analysts from around the United States, questioning the energy company’s abilities.  Basically, they could not reconcile the balance sheet as reported in SEC filings.  Fortune Magazine was among those dazzled by Enron’s rapid rise. In its October 2, 2000 issue Fortune Magazine listed Enron among its most admired companies. 

 The real lesson lies not with the intelligence brilliance of Harry Markopolos but with the need for all of us to take a second look at the contrarians who are always among us.   Nearly 10 years ago I sat with the Chairman of Motorola, Chris Galvin, who told me he always wants to see the minority report.  No matter how certain, how comfortable you may be with an answer, a popular answer, an answer that comforts or confirms, you need to pay attention to other perspectives. That is what intelligence is all about.  It’s about listening to the minority and taking them seriously.

 That is why I’d like to meet Harry Markopolos.

In this second part of our interview with Wayne Rosenkrans, who ran strategic gaming activities for AstraZeneca for nearly a decade and is now VP Consulting for Fuld & Company, we examine what factors contribute to successful strategic gaming for Big Pharma – or any of Healthcare’s players.
Gaming success factors:
LF: Which healthcare companies or organizations have used strategic gaming successfully to anticipate competitive threats?
WR: Most companies in the industry have, at one point or another, successfully used strategic gaming.  Is there one that has consistently used it for maximum effect? Probably not.
LF: What factors underlie successful strategic gaming at a major pharmaceutical company?
WR:  They might include (1) A company whose culture is “outward looking,” not inwardly focused; (2) One with a long-term view; (3) Management support for authentic strategic vision—not just  buzz words); (4) Interest and belief in the power of competitive intelligence, both individual and organizational.
LF: Can you describe mistakes you have witnessed healthcare companies typically make when running war games or scenario analysis events?
WR: There are a few things which stand out

• Poor or inappropriate timing. Usually way to late for the game to have an actual impact on strategy.  Once the phase III supertanker is underway is not the time to run an exercise.
• Ignoring or rationalizing the outcome of the game, a form of corporate denial
• Not including the right teams for the game to truly test strategy – the biggest variable on a strategy may well not be a competitor company, but rather a government agency or payor organization
• Not allowing enough time for proper preparation for the exercise (goes along with the second bullet point), and trying to short-cut the process to meet a time-line.
• Insisting on developing best/worst/most likely scenarios for a scenario exercise.  If you can actually meaningfully predict those, why are you having the exercise?  Scenarios are to explore the plausible boundaries of the future which by definition are unknowable.

LF: Why does war gaming or strategy gaming remain an important tool in a company’s decision-making arsenal
WR: Done properly, with steps taken to minimize institutional bias, meaningful elicitation of the best thinking in the company, and receptive leadership to strategic change, there are no better ways to market proof and future proof organizational strategies.  Most of the rest of strategy arsenal is really geared toward monitoring and understanding the current situation, and hence really act in support of the gaming exercises.
Wayne A. Rosenkrans - Biography
In addition to spearheading the strategic gaming activity for Fuld & Company, Wayne is a Distinguished Fellow at the Center for Biomedical Innovation at MIT working on healthcare strategy and policy issues related to science and medicine.  He is also Chairman, President and a member of the board of directors of the Personalized Medicine Coalition, a Washington DC based organization working with government and other agencies on evolving healthcare policy for Personalized Healthcare, and Chief Applications Officer for SciTech Strategies focusing on scientific competency and capacity development for academia and industry.  He is a former Director of External Relations for the Personalized Healthcare Team and Evidence-based Medicine (EBM) as part of External Medical Relations at AstraZeneca where he had responsibility for long-range external relations strategy and policy development.  He has presented at numerous forums on aspects of personalized healthcare, evidence-based medicine, new development paradigms, and strategy development.  He holds an S.B. in Biology from MIT, a Ph.D. in Cell and Molecular Biology from Boston Univ., and received post-doctoral training in Cancer and Radiation Biology at the Univ. of Rochester.  Wayne lives in Malvern, PA, is married with two college-age children, and enjoys teaching martial arts (Tang Soo Do), restoring antique/classic Fords, and aviation history.

