- [Bob] You know, you can be as pure
as you want about science,
and definitely the ideals which we operate in the lab
are as pure as we can be about science
and discovering truth.
At the end of the day, you know,
you have to run a lab,
and running a lab means you have to fundraise,
you have to create opportunities,
you have to create, have resources,
you have to create this playground,
this sandbox where we can all come and play,
and I think of it as kinda serious play,
where it needs to be playful and creative and fun,
but we're trying to make discoveries.
And if you don't do that,
you're gonna be out of business
and not get to play.
(mellow music)
- [Thi] Welcome to Strategy for Scientists.
This is a podcast for scientists interested in learning
about the fundamentals of business strategy through stories.
I'm Thi Nguyen for Strategy for Scientists
at the University of California San Francisco.
In this podcast,
I talk to Bob Farese,
professor of genetics and complex diseases
at Harvard Chan School of Public Health
and professor of cell biology at Harvard Medical School.
We talked about opportunity costs in running a lab,
promoting your lab brand,
strategies regarding competition,
and an interesting way to organize and lead a lab.
These stories bring a business lens
to decision-making in an academic lab.
So I asked Bob about an example
of opportunity cost in the lab.
According to Investopedia,
an opportunity cost represents an alternative given up
when a decision is made.
For example,
when you decide to work on Project A,
the opportunity cost is the data lost
by not working on Project B.
Bob speaks a little about how he thinks
about picking projects.
- [Bob] In my experience,
you know, there's this business rule,
I think it's called Pareto's Rule,
that about 85% of your productivity
comes from about 15 to 20% of your projects.
So just, you know,
not every project is equal in terms of its impact,
and that's a bit unforeseeable at the start.
We like to believe at the start,
they all have great potential for impact.
But then there's a lotta variables, you know?
The world changes, science changes,
the person working on the project
may or may not have success,
the project itself might or might not be solvable,
and so at the end of the day,
some things become very impactful,
and often for unpredictable reasons.
Maybe you make a discovery
that you didn't foresee at all.
And so at the end of the day,
I think that it's, you know,
it falls in sort of the usual rules of productivity,
where 85% of your productivity
might be in 15 or 20% of your projects.
So as you begin to realize that as a lab leader,
you wanna pay laser-like attention to those things
that you think are of really big important impact
and, you know, make sure that they're moving along,
make sure that you're moving road blocks.
So I think that's the instinct of any leader
is to really pick up on things that are important.
- [Thi] According to Bob,
one aspect of a strategy in picking projects
is paying laser-like attention
to the projects that might have greatest impact.
- [Bob] You know, they might be too hard to do.
They might, we might not have the right technology to do it,
or our hypothesis might just be wrong,
and those are difficult moments,
but I think it's the responsibility of the leader
to see that coming
and, you know, to sit down with the person doing it
and, you know, just have a honest, transparent conversation,
which means, you know,
we recognize all the work that's been put into this
and we have to put it away
or put it on the shelf for now,
and it would be better to throw good money after good money,
or a good project,
rather than keep throwing good money
or good effort on a bad,
after bad money.
And they're difficult decisions,
but I think one has to keep constantly aware of that,
because it's very easy to waste resources,
you know, on bad ideas.
- [Thi] We also talked about branding the lab.
Now, branding sounds like such a businessy term,
but all it is is defining the values for your lab
and what you want others to think about
when they think about your lab.
I anticipated he might want the lab
to be known for the genes they discovered
or their important work in lipid metabolism,
but Bob's answer was broader, bigger picture,
and in a sense, more personal.
- [Bob] The question of promoting the brand
and similar kinds of things
relates to ultimately, does it serve the work?
Okay?
So we have a certain mission in our laboratory,
and everyone is, you know,
pulling together in alignment trying to accomplish
the mission of discovering things that we're interested in.
So it becomes important,
in my view,
to, in service to that work,
that we have a brand of science that we can stand behind.
Which to me means,
and I've tried to do this throughout my career,
is that there's a certain quality that's of science
and communication of that science
that's associated with all of our work.
Not everything you do is a home run, you know?
Or a Science or Nature paper.
There are a bunch of base hits.
