Last night I gave a webinar on grant writing, where I told a story of a grant. It was a story of both failure and successes, showing what things worked and what things didn’t. It was meant to be an instructional story, as many good stories are. In fact, the older I get, the more I realize that people learn far better through story than through pedantic spewing of facts.

So. A lot of people wrote to me afterwards thanking me for the webinar.

But. One lady, we’ll call her “the nice lady” (I previously had called her something not so nice, but I reconsidered – she’s well meaning but a bit misguided) writes to me saying, basically that I should have been more dry, more pedantic, and more boring.

She tells me that I shouldn’t have told an “educational story” of one line of research that I’ve had funded consistently for 9 years through 4 different grants, that this was too “me focused.”

I think she expected me to sit there lecturing about the ABC’s (and D’s E’s and F’s) of “good grants.”

In other words, she wanted me to act like a mummy lecturing from a sarcophagus. That would have been “acceptable.”

There’s a lesson here, which is why I bother posting it. If you think, like this lady does, that writing a great proposal is all about giving a dry, boring “lecture” to your readers, you’re going to struggle. Mightily.

Grants must engage the reader with a great story about great research. In these days of 1 in 6 grants being funded, that’s the ONLY WAY you’re going to get any traction (and even then, you’ll need a bit of luck mixed in!)

Fortunately, she’s the only one who complained! Most others who wrote in, “Got it”.

Now, due to some technical glitches at the beginning (which she also complained about), I’ve decided to do an encore. It’s going to be next Tuesday, Jan 17th at 10AM PST, 1PM EST. You can sign up using the page here (ignore it if it still lists the old time): http://grantdynamo.com/tgbt-webinar/tgbt-webinarblog/

And, be prepared for a “story” where I may actually swear a time or two on a live call (gasp). If you’re not prepared for that, then you probably shouldn’t sign up!

It would be hard not to notice that things are changing in the world of grants. Funding rates are at an all-time low (< 1 in 6 according to NIH data). People are demoralized. I talk to them everyday, and it can be painful at times.

I have some good ideas about why things are changing and what to do about it. Instead of trying to write this up in a (very long) blog post, I’ve decided to put together one of my (in)famous free webinars. The working title is “The state of Grants in 2012, and how to stay afloat” (or perhaps “Morgan’s $23M grant-getting scheme” – that sounds a bit more fun and evil, doesn’t it?)

To register, use this link.

The last one I did in June 2001, got rave reviews. But I’m going to one-up that one to give you by far my best free training to date. I strongly considered requiring people to sign an NDA (nondisclosure agreement) to keep my secrets secret, but in the end felt that that might scare some people off. So I’m going to try doing this one without requiring it to see how it goes.

If you want to see a person who looks like me (ok, that is me, I admit it!) describing the webinar in a short video, here it is:

If you decide that it’s time to tackle the evil, life-sucking grant demon in 2012, then here’s where you register for the webinar (web-based seminar).

A few years ago I gave a talk in the biochem department at UNC. Afterwards I went out for lunch with my mentor, and he berated me. (Did I mention that he can be an intimidating guy? But I listen to him, since he’s the one who helped me go from no grants to lots of grants…)

He berated me for several things, including using a difficult-to-read font, giving a software demo that took a bunch of time to get running, and, most of all, for not conveying “the point” of the talk.

I thought I’d conveyed the point clearly. I thought I’d shown how cool and nifty my new project was. But I was wrong. I hadn’t.

I was really bummed out because I used to let things like that affect me all too much.

I was soon coming up for tenure! I knew I’d have to give one or more “tenure talks” at which I had to really wow folks – including this mentor – before they’d vote me in (or out).

I figured that this was a sure sign I was going to fail. Here comes the unemployment line!

Only six months later, I gave a talk for my department, after which the same menotor came to me and said “that was a great talk.”

What changed?

After I got over my long bout with destructive self-pity, I had a few important realizations.

One of the most important of those was that I hadn’t been treating my audience with respect. I was doing the talk simply to build up my own ego and my own reputation, without paying attention to the “needs” or “wants” of the audience.

I see this all the time. I estimate that about 60-70% of all talks I see are coming from the same place. Maybe that’s why they’re often so tedious. The person is talking from a perspective of “hey, you should listen to me because I’m great and my research is great” – without any real engagement.

And here’s the one key thing I did to change it around. I discovered “love.”

Not romantic love… but love for my audience.

Around that time when I was preparing my tenure talk, I went to a friend’s wedding. There was a tremendous feeling of love at the wedding. It made me think about my talk, and I realized that I hadn’t been putting my talks together from a standpoint of caring about how my audience was feeling. And that was a big mistake.

Any human relationship that’s lacking a sense of caring or love is going to be dissatisfactory.

