Category Archives: Randomness

Internal and external motivation and the GSK big-bonuses-for-a-successful-drug initiative

Posted on by

All opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Novo Nordisk.

The story in the Times of London about GSK’s new strategy for incentivizing its R&D teams by rewarding millions (yes millions) of dollars to deserving members of the team that gets a drug to approval has provoked a flurry of responses.   You can see posts from Derek Lowe, John LaMattina, and David Shaywitz that do a nice job of summarizing why this seems like a really bad idea in a lot of ways.  I don’t want to restate their arguments, other than to agree wholeheartedly that rewarding the lucky scientists will overall disincentivize researchers, will be difficult to administer fairly especially given the collaborative nature of biomedical research and the long, long timeframe for a drug to be approved, will have a great likelihood of upsetting and causing hard feelings in employees, and also misses the point that motivation is hardly what’s lacking in R&D these days.

I’d like to touch on that last point with respect to what I feel is particularly worrisome in this:  the complete externalization of motivation on the part of scientists, and the downstream consequences for ethical behavior and human health.  A recent survey commissioned by the Law Firm of Labaton Sucharow suggests that ethical standards on Wall Street are troubling.  About a quarter of respondents had observed or had firsthand knowledge of misconduct at their companies, and about a quarter also admitted they would engage in insider trading to make $10 Million if they thought they could get away with it.  If these GSK-type bonuses become the standard in BioPharma R&D, will we see a rise in unethical behavior on the part of scientists?  And could that lead to endangerment of human health, with clinical trials performed on compounds that are pushed farther than they should be because the R&D team is looking ahead to the possible prize?

I remember a mentor at Merck asking me after my first year how I liked my bonus.  I responded enthusiastically.  He nodded, smiled a  little and said, “Enjoy the feeling.  Because next year it won’t be the same.  It’ll just be something you expect.”  And he was right.  We talk about the perks of working for BioPharma, but there’s actually a cost to being in an environment that provides the kinds of lavish benefits we get in industry.  It can cause the personal source of motivation to shift from internal to external rewards.  Ultimately, for people who are creative, I think the best work is done when internal motivators are a strong part of the driving force–something Daniel Pink describes in his book Drive.  It’s why I think games work so well as a tool for getting things done.  They tap into internal motivating factors.  After all, no one (other than World of Warcraft Gold Farmers and the like) spends hours playing a game because they’re being paid to. We should not be trying to make an engaging, exciting pursuit like research into just something we do because it pays the bills.

Trying to keep my feet on the ground and not in my mouth

Posted on by

On the blog Ask a Korean! the author recently explored the concept of faulty memes and facile narratives in the context of the recent Asiana Airlines crash.  He pointed out that the connection Malcolm Gladwell suggested in Outliers, where he suggested the relatively high rate of airline crashes by Korean Airlines in the late 1900s was due to specific culturally-derived relationships among cockpit crew members.  In the post, the author critiques Gladwell’s arguments, showing several instances where the known facts of the events leading to a 1997 crash of a Korean Air flight were omitted or misinterpreted.

The post boils down to saying Gladwell used the facts that were convenient to the story he was trying to tell, and ignored those that didn’t fit, and that the result was too great a focus on cultural factors as the driving narrative behind these crashes.

This touched a nerve.  I currently subscribe to about 50 people on twitter and among those about five tweeted or retweeted links to the post.  On Ask a Korean! the author related that within a day that post had received 24,000 views.  Malcolm Gladwell sent a response which was published yesterday, and other bloggers have chimed in with their own views.

My own take is a personal one.  For me the greatest immediate impact was on my own writing and what I try to do as I blog.  As I write I am trying to tell stories, to put out ideas, because that seems the natural and most engaging way to put out information.  And I think it can be very easy to be selective in the use of facts and information to try to make a case.  Which is something I don’t want to do, because then I’m not drawing real connections between interesting things happening in different fields, I’m just building a tidy, pretty facade.

I’ll try not to let preconceived notions get in the way, and I’ll also ask you–all four or five of you that read this blog once in a while–to call me on it if you see something inaccurate and misinterpreted or selectively reported.  I don’t claim to be a journalist, but I do want to be fair and truthful in the things I say.

Undervalued assets in biopharma hiring: Adaptability

Posted on by

All opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Novo Nordisk.

