At the risk of giving you the impression that Idaho is full of backwoods uneducated types, I’m going to mention a recent article about the “vaccination debate” here in Idaho.

The article tells the story of a group of anti-immunization crusaders in Northern Idaho through the lens of two contrasting women. One of these is the leader of the anti-immunization folks, Ingri Cassel. The other is state epidemiologist Christine Hahn.

I’m not going to wade into the depths of the vaccination debate except to say that the vast majority of research points to vaccines being effective, and as a scientist, I like to make decisions based on data, rather than just speculation (when data is available, at least).

But what I will wade into is the communication debate. The article says about Cassel that she’s a “heart-on-her-sleeve rabblerouser who takes on everyone.” It says about Hahn that she “has no desire to engage in a heated debate over vaccinations.”

And that, my friends, is why science is going to loose a battle, yet again.

If you’ve noticed the alarming trend towards science loosing battles against all manner of crazies, you’ve got your reason why in the two quotes above.

The non-science folks are passionate. They tell stories. They pound the pavement. They “market” their ideas.

And most of the scientists on the other side just sit there thinking that “the facts will speak for themselves.”

No, facts don’t speak. Not now, not ever.

The public doesn’t care about the subtle nuances of immunogenicity or fancy buzzwords like that. They listen to passion and stories (yes, anecdotal ones).

If you think this problem is isolated to just a few loonies in Northern Idaho, think again. This is a significant trend that we’ve seen happen in the climate change debates, in the evolution vs creationism, and many more.

If science is going to prevail, scientists are going to have to start being passionate communicators for the value of what they do. Otherwise, we may be doomed.

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”.

I wanted to find out: what is the most pressing challenge you’re currently facing in your science career, and how can I help?

I used good ol’ Survey Monkey, and got > 200 responses so far. Yay! The results were interesting and a bit surprising to me. They also caused me to go off on a bit of a rant about how to learn effective grant writing. Ok, not really a rant, but kind of a Morgan “being opinionated” kinda thing. Here’s the video:

Hope you find it informative, and if you do, please hit the Facebook Like button.

Cheers!

ps – if you want that link for the grant strategy session that I gave out in the video, it is here: http://grantfoundry.com/grantstrategy.html

In this video, I introduce the concept of software-as-a-service, and discuss one system that uses this approach to maximize lab efficiency. The videos and the text cover mostly the same material, so you can choose whichever format you prefer – but make sure to check the end of the text here for something special I lined up in case you’re interested in using the system discussed.

In the last article I illustrated how you can gain a hypothetical $40k/yr for your research using a modest assumption that you can increase your overall efficiency by 20% for a lab operating on a budget of $200k/yr. In this post I’m going to show you one system that might help you accomplish that.

Let’s start by thinking about this scenario: you had a post-doc who published a paper five years ago.  Today, someone calls you up to ask for the cell line that he used and the protocols to grow it.

Where is it?  What state is it in?  How do you grow it?

Brushing off the dust

You could brush off the dust and hunt through stacks of old lab notebooks, trying to find information about his experiments.  Then once you find it, you’d have to go hunt through your freezers, and hope that you can find the original dishes, intelligibly labeled.
Think about how much time you might spend on a request like that.  In my own case, the answer is not pretty.  (In fact, I get a bit anxious even thinking about it).

There are all sorts of “little bleeds” like this, sapping time and money from your lab (and mine!).

The web has enabled a new way of handling these kinds of situations to stop the bleed. For the past few years I’ve been exploring “cloud-based” solutions for organizing lab activities.  Many have been useful, but most are generic business-focused solutions.  Much more recently, I’ve run across several solutions that are very specifically designed for science labs, and this got me curious.  Do they stack up?  Will they help make the lab run more efficiently?

The first one of those systems that I’d heard of early this year is BioKM by the company BioData.  I started playing around with a demo of the system last summer, and was sufficiently impressed to go a bit deeper with it.  The rest of this blog post dives into the system in more depth (as do the videos). I’ll say up front that I’m excited about the system and I’m putting it into place in my own lab, so the text may show a bit of that excitement…

Easy to use from the start

From my first experience with the system, I could tell that this was designed by a scientist for a scientist.  It is quite intuitive.  I had no trouble figuring out how to navigate through and see all the different aspects of my projects, data, supplies, and so on.

