Biotech Insider

Opinions and the stuff that wastes my time

I participated in a marketing meeting last week where an inordinate amount of time was wasted; we discussed the merits of coming up with a way for a busy sales rep on a tradeshow floor can easily identify a particular product sheet from the literature rack. As that is the most important marketing communication that needs to take place!

And of course it began with a senior member of our group's personal observation - that she couldn't find the sheet fast enough while with a potential customer. So what that there are no less than 30 pieces of marketing collateral, so what if the suggested solution (an icon in the upper corner) is not scalable across products, so what if it is only one person's opinion that this is even necessary? Finding a 'consensus' can become just a back-and-forth over what a particular person likes/dislikes, or wants/does not want. Often the most outspoken / most powerful person wins, regardless of merit.

To the uninitiated - beware of thinking that anyone really knows what is going on and what really needs to be done at any point in time. So many times marketing discussions become a free-for-all where the if one can express their opinions coherently and back up their position with a factoid or two, that person will stand head and shoulders above the fray. But it's a careful blance, disagreeing with others while allowing for whatever sense of idiocy they happen to feel at the moment.

Interviewing Success in Biotech

I've had a lot of experience interviewing people, as my current company firmly believes in a lot of up-front screening and then a 4-6 hour marathon interviewing session with 5-7 people. So as a dutiful Product Manager I've interviewed my fair share of technical service scientists, field engineers, technical writers, and product managers from associates up to senior-level people.

Some observations of this process:
1. Please do your homework. Not that I'm expecting for you to read every .PDF and every page on my company's website, but there's a lot of information about any company available if you know where to look, and more importantly who to ask. Nothing says 'I really not excited about this opportunity' than someone who hasn't bothered to do their homework. Just because you are smart doesn't mean that you can get away with 'faking it'. (I've noticed more and more lots of smart people overly depend on their smarts.)
2. Please show up on time. People notice. And try to be as polite as you are able to - it goes a long way to getting people who are doing the interviewing to get to the point of liking you, and frankly, people hire the people they like.
3. Lastly, as one who has interviewed many people from competitor companies, in the marketing world there are a lot of people who are good at selling themselves, but the truth about their performance does come out. I'm finding that excellent people are really hard to find, in particular ones that I would be happy to trust with a lot of investment in time, effort and most of all being able to replace me someday as I move on up.

Stand out from the crowd, put forth a sincere effort, be like-able, and don't make me make a high-risk decision. :)

The Stem Cell War (Fortune Magazine)

Today my copy of Fortune magazine comes in the mail, and an interesting article is entitled "The Stem Cell War", all about California's struggle with the $3B Proposition 71, passed only last November. Now a non-profit foundation, there was a huge amount of politics involved in even locating the Center for Regenerative Research. I know a biotech CEO (involved on the pharma side of biotechnology, not the life science tools side) from San Diego who told me that San Diego's offer was the strongest offer 'by far', and that the level of cooperation and financial support offered from San Diego biotechnology firms was far ahead anything the Bay Area had to offer.

Well it ended up being located in the Bay Area, offers of assistance notwithstanding.

Now the irony is that an initiative designed to accelerate stem-cell research just might simply galvanize the political efforts to stymie it - the Fortune article states just that. To quote: "...opening a Pandora's box by calling into question even scientific methods that are widely used..." "What has happened in California shows how unpredictably complex and thorny this issue can be. Despite all the momentum, Prop. 71 has stalled and landed in the courts."

So the funding has been stopped, the lawyers are getting busy, the activists are getting fired up, and families that are seeking cures for juvenile diabetes like the Altmans showcased in the article have to demonstrate the patience of Job in order to see advances for a disease that has debilitated their family for generations.

The article mentions the 20th century being the century of Physics, while the 21st century is the century of Biology, and they may well be correct. I was a high-school teacher in a prior lifetime, and even then in the mid-1980's it was obvious that a revolution was occuring in Biology, and that Biology would become a burgeoning and powerful force for good in society as a whole. With $39B in US sales in 2003 and a market capitalization in the US of no less than $311B in April 2005, this century of Biology is getting off to a strong start. But politics becomes a bit concerning, as in Europe with the current backlash against GMO foodstuffs.