Dear Colleague:

Fuld & Company is proud to announce the appointment of Wayne Rosenkrans, currently a Distinguished Fellow at the Center for Biomedical Innovation at MIT, as its head of strategic gaming for the healthcare industry. Wayne brings over two decades of experience in war gaming and scenario analysis for leading pharmaceutical firms, as well as healthcare and government organizations.  We invite you to read a question-and-answer interview with Wayne where he outlines some of the unprecedented challenges pharmaceutical and biotech firms will be facing in the years ahead.
Product launches or failures, industry mergers, disruptions caused by a shaky economy or a particular competitive move are all reasons to play out alternatives through a strategy game. Please contact me or Cindy Gerber Tomlinson (cgtomlinson@fuld.com) if you have any questions.  In the meantime, we hope will find Wayne’s interview enlightening.
Sincerely,

Leonard M. Fuld
President

Wayne A. Rosenkrans - Biography
In addition to spearheading the strategic gaming activity for Fuld & Company, Wayne is a Distinguished Fellow at the Center for Biomedical Innovation at MIT working on healthcare strategy and policy issues related to science and medicine.  He is also Chairman, President and a member of the board of directors of the Personalized Medicine Coalition, a Washington DC based organization working with government and other agencies on evolving healthcare policy for Personalized Healthcare, and Chief Applications Officer for SciTech Strategies focusing on scientific competency and capacity development for academia and industry.  He is a former Director of External Relations for the Personalized Healthcare Team and Evidence-based Medicine (EBM) as part of External Medical Relations at AstraZeneca where he had responsibility for long-range external relations strategy and policy development.  He has presented at numerous forums on aspects of personalized healthcare, evidence-based medicine, new development paradigms, and strategy development.  He holds an S.B. in Biology from MIT, a Ph.D. in Cell and Molecular Biology from Boston Univ., and received post-doctoral training in Cancer and Radiation Biology at the Univ. of Rochester.  Wayne lives in Malvern, PA, is married with two college-age children, and enjoys teaching martial arts (Tang Soo Do), restoring antique/classic Fords, and aviation history.

Part one of a two-part interview
BIG PHARMA AND PLANNING FOR THE NEW ADMINISTRATION

LF: You are currently working with MIT’s Center for Biomedical Innovation — as well as working with Georgetown University and Federal government agencies on future healthcare policy.

 Over the next decade, do you see a glacial shift in healthcare coverage or one that is more incremental?  How can Big Pharma and the biotech industries prepare for whichever scenario becomes reality?

WR: We are primed today for a dramatic change to the healthcare system, which will come either from pre-emptive change in how care is delivered . . . or an equally dramatic collapse of the system. 

Big Pharma and the biotechs, need totally new business models for how they do therapeutic development and how they go-to-market.  I believe we’re witnessing today the accelerating implosion of the pharma industry as more and more companies find that the old levers they used to pull to solve the industry’s issues no longer work.

• Blockbuster or one-size-fits-all mentality;
• Low-risk R&D relying on incremental innovation that doesn’t create medically meaningful differentiation;
• Relying on  marketing muscle to create product differentiation, in the absence of clinical data;
• Utilizing sales reps to add share;
• Basically, viewing healthcare as a “market good” rather than a social good;
• Adversarial relationships with payors;
None of these are working currently; yet the pharma industry hasn’t taken meaningful steps to create new effective ones, hence the accelerating implosion

Strategic gaming is a low-risk, relatively low cost way to “stress test” new approaches, to bring together academics, industry, payor and government representatives and explore new rules and possible outcomes in this new era. 

LF: Government agencies worldwide can be either catalyst or barriers to competition. Are there foreign agencies and markets that are bellwethers for more global trends in the healthcare industry? How can these be identified?
WR: Here, again, is where “gaming” past scenarios, and utilizing these “simulators” to look at the present and near term scenarios can be invaluable.

The US market is the outlier globally in its healthcare system.  Other countries manage their health costs through various measures, with differing degrees of intervention ranging from Germany (more draconian than most) , to the United Kingdom and Commonwealth countries with their national health services and effectiveness assessment organizations.