A night of fantasy baseball goes horribly awry

This season I had a spectacularly poor fantasy baseball auction draft.  It was my own fault.  For those of you unfamiliar with fantasy sports, a group of friends create teams by selecting players from a real sports league and track their performance over the season.  The better your players perform, the better you do in your league.  Many leagues, like ours, select players by means of an auction draft.  Everyone gets a certain amount of virtual money to bid on different players, and you use that finite amount of money to fill out your roster.

On the night of our draft, because I had made plans to go out, I set up the auction software with a bunch of default values for different players.  Basically, amounts that I was willing to bid up to for each.  This is called robo-drafting.   I thought I’d set my boundaries well.

I was wrong. Continue reading →

Dealing with disruption: publishing houses and drug development

Posted on by

All opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Novo Nordisk.

I currently have about ten books strewn about my apartment, in various stages of being read.  Many I’ve been working through, on and off, for over a year.  And something that people keep asking me as they look around is, why don’t I just get a Kindle?  Part of the reason is that I’m cheap.  Also, I get a lot of my books from the library, and I get real pleasure from walking to the neighborhood library, checking out books, holding them and leafing through them, wandering up and down the aisles and also paying fines.  Lots of fines.  Which is okay, because the libraries need all the help they can get.  Although in counterpoint to that, a recent article from the Seattle Times described how in many ways libraries are still popular, even among younger people.

But I know that one day, probably pretty soon, I’ll succumb like a largemouth bass to the glowing lure of an electronic reader.  It makes too much sense.  I can still go the library, but it may be just for ideas of what I can purchase, or at least obtain electronically through the library’s ebook collection.  This is the literary world that the internet has enabled.  And it’s making life very difficult for the publishing houses.

When we talk about the changes technology enables, we know it’s messy.  There are disruptions, and there are often winners and losers.  Not because anyone is out to get anyone else, but just because environments select and support specific traits, and when those environments change, many of those traits no longer are adaptive.  We don’t have woolly mammoths because a combination of human hunting and warming climates most likely did them in; their environment changed.  The book publishing industry is in the middle of change due to new and different ways of marketing books, and to the rise of ebooks versus physical copies.

I’ve written before in this blog about drug development and how it can find parallels in other industries, and a recent article in WIRED really resonated.  Let me put down some quotes from the article, and see if they sound familiar:

“…awarding huge contracts for books that may not even be written yet creates tremendous risk.”  and “Predicting the success or failure of any given book is impossible.”  Hmm, replace books with “pre-clinical/early clinical stage drugs” and this is a familiar complaint by pharma.

“The publishing houses stay afloat only because the megahits pay for the flops, and there’s generally enough left over for profits.”  Yep, sounds familiar as a business plan.

“In the long term, what publishers have to fear the most may not be Amazon but an idea it has helped engender–that the only truly necessary players in the game are the author and the reader.”  To me, this speaks to the changing dynamic of drug development, where patient groups are using new internet tools to become more active players in the drug development process.

“The recently announced merger of the two biggest of the Big Six, Random House and Penguin, is widely seen as a move to build an entity that can stand up to Amazon’s market power.”  Now where have I seen mergers done as a business ploy before?

Drugs are not just like ebooks (although my post earlier this week did look at the concept of drugs as information). But drug development faces the same crisis of old ways of doing business not being sufficient to tackle new challenges brought about by changing environments.  In the case of drug development, the disruption is coming from the challenge of creating new, more effective drugs despite increasing regulatory requirements.  Can drug development learn anything from the problems the publishing houses are facing?

Unfortunately, as can be seen by the quotes above, so far the publishing industry doesn’t appear to have any new, magic bullet solutions that can teach the pharma business about dealing with disruption to old business models.   I suppose the key lesson, which many pharma and biotech already seem to be taking, is that adaptability is going to be a necessary component of business strategy moving forward.  Another possible lesson is that book publishers are having to ask what they’re really good at, and seeing how that can be adapted to a new world where authors have more power because they have new ways of reaching the reader.  Publishers are touting that they can provide the added value of savvy marketing and crackerjack editing to make themselves attractive to authors.  Even though we talk about social media as removing the need for traditional marketing, successful marketing is a skill however it’s accomplished, and a skill most authors don’t have and many don’t want to learn.

