Thursday, May 1, 2014

Dancing for the executives

Every year, throughout my company and its sister companies, we have to present a bunch of new technologies to the executives.  Today was that day.  This is a way to let management know what's in the pipeline.  If we present technology that they like, we get to keep our budget. If we present technology they hate, we can all be confident people will be getting fired. However, if we present something absolutely amazing they will give us an extra $15 million (this happened last year). So tensions have been high lately. People have been doing everything they can to show off as many ground-breaking things as possible. Internal groups compete like we're from different companies. It's absolutely insane, and I despise it.

I hate it because I feel like such a pawn. I put on my tap shoes and have to dance for a bunch of higher-ups that think of me as just another chess piece they can replace. I've never felt so unappreciated. And I hate talking sales all day, when we SHOULD be making these products to save lives. This week we worked 2x our usual hours to get ready for the visit. We tested every last project, and wowed the executives. 

We got a crazy amount of money for two projects specifically and they want these in people by December. Considering we haven't done a single animal study we're a little on-edge. Except me. I don't feel anything. I feel like a kid that just worked overtime for my parents' praise, got it, but realized that life will go on and I can be happy without it. I'm glad we got the money since it will go a long ways to save lives. I just hate having to do this show every year. I feel like I'm whoring my science out to a bunch of rich businessmen...

Added to this are the talks by the executives. I was the representative from my division for a meeting attended by a bunch of board members and presidents of sister companies, and I heard "forward-thinking", "synergize", "vertical integration", and "value added" enough times to drive someone mad. I went nuts.  These same people came by to look at my group's new technology and they kept asking "what's the market?" and "what kind of sales would you expect?".  These are different ways of asking "what's the disease target?" and "how many lives will this save?".  The difference is that business-types think of sales numbers. This is something I can't wait to get away from. In my bio I say I'm a PhD in the medical device field trying to cleanse the soul and get into academia. This is the soul-cleansing I'm talking about.  I understand that we always have to fight for more money, but I hate being trotted in front of the executives like I'm at Westminster.

On the plus side, my boss took my group out for one hell of a nice dinner. 

2 comments:

  1. How is this any different than dancing for university donors and grant reviewers?

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  2. I've had to work with university donors in the past: I was an NCAA athlete as an undergrad, and my advisor was lazy and regularly had me meet with donors instead of him doing it in grad school. Yes, I had to do some dancing, but the donors genuinely cares about the science. They were intrigued by the devices and the pursuit of knowledge. I met with private donors who were afflicted by diseases we were researching. And often they were diseases with such small incidences that industry wouldn't touch them.

    There will always be dancing (as much as minister John Lithgow doesn't want it), but I want to dance for certain reason and for people that genuinely care about what they giving their money to. I can't speak for the grant situation, but some of my favorite experiences were dancing for donors at the U.

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