It is almost a certainty that the United States will adopt  some form of national health coverage and assessment organization—supported with a constantly evolving alliance of industry and government entities.  Assessing that alliance, for the benefit of all of the players, will probably best be accomplished through periodic “gaming” reviews.  .
As flawed as they may be, I would look to the UK, along with Canada and Australia as the “canaries in the mine” for tomorrow.

INDUSTRY DISRUPTION – A STEADY VARIABLE
LF: For economic and other reasons, disruptions seem to plague every major industry over the last few months.

What are some of the short-term, as well as long-term disruptions you see for the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry overall?

WR: Barring major scientific innovations, or any major public policy changes, disruptions will be a key part of the industry’s environment. Of course, drug pricing, aggressive marketing, and the lack of coverage for millions of Americans will continue to be significant issues.

What is clear is that the value of healthcare (quality vs. expended/resources) has become a key forward looking issue.

If the industry can’t demonstrate with data that they are delivering higher value, either through higher quality, or reduced cost, or both, they won’t succeed in the future – promising product pipelines, or not. 

Healthcare costs continue to increase at double digit rates, while the quality of the healthcare delivered continues to fall.  If value is quality over cost, then value is falling at an even greater rate. 

Yes, there is superb care available in the US today at places like Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic, etc, but the overall standard of care in this country ranks only 37th worldwide and some 55% of care delivered is inappropriate (overuse, underuse, or misuse).

New approaches are needed here—focused and candid discussions between industry, payors, patient representatives and government have proven to a major platform for moving this discussion forward.

LF:  What are some of the key questions these forums should consider?

WR:
• What works best – comparative clinical effectiveness per resource expended
• For whom – meaningful segmentation of patient populations to increase the benefit of therapy
• Under what circumstances – real world clinical data, not necessarily the sterile world of the randomized clinical trail

Real data from real patients in real care situations are needed to best answer these questions.  The system (if there is one, which is debatable) is neither configured today to generate this data–nor participants incented properly to use it. 

We are on the cusp of voting for a new President. Frankly, I can’t wait. It’s just too much – too much advertising, too much news coverage of the candidates, to much of who dis’d whom.  Despite all the prattle, there is one activity that political campaigns do well that continues to fascinate me: Opposition Research.  In this one activity, politicians may out anticipate, out plan and out execute even the best of the big corporations.  What can managers learn from politicians about anticipating threats? Plenty.

The Obama camp lobbed a small attack at the Clinton camp this June, accusing Clinton of ties to Indian-American donors and with that the implication that Clinton was encouraging the outflow of American jobs to India.  Clinton responded by disclosing her family’s finances and donations, exposing any conflicts in this area as myth.  Accusations that Obama had ties to the Nation of Islam seemed to fade into the background with prepared counter-arguments.  Arguably, both campaigns had successfully blunted these attacks in recent months, allowing them to move forward toward the nomination.

Corporations experience very similar attacks, many that result in market share loss or stock price erosion.  Yahoo!’s successful attempt at fending off Microsoft’s fight to acquire it and Carl Icahn’s attempts at a shotgun marriage between the two, has left Yahoo! independent, but weaker than before the takeover bid.  Yahoo! failed to have plans in its hip pocket that would have anticipated these events.  Politicians do; they have play books that describe dozens of scenarios and issues, as well as proposed responses.

When it comes to early warning, politicians and companies are more alike than either would like to believe.  Both need to prepare for the unknown future. Each needs to be prepared with targeted marketing, the right messages for your audiences, anticipate the unanticipated threat that could set you back months or years (or in the case of a candidate, end your campaign altogether).

Think about the “competitive” pressures facing any politician running for office, particularly a Barak Obama or a John McCain:  Fast-pasted events that can overtake your strategy, the counter-spin created by competition, the press is not always friendly to your cause, and, finally, just plain surprise.   Hey, corporate management, does this sound familiar?

If companies fail to heed these threats, they lose market share and revenue along with it; if politicians fail to respond to similar pressures, they will likely find themselves kicked out of office. For politicians, anticipating the competition, their messages and having a powerful response is everything. You see in politics anticipating threats is a zero-sum game. Get it and you can win; forget about it and you will almost surely lose.