There's a bunch of doubles,
maybe a triple here and there.
Each of those pieces of work
that is the product of your lab,
in my view, for me,
needs to have a certain quality
that we put our stamp of approval on.
That for me also carries over into
how I present my work to other people,
how I give talks,
how I communicate my science,
which I think is extremely important,
because that's your interface with the rest of the world.
And in our papers,
which are even more important,
because that is the peer reviewed recorded document
of your work,
and definitely where what you do meets the outside world
and meets anyone in the outside world,
not just who happens to show up at your talk, you know?
In my view, when you think about it,
that's really where you want your brand to shine,
and that you have to decide what the values are
of that brand,
but for us it's, you know,
high-quality science done to the best of our abilities
and communicated to the best of our abilities,
and we, as lab leaders,
Toby and I try to make sure
that people in the lab drink the Kool-Aid
and they wanna,
they're here because they also believe in that.
- [Thi] So you heard Bob mention Toby.
Toby is the other PI in their joint lab.
But more on Toby later.
Bob views the lab's brand as the quality work,
communication of their work,
and now the more personal aspect of the brand.
- [Bob] You are a person while you're doing your science,
and therefore that is an important component of your brand.
Do you treat people with respect?
Do you recognize other good science
and, you know, applaud them and give them credit?
Are you a good colleague?
Do you, are you helpful?
You know, these things are all,
I think, less obvious,
but very important.
- [Thi] In defining the brand of a lab,
you're thinking about your values
or your value proposition.
Why is the work you're doing important,
how are you doing it,
and how is it different from other people?
Well, this led me to ask him about competition,
because when you're defining your brand,
you're carving out your unique space,
your niche compared to others.
So I asked him his philosophy
and strategies in dealing with competition.
- [Bob] I welcome competition,
because in the right view,
it spurs us on to do our very best work,
to do science the best we can do.
- [Thi] So Bob welcomes competition
because it helps you to do your science better,
but what does he specifically do
if he finds out someone is working on the same story?
Here's what he had to say.
- [Bob] That happens to a lot of us,
and it's certainly happened to me
numerous times in my career,
I've become aware somebody else
is working on something similar.
I think there are different ways to handle that.
If it's early on and you know the person,
they're a colleague,
you may wanna have a conversation, you know?
I heard you're interested in this.
We're also interested in this problem.
Do you wanna chat?
We'd like to know how far along you are.
I mean, again,
the opportunity cost, I'm not sure,
sometimes it's not worth redoing something
that someone else is almost finished with, for example.
On the other hand,
I believe that, you know,
different people can set out with the same project
and the same goal
and come up with different discoveries.
You know, it depends on how much you've sunk into it,
but if you've sunk a lot into it,
I think there's a lotta merit in doing what you do.
One person may be first,
but there's a lot of value for science of having, you know,
two people figure something out
and come to the same conclusions.
- [Thi] I also asked Bob
about the organizational context of the lab,
not necessarily how big it is
or where he wants the lab to be,
but about how he leads it.
And Bob has a unique model
in the sense that he has a scientific partner,
Tobias Walther.
The Farese-Walther lab members
benefit from the shared minds of both PIs.
Bob talks a little bit about the benefits of this model.
- [Bob] So I think our lab takes on the characteristics,
the personalities,
and the values that Toby and I share and project,
and, you know, that's very exciting.
We didn't talk much about partnerships
and running the lab,
but that I've been doing over a distance
with Toby for about 12 years,
and the last two and a half years together,
and it's a really exciting way to run a lab with, you know,
the things that come in any partnership.
If you share common values
and a dedication to synergistic creativity
that happens through the power of two people
where one plus one is three,
it can just be a really fantastic thing.
And then of course we share a lot of values
and a lot of,
we agree on the vast majority of the important things,
but we both bring different personalities to the lab,
and I think that people in the lab
then pick up these things from both of us, you know,
and hopefully are the better for it.
- [Thi] Thank you for tuning into Strategy for Scientists.
Are you interested in learning more?
Check out the online lectures co-produced by iBiology
and the UCSF Office of Career and Professional Development.
Tune in for more stories about scientists using strategy.