It is not widely known that since 1998 (according to this  Nobel-winning source) the world has produced more food than required, and the existence of starvation exists because of political, economic and distribution issues, not due to the lack of food. The scientist, Norman Borlaug of Texas A&M University, is considered the father of the Green Revolution, which started in 1944 in Mexico, resulting in self-sufficiency in Mexico by 1956, to then becoming an exporter of wheat by 1964. He credits technology and looks to biotechnology to solve many of the problems we as a people face today.

The danger is that opportunities for real improvement in lives will be missed, due to religious, philosophical, and political debates that currently are swirling around stem-cell research.

E-newsletters - you should subscribe

I'm pretty picky when it comes to newsletters in my in-box. If they don't have the ./ mantra of 'more signal, less noise' then I'm frankly not interested.

If you are interested in what is going on in the world of Life Science then Genomeweb is a must. They will rent out the email list on occasion, but it is still a very worthwhile read. There are print editions of their bi-weekly newsletters, such as BioCommerce Week or BioArray News, but you have to be prepared to shell out a few hundred $/year.

Another newsletter I subscribe to is the Biospace Genepool, if only for the jobs that are posted there. They do put on local career-hunting events, which may be of interest should you be in the market for a new employer.

A pretty short list - only two newsletters - and there are many others you can subscribe to that are whittled-down versions of trade publications, such as The Scientist, and for a while I subscribed to Nature and Science Alerts which can be useful if you want their Table of Contents delivered weekly.

General marketing newsletters I subscribe to are 'Go-to-Market Strategies' Resource newsletter, the McKinsey Quarterly newsletter (free content articles are available) and stuff from Perry Marshall regarding advertising via Google Adwords.

A  hint about newsletters: simply set-up a free email account such as Gmail by finding an 'unused' invitation in this thread. (With over 70 pages of invitations, at least one of them should be still valid!) That way all your newsletters are in one place, and any commercial email will go to that address keeping your inbox clean and tidy.

Hint number 2: Reserve your own domain. I use this service for something like $10/year. (For example, www.lastname.com, if not taken already.) Then you can setup a personal webspace via a web hosting service (I use this one, only $30/year) and have it auto-forward everything sent to firstname@lastname.com to currentname@currentdomain.com. This way if and when you move or your ISP goes out of business or you switch from AOL to DSL to another DSL and then to cable (or whatever), your email address stays blissfully the same. Of course you have to keep track of two email accounts, the personal one you guard jealously and the one you give out for commercial purposes, but once you set it all up life is good!

Books that have shaped my thinking

Talking with a friend at work last week, she was in a bit of a funk and the conversation soon turned to books that have inspired us. She showed me a book she was starting to read, which reminded me of the books that have really been a great help over the years, and whose message seems to be lost in this age of get-rich-quick schemes or people dreaming of hitting it big via Real Estate. (I am no fan of Robert Kiyosaki.)

Anyway, at the top of my stack is the classic "The Road Less Traveled" by M. Scott Peck.  This book's lessons and insights are nothing short of amazing. Any book that starts with the following paragraph has got it nailed: "Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult - once we truly understand and accept it - then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters." The four great themes he treats are Discipline, Love, Growth & Religion, and Grace. A worthwhile read, worth reading and thinking and discussing.

Another book high on the list is Victor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning". An account of a Holocaust survivor, he relates many of his experiences in such a vivid manner that it is difficult to forget for a long time afterward. His philosophy that analyzes the psychoanalytical aspects of his suffering puts all the difficulties and struggles of life into perspective, as well as the all-important need to have an overarching sense of purpose. The philosophy that results may not be the most well known (I frankly have not heard of logotherapy before or since) but there's a lot of good stuff here.

I would be remiss if I neglected that well-worn classic of Western Literature the Bible, and perhaps I assume too much from others when I make a comment quoting Agag the king of the Amelekites during a meeting ("Surely the bitterness of death is past"), but there is a lot of useful concepts there. I admit I'm something of a strange bird, combining a background in molecular biology with a comprehensive understanding of religion and church history. If the Bible hasn't shaped your thinking I'd say it's never too late to learn some of the literary riches it offers, not to mention how it puts the current political / economic / ethical world in which we live in context.

Only three books for now - and these are the first that come to mind. Others that are on my list will be posted in the future.

'Toastmasters and You'

For many years I would wonder about organizations like the Kiwanis or Rotaries or others that serve as good examples of civic volunteerism, and mistakenly grouped the Toastmasters as one of them.

