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Ask a fresh-faced, bright-eyed Ph.D. student at the outset to name their career goal and a majority will say, “professor.” Although most of them will never get there. The numbers that achieve this goal are very low indeed, varying somewhere between 0.5-10%, depending on the country and discipline. One of the problems is that, inside academia, a non-academic […]

It’s often said that the most important task for leaders is to develop their people. While there’s more than a grain of truth in this, there’s also an old saying from personal growth, Let It Begin With Me. To be able to develop others, you need to care for your own development if only so they can

I caught up with my old friend, Mike Crawford while preparing a talk on research strategy. After a 30+ year career in academia, including 26+ years as a professor at U Texas at Austin, Mike joined a technology start-up as CTO in Idaho in 2004 and subsequently spent nine years at Siemens as a Fellow Engineer, before

Meetings are the bedrock of getting things done in organizations, or at least they could be. Despite all the practice we get, most people complain about meeting quality. Don’t expect them to improve on their own. Eric Barker’s Barking up the Wrong Tree blog has pulled together useful meeting resources in an article 5 ways to

Imagine that a professor were to beam in from a late 19th century laboratory. Once he had recovered from the shock of the trip itself and the variety of new machines and instruments surrounding him, he would begin to smile and nod in recognition about the familiarity of his current surroundings. Once he strayed outside the

I recently asked a group of research leaders how they would respond, when one of their people was trying to insist that a picture from a result was showing something that wasn’t in the data. The answers were varied. A few focused on the person’s need to please, a few talked about the person forgetting

Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund organized their first lab management course in 2002. After the 2005 edition, they issued the book Making the Right Moves (which you can download by following the link). Thomas R. Cech, then president of HHMI gave the keynote to the 2002 course. He shared the lessons he had learned

Time management is a topic that will always be with us. In a recent leadership workshop, one of the participants, a professor of physics, asked me about it. I thought that the wise words of Lewis Carroll, the pseudonym of Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson, on time management might appeal to him. They did. They illustrate the