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It was F. Scott Fitzgerald who famously declared that “there are no second acts in American lives.” Was he ever wrong! In this age of reality TV actress Martha Stewart, Viagra huckster Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich (rehabilitated as a health-care lobbyist, no less), it seems even the most down-on-their-luck public figure can mount a lucrative second career.
Which raises an all-important question: is Fitzgerald’s aphorism any more accurate when applied to the American corporation? And what...
It was F. Scott Fitzgerald who famously declared that “there are no second acts in American lives.” Was he ever wrong! In this age of reality TV actress Martha Stewart, Viagra huckster Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich (rehabilitated as a health-care lobbyist, no less), it seems even the most down-on-their-luck public figure can mount a lucrative second career.
Which raises an all-important question: is Fitzgerald’s aphorism any more accurate when applied to the American corporation? And what better test case than the widely vilified tobacco industry, the source of some 400,000 deaths annually in the U.S. alone and now facing tens of billions of dollars in possible penalties for fraud and deception for its decades-long denial of the hazards of tobacco?
Seems that years ago Philip Morris, in its search for a “safer” cigarette that could deliver the market-retaining (i.e., addictive) nicotine without the pesky carcinogens in smoke, developed an innovative drug delivery device named Aria. By sucking on the device (coincidentally, the way one would on a cigarette), the user could draw liquid nicotine through a thin tube over a heating element that turned the nicotine into a fine mist, suitable for inhaling (and getting hooked). Evidently, smoker disinterest in the product has convinced the company not to bring the product to market as a nicotine-delivery device.
But what if you could sell the device and a new image for the beleaguered industry in one fell swoop? According to the Wall Street Journal (October 27, 2005), Phillip Morris is now trying to adapt the device for the delivery of pharmaceuticals to treat multiple sclerosis, migraines and pain. The company claims that Aria will do a better job than conventional aerosols in delivering drugs to the lungs for absorption into the bloodstream. The ultimate irony: the device might have particular usefulness for treating smoking-induced lung diseases.
The company will have to face a skeptical public. James Donohue of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine notes, “People are going to ask whether this device is an attempt by Phillip Morris to undo all the damage the company did to the public health.” Others will note that the company’s prospects dim as Americans stop lighting up: The smoking rate for U.S. adults was 22% in 2003, down from 26% in 1994. Hence the need for the company to diversify.
Thus, it seems, we need not mourn the downfall of Enron or Tyco. Perhaps Enron still has a rosy future turning its tax- and regulation-evading offshore shell corporations into group purchasers of AIDS drugs for the Caribbean. Or maybe Dennis Kozlowski will donate the waiters’ togas from his wife’s $2 million birthday bash in Sardinia to clothe the poor in Africa. For Fitzgerald was sometimes on the mark: “A big man,” he once said, “has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.”