When I relocated a few years ago to a new area I figured that I had a chance to get involved to meet new people in this new location. It was something by happenstance, a training on Project Management had an excellent instructor who mentioned in passing a joke she heard at her Toastmaster's meeting, and it reminded me that I had wanted to check it out for a while. So I did what any web-savvy person would do, which was to find a local meeting and checked it out.

I went to probably 10 8 different meetings before I found my 'home'. And it was so interesting to see each small club (some only had 7 or 10 people in attendance the day I visited) had so many similar procedures, and each club made me feel so welcomed. As one who used to teach (in a prior lifetime) I had a fair amount of public speaking experience, but the Toastmasters group obviously knows a tremendous amount about public speaking and is highly recommended for career advancement.

I have not had much experience working with people who earn serious six-figure incomes (like the CEO who is $500k+ and the VP of R&D above $250k), so naturally I get a bit nervous around them. And when making presentations to the Senior Management group (as I was upon occasion), it is public speaking at its best - or worst. And this is where Toastmasters comes in - you learn not to say "umm" or "ahhh" and you learn how to be humorous and relaxed, in addition to gaining great confidence and ability in public speaking.

The group I found is an amazing resource - like-minded folks who want to improve themselves and improve their careers. A great place to meet great people and learn a lot.

If you want to advance your career work on your public speaking and presentation skills. It gives you the confidence and 'voice' that you need to advance right on up. If you don't believe me, show me any successful executive in any business who speaks poorly, either in person or in front of a group; it is something definitely to consider.

Crossing the Chasm

When I look back at where I began not-so-long ago, as an experienced pair of lab-hands who knew his way around tissue culture transfections and Northern and Western and Southern Blots and immunoprecipitations and routine cloning of genes, I wonder sometimes at the change between what I'm doing now and what I was doing 10 years ago. Then it was figuring out how to normalize my RT-PCR data (this was in the days before TaqMan); now it is figuring out how I'm going to push through a development project that has absolutely no resources (i.e. everyone is too swamped with work to get around to do work on it) and there are days that my Franklin Planner Dilbert pages are mysteriously prescient.

Having been a fan of the Franklin Covey system since the late 1980's (yes they were even popular then), I have found a surprising number of people in business at a great disadvantage - they think they can get by on their smarts (they are organic chemists or molecular biologists or geneticists or what-have-you) and good looks, rather than having a clear set of goals and a system by which they can get to where they want to go.

But the chasm remains - the transition from the bench to business. Looking back I see that this was something that I was evaluated for even before accepting the initial offer. How would I interact with customers? How would I handle their anger, their frustration, their problems? But in that first job, there was so much to learn, so many things to do, and so many people calling calling calling (I was in a call-center, handling on average 25 calls per day). I did well - very well, in fact - so that a wise manager kept up the pace and gave me larger and more interesting projects to work on. Thinking about it, it was that first manager that made a real difference as both a role model and as a mentor. He gave me the impetus to work hard - as hard as I ever have, although admittedly not as hard as during the last three months of my thesis - and the work was recognized, and was soon earning more than I thought I ever could.

Ahh, being able to earn a comforable living. Not being given a comfortable living, but being able to be rewarded in direct proportion to your contribution. Of course there were times I thought there were those who didn't work that hard but were very, very smart, and that their smarts could compensate. Years later I know better - at a certain level all the smarts and experience becomes equilibrated out, and it is an essentially even playing field. This is where people who can both work very hard and work very smart can stand out, and be rewarded accordingly.

"Let's keep in touch"

Listening to a tape by Brian Tracy ("How to Master your Time"), he says that a mentor can shave off years from a career path. I certainly believe it, as recently I've consulted a few who have years of experience in biotech (both from a marketing and from a sales perspective) and their experience has been priceless. It is difficult to evaluate in terms of how many years of anguish I've saved, but suffice it to say that it has been well worth it.