I applied that principle as I put my talk together. For each slide, each sentence, and each figure in the slides, I asked myself: does this help my audience to see or hear this? Or is it just another thing that I’m putting in here for selfish reasons (such as wanting to impress with how hard I’ve worked)?

In other words, I was constantly thinking to myself “I’m going to love my audience and treat them right!”

I haven’t done all of my talks that way. I’ve forgotten and then remembered this principle multiple times. But every time I do a talk or presentation based on this notion, it goes better – much better. That’s because I’m going outside of myself, thinking about the other people involved. I’m considering the time that they’re spending listening to me. I’m not just considering my own time or fame or fortune, I’m thinking about: how can I give them a great experience?

It works. It works really well. If you want to ramp up your results in front of an audience, this is the most potent way I’ve ever discovered. I hope you’ll use it!

ps – to summarize, whenever you’re preparing a talk, constantly ask yourself “am I treating my audience with love and respect?” It will ramp up your talks considerably.

pss – Do you want more tips and advice that will help you in your career? Grab your copy of the free report: “5 steps to a great science career”.

The Great Grant Crunch is coming soon…to a theatre near you.

What the heck is “The Great Grant Crunch?” It’s a term I invented to describe the perfect storm of factors that are headed our way as grant seekers:

• ARRA stimulus funds are wearing off.  This is a very big deal.  Lots of us who had that funding ramped up operations and hired staff to do projects, and given that 2 yrs is not a very long time to ramp up and do some good science, a lot of us will be seeking more funding in the future to keep that work going.  This could mean hundreds to thousands of extra funding requests in the Spring and Summer of 2011.
• This surge in new requests comes right at a time that the US Gov’t is moving towards full-on austerity mode.  In case you haven’t noticed, we’re running huge deficits, and the Tea Partyers campaigned (and won) on a platform of cutting these back.  That means the likelihood of increased science spending is about as likely as Palm Beach weather in Fairbanks Alaska during wintertime. In other words, not much.
• States are cutting back.  Many states were relying on revenues related to the housing boom to fund their budget largesse.  That ended in 2007/08.  Many keep hoping for an improved economy to replace it.  I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but look at what happened to Japan after its housing bubble collapsed in ’91.  They still haven’t recovered!  Of good news, the US corporate system is not quite as moribund, and US entrepreneurs have it better than Japanese entrepreneurs.  Regardless, a quick recovery is not on the map.  That means ongoing stagnancy or even shrinkage in state budgets – including support for academia and research.
• Foundations are struggling. They’re hit by a double-whammy of declining investments and declining donations.  I experienced this firsthand when I had a good score on a proposal with the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, but that year they told me they weren’t funding ANY grants due to the troubles.  This will be slow to improve.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if you’re in grant-getting mode, you should know about this.  It simply means that grants will keep getting more and more competitive over the next two years (or until the US budget situation improves, whichever is later).

What can you do about it?  I’m going to be addressing that on a free teleseminar, where Gina Hiatt, PhD of the Academic Ladder will be interviewing me, on Thursday Dec 9th at 7pm EST.  A replay will be made available for a few days after, in case you can’t make it to the live call.  You can sign-up for the free call here: https://marketyourscience.com/survivegrantcrunch.html.  Make sure to have your questions ready!

ps – please don’t let the Great Grant Crunch notion freak you out.  Though it is a big deal, the core solution to something like this is just to realize it is coming, and do the very best you can to prepare.

“Running a lab is like running a business, but most labs are poorly run businesses – they throw money out the window.” - paraphrasing an article I saw in my campus periodical, the University Gazette.

You might be saying to yourself, "wait, MY lab isn't like that." But I hope you'll take a moment to think about this with me.

Like a business, our research labs depends on money to function. That money pays for people, supplies, and equipment.

And, like any business, there are only two ways to create more money:

1. Generate more funding through grants or contracts; or
2. Operate more efficiently with the funding that you have.

That’s it, door 1 or door 2.

For door 1, generating more grants used to be a viable option, but that keeps getting harder and harder to do. Many researchers are struggling just to maintain consistent funding, so expansion is out of the question for many. Grant funding is getting ever more scarce, and with the recent political changes in the US, the chance of increased science budgets in the near future is slim to none.

On the other hand, door 2 remains highly under-appreciated and underutilized. If you could operate your lab 20% more efficiently, let’s think about the implications of that in terms of your overall budget for people, supplies, and equipment:

Say you have a single R01 grant funding your lab right now at $200k/yr in direct costs (a relatively modest budget for a research lab).

Twenty percent of $200k/yr is $40k/yr. That’s enough money for:

- Two additional undergrad students (possibly three) working part time in your lab

- One additional graduate student, with leftover budget for supplies

- An advanced liquid chromatography instrument, or a centrifuge (lightly used)

The take-home message is that a relatively small increase in efficiency (20%) leads to significant gains in overall cash available to do more and better work. It is not chump change, and can make a real difference.

