Thoughts on people, teams, organizations, communities, effectiveness and success
Stanford University professor Bob Sutton, whose work I admire, authored the book “The No Assholes Rule.” Good book, great topic, and some wonderful thoughts about how to work with and / or avoid workplace assholes.
Unfortunately the “rule” doesn’t work in most firms. And even while asshole behavior is corrosive and cancerous to the effectiveness of most companies, here’s why jerks and assholes will continue to exist in the workplace.… Read the rest
The headline for the story in the Wall Street Journal by Jonathan Rockoff said it all: Pfizer to Pay Academics to Find Uses for Molecules.
Rather than have their own researchers take a crack at it, Pfizer is spending $22.5M to have researchers at the medical school at Washington University in St. Louis review approximately 500 Pfizer molecules to see if they can be used for other purposes than those for which were either approved, or are in current research for a different use, or failed in clinical trials.… Read the rest
Corporations make decisions for all sorts of reasons. You may benefit from some of them, but it’s unlikely you will benefit from all of them. And because of that it’s important that you manage your career and your life rather than hope that someone else will manage it well for you.
And that means you need to think of any job where you work for someone else as a temporary job.… Read the rest
Palm, the maker of mobile products, is losing talent.
Tech journalist Kara Swisher has commented that Palm is a company with nine lives. This, by my count, is number ten.
Michael Abbott, SVP of Software, and Caitlin Spaan, VP of Carrier Marketing, have both left Palm. Abbott landed at Twitter. SEC filings indicate that CFO Doug Jeffries and Global Operations Senior Vice President Jeff Devine both were paid $250K bonuses and provided stock options as part of a formal retention plan (bad news when a company’s CFO has to be paid more to stay).There’s … Read the rest
Almost every exec and manager hires people – even in the flat organizations common today. Yet few do it well, and many put it down low on their list of favorite things to do.
It doesn’t have to be that way, and there are four simple steps you can take to make the hiring process easier, go smoother, and make better hires.… Read the rest
I recently individually interviewed 10 biotech CEOs and 10 biotech venture capitalists as part of the data collection portion of an executive coaching engagement. It wasn’t the subject of the interview – which was to collect feedback data regarding my coaching client – but everyone to a person brought up the subject of venture capital and biotech.
Everyone talked about the model of investment and development that’s been in existence since Genentech (1976) and Amgen (1980) were founded.… Read the rest