Derek B. Lowe, Contributing Editor06.05.13
Let me take you on a quick nostalgia trip, back to an earlier day in pharma research. Do you remember when some companies used to actively boast that they encouraged their scientists to devote x% of their time to working on their own ideas? Whether this sounds vaguely familiar to you or comes across as a does-not-compute non sequitur will depend on how old you are. I only saw the tail end of that era myself, a time when such pledges were — to be honest — honored more in the breach rather than in the observance. But there were indeed companies that found it at least expedient to pretend that the policy was in place.
Does anyone still? I’ve heard that Google does, or at least did, encourage the practice (although I haven’t asked anyone who actually works there). But in biopharma, I can’t recall the last time I heard about anything of the kind. The same forces that cleared out the Central Research divisions of some of the big companies wiped out the idea of regular bench scientists working on their own projects. It became harder and harder to sell the board of directors (and the shareholders) on the idea that these were good uses of the time and money, what with all the other pressures on the bottom line, so off they went. Not that the shareholders became noticeably happier.
Since I never experienced this personally, I’ve always wondered if this policy was a lip-service exercise from the get-go, or if it really existed everywhere that proposed it. It’s hard to figure how one could carve off an even 10% of one’s time (the usual figure, I think). Projects don’t quite work that way, not even the ones that you’re explicitly assigned to. Many departments have gone through periods when they try dividing up chemists and biologists across projects, leading to ludicrous lists with items like “3.2 FTEs” next to a project name, as fine an example of the Nonsignificant Significant Figure as you could want.
Other parts of the company live for that sort of thing, though. I’m sure that many readers have had to fill out those time-sheet thingies that the accountants always want, listing what part of your efforts that month went to which project. When I started in the industry, it was a physical time card, a real index-card form that was filled out by hand. That was already a vestige of a passing era, and I like to think that I helped speed that passage a bit at my own company by writing slogans like “Down With the Time Card Oppressors!” on the back. Several weeks of increasingly militant messages went by until some junior-level oppressor noticed my editorializing and sent a rather militant message back to me. At any rate, these things are also full of out-to-two-digit estimates of effort, which are no less guaranteed to have been pulled out of thin than is the morning dew.
So did companies have some sort of project code for “Own Ideas” that you had to enter on such forms? And if so, did everyone just sort of put that down because it was expected of them, with a feeling that it might look odd if you didn’t? I ask because there’s always been something else that seems clear about this whole concept: it wasn’t for everyone.
I don’t mean that unkindly, and I’m not saying that this sort of thing always divided the smart and the motivated from the rest of the herd. But think back to co-workers you’ve had, or just put your head up and look at the ones around you now. Not all of them would feel at ease working on their own ideas. Not all of them even have their own ideas. I’ve had people tell me, in all seriousness, that they don’t have time to have ideas, and I could see their point, sadly. Some of these folks would be glad to come up with some if there weren’t two deadlines and three meetings per week, assuming that they haven’t lost the knack entirely. But others, well, you could have a pretty long wait even under ideal conditions.
Given this spread of desire and of ability, which I’m sure has obtained in the much the same way through the years, what did people do with their 10% “me-time”? My guess is that a substantial number of people just let it slide and kept trying to get their own official work done. They might, in some cases, have had some canned answer ready if anyone asked them what they were doing with their own-ideas allocation, but it was probably a variation of the same answer every time, since it never really got worked on much (or at all).
But there were, no doubt, people who took the chance to try some things out, and it’s worth asking what’s happened to them and to their type over the years. Some of them, unfortunately, have probably had the desire hammered out of them. My guess, though, is that others, the crankier or more motivated, have continued to do bits and pieces of their own thing. Instead of being able to (in theory) carve out 10% of their time from their usual workload, they’ve added 12% or so to gross things up. The sort of person who thinks up interesting ideas is usually the same sort that wants to see if they’ll actually work. (They’re not always the sort of person who can actually make them work, but that’s another story entirely).
This cohort is small, but hardy. It takes a certain kind of personality to strike out on one’s own like this. You have to have a lot of nerve, for one thing, and to be willing to look like a fool, if you fail, to those who knew about your efforts (and that very much includes a willingness to look like a fool to yourself, too). This is not everyone’s idea of a good time, but people who have the urge will probably do it whether they have official sanction or not. The saying that it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission is what such people live by, and I’ve no doubt that side projects that never yield much just never get talked about at all. (One wonders if the rise over the years of electronic notebooks has made true submarine projects less practical).
I think that a disproportionate amount of real scientific progress has come from this personality type, actually, even though they can be painful to have around. You certainly wouldn’t want to stock a whole department with them: what if they all got into phase, like flowering bamboo or something? But that takes us back to the original 10% idea. The official policy of personal time reserved for a company’s scientists was, perhaps, always a bit of a flattering version of reality. I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing to publicly sanction this kind of work, not at all. But I think that if you’ve hired the right kind of people, you’re always going to get some of it, no matter what. And if you’ve hired to wrong kind of people, no amount of official encouragement is going to make them more inventive than they already are.