Pharma can similarly look at what they do best–clinical trials, sales and marketing–and possibly move out of the discovery part of things altogether.  It would be a radical change, but ignoring changing external factors and keeping the same business practices is unlikely to work in the long run.

Interestingly, in publishing I think the big winners when the dust settles might be…libraries!  While people want to buy books online, they still like to leaf through them.  You see the same phenomenon, by the way, with places like Best Buy.  People like to go see the physical item before hunching over their smartphone and doing one-click shopping.

This is leading to many bookstores becoming the de facto showroom for Amazon, and subsequently going out of business.  And when there are no neighborhood bookstores, people may turn even more to their local libraries.  There, they can not only see and leaf through books, but also talk to a friendly librarian without guilt and get recommendations.  One of the many things librarians excel at is navigating information and matching you up with the right book.  I wonder if we might eventually see librarians working on a partial commission basis, with you “tipping” them via Square or some other form of electronic money.  If we can download a song on impulse for 99 cents, wouldn’t we be willing to grant our librarians at least that much for helping us find the perfect novel?

Why Derek Jeter being a lousy defensive shortstop gives me hope for innovation in industry

Posted on by

All opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Novo Nordisk

Hat tip to Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs.com for the article that sparked this idea.

It used to be we knew what a good defender was in baseball.  And Derek Jeter was a good defender.  He had balletic grace, he scooped up balls and threw them with flair and panache, with an all-but-patented jump-throw that made announcers gush and coaches shake their heads in awe.  He was the complete package, a player who could hit, field, throw and lead, a first ballot hall of famer.

Except that, when you look closely, it turns out his defense is lousy.

Defense used to be measured (still is, by many) via the eye test.  How does a player look when catching balls in play?  And this was backed up by the statistic of fielding percentage.  How many balls did a player field cleanly?  It makes intuitive sense.  The more balls a player fields correctly, why, the better defender he must be, right?

Except that’s only part of defense.  It’s nice if a player can catch a ball well.  But what about balls that get by him?  In the last decade or so, baseball analysts began studying the concept of range.  All things being equal, the realization came, range is actually more important than errors or how a player looks.  It’s one thing to catch everything that gets to within a few steps to the shortstop’s right and left.  It’s another thing entirely to catch 98% of everything spanning the third baseman’s left pocket to the grass on the far side of second base.  When you consider the huge number of balls that are hit in the vicinity of the shortstop every season, and the relative value of a hit versus an out, those extra feet of range translate into saved runs.  And saved runs contribute to wins.

Just as an aside, current defensive metrics suggest Derek Jeter has cost the Yankees over a hundred runs relative to an average shortstop over his career.  Still a hall of famer.  Not a great defender.

However, those saved runs and that increased range come with a cost.  By definition, the best shortstops will have more chances to make a fielding play, and if you make more chances, you are likely to make more errors.  Indeed, the very fact that a great fielding shortstop is able to get to more hard hit balls on the edge of his range may well lead to a lower overall fielding percentage as well as a higher number of errors.

Fortunately for those shortstops, baseball teams are getting smarter and are realizing the tradeoff is worth it.  Scouting reports regularly cite range in addition to how a player looks, and fielding percentage is low on the list of statistics an organization cares about in evaluating a player.

And that gives me hope for innovation in two ways.  The first is the point above about the eye test.  We trust what we see and feel.  However, that’s not always the complete story.  Often in trying to implement innovation, there’s a gut feeling by those doing the evaluation–this is innovation, that isn’t, I can tell.  Only anecdotal evidence suggests that no, in fact, often people can’t tell.  Just ask Kodak.  However, if baseball can come to realize that the eye test, while important, is just one part of the evaluation package, industries can also learn that lesson and look for other, possibly less subjective ways to measure innovation.

The second relates to two contradictory things that are often said about innovation, sometimes one right after the other.  We need to innovate.  And we need to de-risk it to make sure that it will work.  Unfortunately, there can be no real innovation without the very real risk of failure.  In an interview with Wired magazine, the inventor James Dyson is described as having worked his way through 5127 prototypes of his bagless vacuum cleaner before hitting success.  But if baseball can come to realize that a decreased probability of fielding success is actually a good thing when it means a shortstop is reaching defensive heights few others can, maybe industries can finally realize that failure, in the right cause, is something to be celebrated and embraced.