It did take me a while to figure out how powerful the linking feature is (more on that below), as it wasn’t immediately obvious how much could be done with that.  But once I figured that out, it is a “killer” feature.

The reason linking is so important is illustrated by the example I gave before about the request for a former post-doc’s cell lines. In a system like BioKM, responding to this request is pretty simple: you log in, navigate over to the “papers” section to find the published paper, and then see all of the items that are linked to the finished paper – the cell cultures, protocols, and reagents.  BioKM tracks location information (down to the individual well or test tube), so, as long as someone entered the information in the first place, you’ll pinpoint where the cultures are right away.  The protocols are also linked, so that when you send the sample off to your colleague, you can include a copy of the protocol.

Thinking about that makes me wish I had had such a system in place years ago!  I can think of several headaches that would have been spared.

Anyway, I’ve recently become an efficiency nut.  I used to be one of the most disorganized people on the planet, and the more I get organized, the more efficient that all my operations (lab and businesses) run.  Hopefully it is pretty clear to you too how tracking your supplies, materials, and protocols is so important if you want an efficient lab.

Drilling down into how BioKM might help accomplish this, it focuses on organizing five primary areas of your operations:

1. Track your projects to hold people accountable, make sure they are on task and that they are operating efficiently. The interface has a full-featured group project tracking application where you can define a project (e.g. “Develop new HIV vaccine”) and then break that into milestones (e.g. “Determine the proteins involved in immune evasion” and “Determine the biological effects of mutations at the L42 locus”).  Each milestone is broken down into tasks, and you can set deadlines or goals for those that appear on the group calendar.  For each milestone, you can attach notes, experiments, and files.  You can delegate the tasks to individuals in your group, and track who is getting what done.  You can find out where the bottleneck is, and quickly move to overcome it.  This stuff is really important – by introducing project and milestone tracking in my own lab, we’ve seen a significant improvement in output.  Also, by implementing better tracking and accountability, you actually make your staff happier to work in your lab (that’s really important if you want them to be productive!).   They will feel more focused and clear on what they are supposed to be doing, rather than being stuck with the frustration of not knowing what to do next.
2. Track your specimens – never wonder where they are again. Most of us working in or running biology labs create and/or operate with specimens (cell lines, animal lines, plants, etc) of one kind or another.  Even though these are often costly to develop or acquire, keeping track of them can be a real problem. This is especially true when people leave.  As we talked about with the former post-doc example, this is especially problematic when people leave your lab.  In our lab’s freezers we have stocks that are from people that left years ago, and with an impending move, I’m not sure how to deal with the problem.  I wish we’d had something like this to better track them.
3. Increase your lab’s communication efficiency with the knowledgebase. The knowledgebase in BioData is designed to keep track of your papers, protocols, documents, and images.  If you’re like most labs, more than once you’ve tried to find a protocol developed by a former student or technician, and it was left on an old computer hard drive somewhere, or buried in a stack of lab notebooks.  If you’re lucky it only takes a few hours to find it.  If you’re unlucky, you have to re-create it from scratch.  I remember one case in particular of a paper that a postdoc had written and that we submitted before he moved on to a faculty job.  Later, when revisions had to be done to get it accepted, he was completely incommunicado due to being in New Orleans during Katrina.  He’d had to leave without his stuff or his computers, and was homeless!  So I had to piece together what he’d done, and re-create two figures from scratch to get the paper into shape.  That consumed several days of my time and tons of patience in trying to piece these things together.  I can only imagine the difference it would have made to have this all in one place at the time.It is clear that the BioKM system is designed to facilitate locating these kinds of documents centrally, so that you’ll be able to access them (or give access to them) immediately, anywhere you are.  When new images are acquired (e.g. from a microscope or gel), you can have a look at them so that you and your people can communicate and figure out what to do next.  This may take some habit re-setting for people in your lab (as I’ve gone through implementing a system like this), but the payoff can be big.  Next time you sit down to write a manuscript, you can immediately grab the relevant images and protocols to put into the paper. Yay for that.
4. Track your gene, primer, RNA, and antibody sequences. Genes, primers, plasmids, antibodies – all of these have sequences that usually need to be stored for later use.  Storing them in flat file documents on your hard drive means that you’ll spend a lot more time hunting for them the next time you need them – and if your hard drive fails, they’re gone. Nothing drives me crazy more than when a critical sequence gets lost in a hard drive crash.  I’ve seen it happen. Biodata allows you to store sequences, then link them to other objects such as protocols, papers, or cultures.
5. Use your supplies efficiently, and don’t run out. One of the challenges running a wet lab is keeping track of supplies such as reagents and enzymes, knowing when more needs to be ordered, when stocks are getting low (or out of date), and so on.  This is a part I’m really horrible at.  Just this one function can consume many hours per week.  BioKM has a module designed to optimize tracking of stocks and the vendors that you order from. It tracks quantities, costs, vendors, and the actual physical locations of your current stocks, and it can facilitate placing orders when stocks are low.  It can help eliminate redundancy, going in the direction of “lean” operations.  This is a good thing all around.