Amidst this week’s market turmoil, T-Mobile and Google announced the first Google phone based on Google’s Android platform.  All the articles this past week, including The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times (An iPhone Rival Open to Whims) missed a very important point.
Most of the press is looking at the Android platform and sees a challenge mostly to the other platforms, such as Symbian and Microsoft’s Window’s Mobile platform, both of which run on most phones worldwide. Only the iPhone has broken through and it only accounts for 2.8 percent of the market.
From the war game we ran this past March (The Battle for the Wireless Internet) with teams representing the carriers, chip/handset companies, and investment groups, Android will certainly threaten the other platform companies, such as Microsoft and Symbian.  That’s clear. 
The other, more subtle threat – and the one the press seemed to miss, the one that the war game clarified – is the larger one handset companies and carriers alike will face. It’s the threat Cloud Computing presents to the handset companies.  Cloud computing, as represented by Google, can mimic the complicated and high-priced features embedded in phone hardware (for which consumers pay a premium) and moves those features to the Cloud. Calendars - email, video applications, mapping technology, and so on.  Instead of a Nokia or an Apple building complex phones with chipsets that support a multitude of complicated programs resident on a sophisticated miniature computer, known as a smart phone, Google wants the Android platform to become that gateway to the Cloud where all these services will exist, mostly for free (supported by search advertising).  This is where Android will prove its greatest threat.
T-Mobile is near the bottom of the phone carrier heap in the US market which is likely why T-Mobile welcomed joining forces with Google. You won’t see other carriers, such as AT&T (Apple’s iPhone partner anyway) or Verizon connecting with Android anytime soon unless they are forced to do so, kicking and screaming.
Right now Android is a novelty but if it does gain momentum by working with various wireless carriers as it has with T-Mobile, it can devalue smart phones, such as those produced by Palm, Apple, Samsung, and Nokia, as well as the platforms they currently use.
 

In competitive intelligence, we often lack a perfect set of data, so we do a lot of analysis to fill in the blanks.  Sometimes, though, you actually can find the dead-on-data you’re seeking. You’ve nailed it.  That’s a lesson I learned at a barber shop a few weeks ago. I realized just how much information people will spill while sitting in the chair – a lot of it could be dead-on-data, critical to a company.

Remember the recent Yahoo! – Microsoft hostile merger discussions. Yahoo! has over 14,000 employees, a large proportion of them employed at its Sunnyvale, California offices.  Most of them will visit a barber or hair dresser. Did you know that greater Sunnyvale has over 480 barbers or hairdressers? (Source: Switchboard.com).

Sure, lots of barber discussions are filled with small talk, but people also complain and talk about things they should not.

A couple of weeks ago I visited a barber, a new guy recommended by a friend.  Boy, did he talk while snipping away what little hair I had on my head in the first place.

When I came home, my wife asked me what I thought of him. I said he was fine. He did the job but “Boy, could he talk,” I told her.  She was curious and asked me what he said.

I told her that he emigrated from Greece in the late 1970s, had two daughters, one of whom has found a career and the other is still searching. He lives in a nearby suburb, and so on. 

Then she asked me what I had said.

“Not much.”

I hesitated then realized that I told him we have four children.

Oh yes, I also discussed their ages.

By the way, I also told him what each was doing (we were comparing notes on our children, after all).

Hey, you know we also discussed town politics, what business I was in, and so on. While I did not reveal anything about my clients, I did tell him far more than “Not much.”

When Yahoo! was fending off Microsoft–not to mention investor Carl Icahn’s move to take control of Yahoo!–don’t you think these battles were the talk of the town? Don’t you think that every coffee shop, post office corridor, grocery store checkout aisle was filled with gab and gossip about the hostile takeover attempts? Don’t you think that Yahoo! employees seeking solace and refuge from the anxiety of such attempts will speak volumes while sitting in a barber’s chair? I do.

The lesson is not:  Don’t get a much-needed haircut or styling.  The lesson is be careful where you decide to discuss company matters  Not only are barber shops legendary places for giving hot stock tips, they’re also great receiving stations for hot information leaking out of companies.

Hey, I wonder who was sitting in the chair next to me?