Faradays and collaborators

This week, I am at a science summit in Philadelphia, atrios’ urban hellhole. The traffic is miserable, the parking is expensive (although, yesterday, I found a lot that only charged me $10 for the whole day. No sexual favors involved. Go figure.). I love public transportation but this is not a post about that.

No, this is a post about management schizophrenia.

Yesterday, Yvonne Martin, the doyenne of drug design, gave a presentation. The science was retrospective but her commentary on the state of pharma management was scathing. Well, in general there’s a lot of commentary in general about the way modelers have been written off and excluded from patents and publications. Everyone here has a story to tell about how the pressure to get credit for a design drives people to shut out their collaborators.

Yvonne’s tale is a little different. She worked with a talented designer in her group and had high respect for his work. They enjoyed collaborating. But her employee couldn’t get a promotion. Why? Because management had decided (erroneously in Yvonne’s estimation) that the employee only did what Yvonne told him to do. He was judged incapable of doing his own work. Yvonne said she thought it was because management does not really value collaboration. Then she said, “or maybe it’s because I’m a woman.”

Jeez, I hate to keep coming back to this but when a person who has been in the business a long time sees things this way too, there might be a problem. I have worked for two extraordinary supervisors. I learned a lot from both of them. Both of them preferred collaboration. Neither of them are appreciated for their skill in bringing people together to work productively. One of them was a woman. And recent studies suggest that the more women you have in your working groups, the more creative and productive your group will be because they are more likely to share information and cooperate on solving problems.

More distressing is the idea that because a person is less senior, their contributions are instantly attributed to their manager. This is a symptom of what management wants rather than what they say they want.

What management says it wants is collaboration and breaking down walls and sharing information. They have the graphics department put together little origami paper pamphlets showing the “dos” and “don’ts” of good corporate behavior. We all study these things and dismiss them because data and observation confirm that is is precisely the “don’t” behaviors that are rewarded. Secrecy? Check. Don’t share information? Check. Cutting people out of the loop? Check. People who believe in the value of collaborating and crowd sourcing, those people are willing to share the credit. But the minute you do that, you lessen your own contribution in the eyes of management and you aren’t ambitious and competitive enough.

So, there are more and more stories at this summit of chemists cutting modelers out of the loop, refusing to make molecules that aren’t their ideas and jobs lost without a paper trail because the designer is thought to be junior and therefore easier to write off. What takes the place is a system where the non-collaborators are encouraged to take credit for other people’s work and are rewarded for it. It’s a system where loyalty is more important than work effort. It’s a system where hierarchy and pedigree takes the place of ability.

In short, it’s the same kind of system that existed in the early 19th century Britain when gentlemen scientists with money and educations limited to the well heeled class held sway in the scientific societies of the day and when the works of people like Michael Faraday, without the formal education and from working class backgrounds, were vulnerable to the ambitions and entitled behavior of their betters.

It is Michael Faraday who is remembered as one of the greatest experimentalists ever. But it was an uphill struggle. America was supposed to be a land of opportunity where anyone with a good idea could get a shot and that has been our greatest strength in terms of innovation. When the home schooled (Edison) and the college dropouts ( zuckerman, jobs, and gates) were able to innovate without barriers, we were great as a country.

But these are the days when pedigree and ruthlessness trumps all. When it’s more important that one person is designated as the innovator and automatically gets the credit no matter what they do, the barriers for good minds to gain entry and participate become too high. What results is a lot of top heavy departments. A lot of people who want to direct and are forced to pursue the top spot and fewer people who work together to solve problems.

Collaborators and Faradays beware.