Keith Ferrazzi has a book out called "Never Eat Alone" and it is on my 'need to read this book' list. He makes such an excellent point about giving and being human - many an ambitious person has called me with a 'you know me through so-and-so and thus you owe me this-and-that' attitude that completely shuts me down. If you want to hear an interesting online conference he has one archived here that I recently listened to - it's worth the download, although Microsoft really needs to get their online act together, since many of the audio sections were duplicates so you need to check the title of each in order to not download the same thing twice or even three times. I wonder sometimes how Microsoft can afford to stay in business, what with their goofy dinosaur ads they spend Million$ of dollar$ on. Something to the tune of $150-$200M, not chump change, but not the $1B that the automakers routinely spend either. Yup, we hate our customers - unbelievable.

Oops, got off-topic. Anyway, being a giving, decent human being seems to be in short supply, but thinking about it, decency may have consistently been in short supply. The 'good 'ole days' were not that good, and if you think so it just illustrates a lack of historical perspective.

About two weeks ago I was invited by a friend from Toastmasters to join LinkedIn, a social networking site. This friend was, shall I say, very interesting from the point of view that she did marketing, which we had in common, but it was of the alternative / holistic healing / life coaching / world peace and harmony angle. Intrigued with the concept (being a reader of Fast Company, Wired, Fortune and Forbes I've encountered discussion of social networking many times), I bothered to fill in my work history and look up anyone I knew. Turns out quite a few of my old work associates (some I had stayed in touch with, others I haven't) were indexed on the site, and it still isn't clear to me whether or not their names were simply harvested from all over the WWW. So I naively started inviting several people, and selectively left out others I could not vouch for.

Then I get a few invites to 'connect via LinkedIn' to people I did not work very closely with at all, or not at all as they had joined my former employer after I left, and have contacted me for employment at my current employer! No phone call, no 'how are you doing?' invitation out to breakfast, nothing but an anonymous "I found you via LinkedIn and want to connect with you." It seems like the work of keeping in touch, the work of building credibility, the work of building up a 'positive bank account' (to borrow a phrase from Steven Covey) is short-circuited to an electronic connection via a website. I think that experiment (for me) is coming to an end, and I can't say that the results were positive.

Bottom line: keep your network up-to-date, and don't be afraid to be a decent, giving and humble human being. There is enough greed, avarice and pride in the world as it is.

Some favorite links

As the first entry to this Sales and Marketing blog, here are some of my favorite links to online stuff.

As the life science business is young, there are only a few places where scientists (customers) and commercial folks (sales reps, marketing folks, business development people) hang out online. One good place is Biofind's Rumor Mill, which is now officially for sale, so any of you who want to try an commercialize rumors can go give it a try. A little history, though - there was a ton of controversy to make this rumor site a paid-subscription site, complete with online polls, that caused no end to the level of noise, what with endless strings of posts that were nothing but complaining, whiny people too cheap to pay for information. Ah, the wonders of the Internet. Note: this site is difficult to navigate, as there is only a filtering function by biotech discipline, so be prepared to wear out your 'back' button, and regularly start over from the home page. Also some companies are represented much more than others, which has little relationship to market size, growth rate, number of struggles, amount of politics, or relative level of happiness. About that last comment - there might be a correlation to relative level of happiness to number of posts, but I don't have enough information at the present.

For another source of company-specific news where customers meet online with sales and/or marketing people would be the stock message boards at Yahoo! Finance, but the level of traffic may be hit-or-miss, depending on the company. And if you are looking for insider news about a small privately-held company online, good luck!

One of my trade magazines in my 'must-read' pile is Genetic Engineering News, but a lot of its content is not found online. Their website was recently revamped, now much easier to read, even with a discussion forum that is currently empty. If you are currently 'behind the bench' (say in an academic lab somewhere as I was for many years) and would like to find out more about the real business of biotech suppliers, this is a must-read, and do what you can to get a free or paid subscription if you don't get it already.

Another site that is well-worth bookmarking is GenomeWeb. They publish Genome Technology, and if you don't have a free subscription you can get one easily. Back to GenomeWeb - they have a twice-daily email alert service that is invaluable to me - another item on my 'must-read' list. It can often take the place of subscribing for 'investor alerts' from the websites of your competition. :)

For academic life-science literature, I'd be remiss not to mention NCBI (in particular PubMed), Stanford's Highwire, or Google Scholar. And the PLoS (Public Library of Science) is an interesting experiment in 'open-source' scientific publishing. But often as a busy Sales person you aren't going to do a lot of this footwork yourself - that's what Marketing and Technical Support people are for - and often a well-timed complaint will get you what you need.