But the question is, how do we achieve that modest 20% gain? If it were so easy, wouldn’t everyone be doing it?

I ask you to think about how organized your lab is. How much time do you or your people spend searching for samples? How much time do you spend showing new people in the lab where stuff is, and training them on your procedures and protocols? Think about how quickly new people are at getting up to speed, and how efficient your existing personnel are…  What if you could substantially reduce those kind of inefficiencies?  It is not farfetched.

It does surprise me that “not everyone is doing it” – but I think years of expanding science budgets made it a bit too easy to focus on getting more money rather than maximally using the money that we have. With expanding science budgets far from assured, I predict a future where many labs are going to be turning to improved efficiency as an alternative approach. Those that do will likely get ahead.

Here’s an example: my department inventoried chemicals a few years ago, and we found a huge volume of a particular solvent in each lab, far more than we could ever use up. There were vastly redundant supplies of this chemical because nobody had a good tracking system to know who had what and where they had it. If there had been some kind of tracking in place, it would have saved thousands of dollars worth of this costly solvent. That is one example of many I’ve seen. Each one may be a small bit of money – but small bits of money have a way of adding up into big chunk of money.

You’re with me on this, right? Improving the efficiency of your lab’s operation boils down to:

1. Better communication, so that the people that need to get up to speed on new protocols aren’t held up and can get going on their jobs quickly and efficiently

2. Improved tracking of milestones and accomplishments, so you can hold people more accountable (this is really important!)

3. Better organization of your samples and supplies, so you know what you have, where it is located, and when you need more.

If you’re like me, you may look at this list and say, “well, that’s nice, but HOW do I do those things?” I used to think that this kind of stuff was only for those who aren’t organizationally challenged (like I am). I simply didn’t have the willpower to implement strong organizational systems in my lab.

But here’s the big bonus for organizationally dysfunctional folks like me: the advent of new internet-based technologies has now brought organizational improvement to within the grasp of even the chronically disorganized (as well as the people who are only mildly disorganized).

By applying these kinds of technologies to get more organized in each of the three key areas (communication, accountability, and sample/supply tracking), I have noticed significant improvements in efficiency.

In the next few articles, I’m going to cover some of the tools that I’ve discovered that can turn your lab from an inefficient, rusty machine into a well-oiled, efficient machine that cranks out work more quickly, and helps you keep ahead of the competition. It should easily help you become 20% more efficient. Stay tuned!

ps – want to be notified when the next article is posted?  Use the sign-up link here to subscribe to my newsletter, and get your Science Foundry report on improving your science and its recognition. (If you’re already signed up, no need to do so again).

pss –  Comments are not FDA approved, so it could kill you to leave one.  But if you’re the daredevil type, I dare you to go ahead and try.

You sit down with palms sweaty against the keyboard, ready to write your next grant proposal to get your Big Idea (™) funded. You are dead serious and you let your reviewers know it, as you spew forth a stream of endless facts and figures about the wonderful work you do and will do. This is how to write a grant, right? You know that your proposal is very impressive, and therefore agencies like the NIH, NSF, and DOE will clamor to fund it, right? Morgan shatters your illusions in this episode of Meta Morgan TV.

Thursdays are “Dear Morgan” days, when you get to ask questions about science and faculty careers – and Morgan answers them. Today’s question was: “What if my four year fixed term appointment is ending and won’t be renewed because of my failure to get grants, but I want to stay in science?” Morgan does some brainstorming about possible directions to take.

Recently Morgan was told that her approach to sharing her grant writing wisdom and knowledge was “guru centric.” “What?” asks Morgan? That’s crazy talk. Time to get out the tie dye t-shirts and incense sticks, and start chanting “Om” to get the big grants coming in. Maybe if we think hard enough about it, grants will fall from the sky into our laps. Yeah, right…. Morgan takes on the crazy talk. But if you want to call her the Grant Guru, that’s fine with her!

Reminder: Make sure to sign up for the “Win an iPad Contest” – I’m going to be spending $699 of my hard earned money to send one to a lucky person – so let that be you.

“Ommmm.”

http://morganonscience.com A reader wrote in saying, “How would you distinguish between the emotional reaction to your grant, versus things that could actually be wrong?” Morgan responds to the question on this episode of The Not So Boring Scientist (formerly Meta Morgan TV, a title abandoned because it was too boring!)

Sometimes getting an NIH grant is like pulling teeth, because you’ll submit a proposal that you think is great, and get reviews back that just pick it apart. But grant reviewers almost never tell you what they’re really thinking. In this episode, Morgan reveals why that is, and how you can avoid it.

Hey, get some key tips on science careers, including an excerpt from my upcoming book…