While it’s handy to have each of those individual tracking capabilities, the thing that is the most powerful about the system that linking thing I mentioned before.  It allows you to link all of your items together.  You can orchestrate and track complex experiments, having a protocol tied to the reagents and cultures, with milestones and tasks delegated to various people in the lab.  When it’s all done and distilled into a paper, that paper can be uploaded and linked to all the bits of information used to produce it.  I love this idea, and I hope you don’t mind if I repeat myself: I wish I’d had this kind of system in place years ago!  (My lab is about to undergo a big move, and the thought of figuring out where everything is – and what it is – scares me.  It could have been so much simpler if we’d had this system…)

As you can probably tell, I’m into this.  I think that this kind of tracking can save both time and money – but also sanity.

I’d like to say a word about cost.  BioKM isn’t free after the first 30 days, it is a paid subscription (you can get started very inexpensively, but for a big lab the price goes up).  While I’m very much in favor of free solutions, sometimes (often times!) free solutions come with a big cost: your time.  I’ve had plenty of “free” software that sapped days, weeks, or months to get up and running.  I contacted BioData while writing this post, and they reminded me about the responsive support they provide people to get up and running. I hadn’t thought about it, because I didn’t need any support to get going with the system.  But it is nice to know that it is there.  Also, when I talked to BioData, they offered a coupon code to help with the cost a bit – see the end of this post for that.

In studying successful people in all walks of life, this is one thing that they do: they realize that time is the very most precious resource they have.  You can get more money, but not more time.  This realization was slow to dawn on me, but it has resulted in tremendous gains in my productivity.  My point is that when you think about whether the cost of a system like this is worth it or not, I do hope you’ll include your time costs for the alternatives (such as doing nothing or implementing a free solution).

One major deficiency (but it is common to all organizational systems)

I have to be realistic about one big deficiency of all such systems: you have to get in the habit of using it, and so do your people. Without that habit, it will be useless to you. Depending on you and your staff’s natural inclination towards such things, this could be a minor or a major challenge.

In my lab, we’ve experimented with various organizational systems for our data and projects, and I’ve found that, following an initial burst of use, enthusiasm wears off, and some people will stop using a system, unless prodded to do so.

In general, I’ve found that it takes 20-40 days of doing something regularly to make it into a habit.  Personally, the idea of making my lab a lot more efficient is worth the effort to make that into a habit for myself and the staff.  But I just want you to be aware that it takes some time and focus to do.

Here I show a short overview of the system in case you want to see how it works:

In this video, I give an overview of the BioKM system.  At the end of the video I mention that the company has offered a discount for Morgan On Science readers by using the coupon code “SciFoundry”  The company contacted me after seeing the video and reminded me that the discount is 15% for the first year, rather than 10%.