Derek B. Lowe has been employed since 1989 in pharmaceutical drug discovery in several therapeutic areas. His blog, In the Pipeline, is an awfully good read. He can be reached at derekb.lowe@gmail.com.
Does anyone still? I’ve heard that Google does, or at least did, encourage the practice (although I haven’t asked anyone who actually works there). But in biopharma, I can’t recall the last time I heard about anything of the kind. The same forces that cleared out the Central Research divisions of some of the big companies wiped out the idea of regular bench scientists working on their own projects. It became harder and harder to sell the board of directors (and the shareholders) on the idea that these were good uses of the time and money, what with all the other pressures on the bottom line, so off they went. Not that the shareholders became noticeably happier.
Since I never experienced this personally, I’ve always wondered if this policy was a lip-service exercise from the get-go, or if it really existed everywhere that proposed it. It’s hard to figure how one could carve off an even 10% of one’s time (the usual figure, I think). Projects don’t quite work that way, not even the ones that you’re explicitly assigned to. Many departments have gone through periods when they try dividing up chemists and biologists across projects, leading to ludicrous lists with items like “3.2 FTEs” next to a project name, as fine an example of the Nonsignificant Significant Figure as you could want.
Other parts of the company live for that sort of thing, though. I’m sure that many readers have had to fill out those time-sheet thingies that the accountants always want, listing what part of your efforts that month went to which project. When I started in the industry, it was a physical time card, a real index-card form that was filled out by hand. That was already a vestige of a passing era, and I like to think that I helped speed that passage a bit at my own company by writing slogans like “Down With the Time Card Oppressors!” on the back. Several weeks of increasingly militant messages went by until some junior-level oppressor noticed my editorializing and sent a rather militant message back to me. At any rate, these things are also full of out-to-two-digit estimates of effort, which are no less guaranteed to have been pulled out of thin than is the morning dew.
So did companies have some sort of project code for “Own Ideas” that you had to enter on such forms? And if so, did everyone just sort of put that down because it was expected of them, with a feeling that it might look odd if you didn’t? I ask because there’s always been something else that seems clear about this whole concept: it wasn’t for everyone.
I don’t mean that unkindly, and I’m not saying that this sort of thing always divided the smart and the motivated from the rest of the herd. But think back to co-workers you’ve had, or just put your head up and look at the ones around you now. Not all of them would feel at ease working on their own ideas. Not all of them even have their own ideas. I’ve had people tell me, in all seriousness, that they don’t have time to have ideas, and I could see their point, sadly. Some of these folks would be glad to come up with some if there weren’t two deadlines and three meetings per week, assuming that they haven’t lost the knack entirely. But others, well, you could have a pretty long wait even under ideal conditions.
Given this spread of desire and of ability, which I’m sure has obtained in the much the same way through the years, what did people do with their 10% “me-time”? My guess is that a substantial number of people just let it slide and kept trying to get their own official work done. They might, in some cases, have had some canned answer ready if anyone asked them what they were doing with their own-ideas allocation, but it was probably a variation of the same answer every time, since it never really got worked on much (or at all).
But there were, no doubt, people who took the chance to try some things out, and it’s worth asking what’s happened to them and to their type over the years. Some of them, unfortunately, have probably had the desire hammered out of them. My guess, though, is that others, the crankier or more motivated, have continued to do bits and pieces of their own thing. Instead of being able to (in theory) carve out 10% of their time from their usual workload, they’ve added 12% or so to gross things up. The sort of person who thinks up interesting ideas is usually the same sort that wants to see if they’ll actually work. (They’re not always the sort of person who can actually make them work, but that’s another story entirely).
This cohort is small, but hardy. It takes a certain kind of personality to strike out on one’s own like this. You have to have a lot of nerve, for one thing, and to be willing to look like a fool, if you fail, to those who knew about your efforts (and that very much includes a willingness to look like a fool to yourself, too). This is not everyone’s idea of a good time, but people who have the urge will probably do it whether they have official sanction or not. The saying that it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission is what such people live by, and I’ve no doubt that side projects that never yield much just never get talked about at all. (One wonders if the rise over the years of electronic notebooks has made true submarine projects less practical).
I think that a disproportionate amount of real scientific progress has come from this personality type, actually, even though they can be painful to have around. You certainly wouldn’t want to stock a whole department with them: what if they all got into phase, like flowering bamboo or something? But that takes us back to the original 10% idea. The official policy of personal time reserved for a company’s scientists was, perhaps, always a bit of a flattering version of reality. I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing to publicly sanction this kind of work, not at all. But I think that if you’ve hired the right kind of people, you’re always going to get some of it, no matter what. And if you’ve hired to wrong kind of people, no amount of official encouragement is going to make them more inventive than they already are.
Derek B. Lowe has been employed since 1989 in pharmaceutical drug discovery in several therapeutic areas. His blog, In the Pipeline, is an awfully good read. He can be reached at derekb.lowe@gmail.com.