Monday, July 19, 2010

How do you know when you’ve “made it” in the biotech world? What is the fastest way to the top of corporate fiefdom? The only way to know this is to have observed it first hand. Today let's talk about what it takes to get promoted in the biotech world.

There are many courses you can take on leadership, managing people, and how to dress for success. But will these help you rise to the top, to be among the cream of the crop of a major biotech corporation? Those qualities are important and will serve you well for kissing the ass of the hand that pays you. But the real way to success is a secret that no one has openly shared with anyone in the "outside" world- until today.

The secret to rising stardom in biotech is as follows.

1. Appear as if you work incredibly hard (aka email diahrrea). Send emails to everyone and anyone. Add at least 5 names to the CC line with every email. Everyone above and below you needs to know that you are micro-managing every detail of every project that you’ve delegated out to others to do for you.

2. Become the person no one wants to work with. Make it impossible for people to stand you. Your excuse? "They don't work hard enough", "they don't have the experience to make it", "they don't have the right vision". Basically, shit all over the team doing all the work thus making them demand that it's you or them. Result? You get promoted!

OK- I am joking here. Totally blowing it out of proportion. Sorta.

Anyone who has worked in the biotech field will have noticed a curious phenomenom - it's impossible not to notice. The more incompetent a person is, the higher up they move in an organization. This is in the very large organizations. Let's just say for the sake of discussion, organizations in the >500 people range. It's not a hard and fast number, but the company needs to be big enough to allow slackers to fly under the radar while have enough worker bees to keep the company afloat.

How does this happen, you ask? How do incompetent people move up? Simple. No one wants to fucking work with them. But you can't fire them. So they get promoted. I am serious. Many large organizations can't fire employees and so it is easier to move them around and in the process, they get moved up. This is how many formerly great companies became a waste of space on the planet. The people who were once talented, bright eyed and bushy tailed move on to start-ups and start logging on to the Biotech Rumor Mill to lament about the "good ol' days".

Any company with a huge number of middle and upper managers who have job titles that seem like they were the result of some yahoos night of drunk brainstorming or an egomania attack are people who should have moved on a long time ago.

What? You want examples of ridiculous job titles? Want to make sure that when it comes time for you to reward yourself with a hand-picked title you don't make the same mistake?

Linkedin is full of them. Let's take a look.

How about director of marketing optimization? What is that? Does a company need someone to optimize the marketing? What are the marketing managers for? I guess they have marketing optimization managers focused on fixing everything that doesn't work so that the director has someone to direct. I wonder what their meetings are like. I imagine questions such as, "Have you figured out why our email blasts have a 0.1% open rate?" or "What should our promo codes look like?" are major areas in need of discussion.

And some companies are adopting a new layer of upper management with the title "Chief of Staff". What the hell is a Chief of Staff in a biotech company? Chief of what staff? Is that second in command to the CEO, as if he works in the Oval Fucking Office? Is it your responsibility to watch over all the vice presidents, making sure they've all turned on their computers at least once a day (as noted by their appearance on Skype) and that their executive admins turn in their expense reports on time? Is this some new layer of management companies are inventing to provide high paying jobs to people they really don't have room for? I'd like to see the job qualifications for the Chief of Staff position. I think I may want to apply for that. I'd like to make $300,000 a year to babysit VPs.

Another really awesome title I found on linkedin involves the words “innovation strategy". Innovation strategy? Please tell me what you do all day. Do you surf the web, checking out new technology and send emails to R&D Directors saying "Isn't this cool? We should be doing this too!!" And by the way, what do the VPs of R&D do if not innovation strategy? Or the CSO? Sounds very redundant to me.

I think the take home message here is: you want a job title with the word "strategy" in it. Because really, when you strategize, you aren't really doing the work. You are coming up with the ideas for future work. You really can't be held accountable for bad decisions. They were just ideas after-all, and you can always blame failure on R&D for not being able to innovate your vision.

I think I've revealed enough of the inner workings of middle-upper management in the biotech world for one night. If you see any other ridiculous job titles, let me know. We'll make fun of them. You're allowed to do that here.