Storing data externally

The one issue that bears discussion is the storage of your data on external servers.  The positive in this is that you don’t have to worry about maintenance, backups, crashed hard drives, and etc.  That worrying is done by the people that maintain the servers at the other end.  The two potential downsides that arise over this are data security and data recoverability.  On the data security end, I’m not too concerned because BioKM uses the https encrypted protocol for communications – the same one used by credit card companies.  Is it perfect? No, but neither is a computer sitting in a lab (which can be hacked or stolen – especially if it is a laptop).

On the point of whether your data is recoverable, BioKM does have an export feature.  To ameliorate any concerns about this, I’m going to set someone up in my lab to do an export once every two weeks or so, just as a precautionary measure.  Then I’ll store those export data sets on a backup drive somewhere secure.  That way you make sure to always have a recent copy of your data both locally and on the BioKM servers.

To wrap up, I like it a lot.  While there are some other great systems for doing some of what this does, this is the first I’ve encountered that deals with both the project management side and the supplies/reagents/stocks side of things so well.

How to get it: BioData offers a 30 day free trial at http://grantdynamo.com/biodata.html.  When I contacted them, they said they’d offer a 15% discount for the first year of use to readers of this blog.  If you’re into that kind of thing, you can use the coupon code “SciFoundry” when you sign up.

Enjoy getting organized, and stay tuned for overviews of other organizational systems.

ps – make sure to leave a comment with your thoughts about implementing such a system in your own lab. Do you think it would help?

Note: Biodata will pay a small affiliate commission to me for anyone who uses the coupon code, so we both win when you use it – I can keep creating more books and training on science careers and you can save money.  I would never recommend something that I don’t think is the cat’s meow (meaning good enough that I’d use it in my lab).

“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.

We all know that science education has been slipping … along with our society’s general interest in things related to science.

This is really bad, methinks.  We need more scientific innovation, not less, to face the challenges of today – energy, hunger, poverty, disease, and all those other nasties.

The question is, how do we do this?  One way is to improve our science communication and marketing skills, so that when we encounter members of the general public (like those pesky inlaws at parties) we can actually explain what we do in an interesting way.

But a second way is to get people started early in their science careers, and to help them along.

I’ve decided to do something about this: I’m going to put 10% of all proceeds from my consulting work, grant writing book, coaching, and grant writing course towards one or more charities that promote science and/or science education.

And here’s where you can help.  I haven’t had time to research the best charities for this kind of work, so I need your ideas and thoughts.

So, can you leave me a comment below with your favorite charity to support?  Even if you’re involved in your own charity, this is your chance to pipe up (as long as it’s authentic).

Let’s get a good list going, and then in a future post I’ll narrow it down, and we can take votes on the top few.

Thanks in advance for your help!

The title of the post relates to a debate going on over at the Science Careers Blog.

The editor there was responding to an article by Dr. Isis that was responding to an article by Vijee Venkatraman titled: “Time to Hire a Housekeeper?”

The debate boils down to this: Vijee and Jim are saying that the idea of hiring a housekeeper is a great way to leverage your time and focus on the important things. The advice in the original article is particularly focused on female scientists.

This got the bees abuzzin’ – Dr. Isis and others are offended that the advice is particularly targeted at women. Their point: why is this advice specific to women?

It is not: anyone who wants to be really successful at a science career needs to learn how to leverage time – regardless of the particular anatomical bits one was born with.

One of the commenters over on the Science Careers blog went so far as to imply that we should all be doing housework, because to hire someone with a different skin color or of a different gender is somehow demeaning and discriminatory.

Pffft.

It is a simple equation. How much has society invested in the training of a scientist? Many years and over a hundred thousand dollars. This resulted in a skillset that few people have. Not just anyone can develop cures for cancer, or develop the next generation of fusion reactor, or etc.

But just about anyone can clean a house.

And in fact, there are a ton of people without jobs at the moment.

