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The Gilman Test

Over dinner the other night, a very experienced Pharmaceutical Industry executive asked me one of those awkward questions people reserve for the second bottle of wine.

“Why is drug discovery productivity so low when so much is spent on new technology like combi-chem, High Throughput Screening, protein structure determination, etcetera, etcetera?”

I said that I didn’t know, because the scientists I meet in Pharma companies are still the clever hard-working, high integrity people they always were. I said I thought that the size and complexity of large organisations and management obsessed with “process change” and “work smarter” initiatives that get people working on things other than drug discovery was ultimately a sign of weakness and was probably part of the problem.

I spent several (wasted) years of my life actively engaged in this kind of large company “strategic change initiative” which meant I was permanently on planes heading to window-less rooms in bland hotels where  a group of us middle rank managers would “brainstorm” and “envision” the future, led by some charming facilitator with post-it pads and flip charts, organising us into break-out groups and workshops. It was all very exciting to start with. It felt like being part of the chosen ones, changing the future. It took me a few rounds of this to realise that the organisation was in love with the change process, not the change itself. It got to the point where I could keep the slide pack from one change initiative and recycle them in the next. My contacts in the industry tell me that this obsession with process change continues. I offered to lend them my slide packs from 10 years ago, but I think the jargon needs updating. 

I quit when I couldn’t face the thought of another “brown paper brainstorming”. I still have an allergic reaction to flip charts and post-it’s.

Mostly though, I quit because I didn’t think what I was doing passed the Gilman Test.


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