My replacement

A year into my job out of grad school I proposed the idea for the creation of my group. It was a new idea for research and medical device development that has proved to be very successful for the company and for patients. We started off in leftover lab space with a dedicated, smart, but inexperienced team (I was the oldest...and only a year out of grad school...). We slowly developed into the best group in the company and a little over a year ago started working in a custom-built lab that we designed down to the border on the windows. It has all the equipment I wanted, with the exact layout I thought would be most condusive to doing great research. I love it. And I love my team.  It's incredibly fun; a start-up feel with big company name and dollars.  And the concept has worked out so well that a year ago I was made the international representative for this kind of group.  Every division across the world now has a group similar to mine.

When I accepted my academic job I started to talk to management about cultivating my right hand person to take my position. They've been with the group since the beginning and is only second to me in patents/year in the company. Leadership agreed this was the best move. 

But today I was given some troubling news. Leadership has found someone they want to join my group and shadow me to pick up everything they can in the one+ year before I leave. This person has a very good track record as a leader in other biomedical companies, but doesn't know much about applications.  Mr. MBA, as I've been calling him. Also, we've all talked with this person and our personalities don't match at all. Our group dynamic is one of the most important things about our team, and I'm pissed that leadership wants to mess with this dynamic.  He tells very different types of jokes, and comes in thinking he knows everything.  He worked in the old-world way of biomedical development, and very different from how my group does R&D; focused on money not lives.  And we can all tell that he's here to move up the ladder.  I would have never left my group if not for academia.  Even if they offered me the CEO position.  I love my group too much, and he's definitely here to leave.  Honestly, I think leadership put him here to quickly get experience in leading the best team in the company before moving up the ladder with that 'experience'.  There's no way this is going to stop me from leaving, but I'm suddenly fearing that the group will go downhill when I leave. And my group has been responsible for the vast majority of the company's recent success. I've got nothing to lose so I'll DEFINITELY be voicing my opinion.  My #2 isn't upset they're getting pushed back, and they definitely won't leave because the group is too important to them, too.  The rest of the team is sticking around, too.  But they definitely aren't happy about this.

I already hated business-types. I'm about to hate them more.