I don’t understand why some people are so weird about the idea of hiring help – as if it were just another thumbing-of-noses at others of lesser economic status. It seems like a win-win to me – use your specialized skills to maximal benefit, and give someone else a job so they can feed their kids.

In any case,the original article did made a mistake in targeting this specifically at women. While I don’t agree with Dr. Isis that this is another sign of bias against women, it does smack a bit much of a stereotype.

I can see why they did it. A lot of women are raised to feel that it is our responsibility to “maintain the household.” This breeds a sort of “internal pressure” to take care of household responsibilities that men often aren’t raised with.

Hence, I think it is easier for men to give up that responsibility by hiring someone to help. For some women, I think a bit of guilt comes with doing that.

And that guilt might just be a sufficient activation barrier that the hiring-of-help doesn’t happen.

I believe that was the reason that the Science Careers article by Vijaysree focused on women.

Perhaps that was a tactical mistake. But the central message is correct for any scientist.

Learn to leverage your time, and focus on what you’re good at, while preserving your precious free time for the things you enjoy.

In her video, “The Risk of Starting a Career in Science,” Zella Zanolli talks about the frustrations of sacrificing everything for her science career, then struggling to find a good science position. This is sadly a common story. Does it mean you should give up on having a science career? As usual, Morgan provides a unique perspective on the question… watch the video to find out, and post your comments on the blog.

Morgan explores her own experience with fear and the impact it had on her life, then talks about the importance of banishing it to do truly great work.

Today I had a conversation with someone who is now working for free at a major academic center.

Yes, that’s right. This person is no longer being paid a salary – but is still working.

The center that this person is working at brings in a few hundred million per year in grant money – on top of hundreds of millions in patient care revenues, etc.

But, because the person hasn’t received a grant for a while, the university has shut off the salary.

“Sorry, no grants, no paycheck.”

“Oh, you need to eat? Food? Maybe you can eat agar left over from the latest experiment while you wait for three months to see if you’re graced by the roll of the NIH grant dice.”

“By the way, we still expect you to teach that course next fall for all the med students, but we don’t have any money for your salary to do that – you’ll have to milk the NIH for that.”

This is taking things too far.

I’m calling a spade a spade – and this is the worst kind.

Universities seem to have gotten this notion that this is a “business” and that all their scientists are “businesspeople”. This is especially true in academic medicine.

But I’ve got news for the administrators who think they are being so smart by running things “like a business:”

Yes, in a business, salary can go to zero if you’re not “productive” enough. No difference here.

But, in a business, salary can go to millions or billions if you’re extremely productive.
BIG difference here. In a business, there’s huge upside potential. In an academic job?
Not so much, these days.

Basically, what the university is doing to this person (and many are doing to many people) is saying: you’re taking all the risk on the downside, but you get none of the upside potential.

You get no grants, you get no salary.
You get millions of dollars in grants, and you get no extra salary*.

It’s not the way to motivate people, folks. At least not the really smart and really capable people. They will see right through the ruse (why do you think I own two businesses? I don’t want to miss out on the upside potential of my own particular skills and talents).

I’m happy to take on the risk of my salary going to zero – as long as the university is happy to pay me at least 30% of the total grant revenue I bring in each year. (ummmm errrr maybe I shouldn’t be giving them any ideas about “businessifying” academia even more)

It is saddening to me that the academy has gotten to this point. I understand that everyone has big budget pressures to deal with. I try to be sympathetic about that. But the question that admins should be asking themselves are, “what are the long-term ramifications of my budget cutting decisions?”

The long term ramifications of putting people in a situation where there is only downside but no upside is low morale, and a flight of talent.

When the talent flees, the revenue will drop.
When the revenue drops, more budgets get cut.

And things go into a death spiral.

That’s not the way to run a business, folks. Most businesses who go into that kind of death spiral die (or get bailed out by the government).

Universities: treat your scientists (and all your people) well! You should be treating them like kings and queens, not like peons. These are the people that make your university great – and bring in hundreds of millions of dollars in grants.

Universities administrators that “get this” will be leading successful institutions into the future.