When hell is other people, find salvation in raising your game to a higher level!

A colleague said something recently that made me smile, when discussing some of the more frustrating aspects of life in the contemporary workplace or office - "The hardest part of my job is dealing with the other people in the office." - which might appear to be a rather typical or even urbane statement on the one hand, yet being completely revealing on the other. I laughed out loud at the comment, but it raises a few interesting points, perhaps the most pertinent being - is it you or is it them?

Anyone who has spent any real time in laboratories, offices or agencies knows that sticking a bunch of highly educated people together and asking them to get along and work contentedly beside each other is indeed asking for a lot. How many laboratories (for example) are truly full of the happiest bunch of people, skipping like little spring lambs through the experiments, all feeling that they get their fair share of attention/appreciation from the boss, and the same equal fair share of publications and scientific glory, and all freely socialising with one another even outside of the lab? And by the way, that's meant to be a rhetorical question, people!

Wasn't it Sartre who said that "Hell is other people"? Perchance, and he was not wrong, at least some of the time. It is unquestionable that one bad apple can ruin the barrel, but if you are feeling like the office is full of bad apples and they ruin your barrel, what is the right thing to conclude from that scenario? Surely in any remotely professional outfit, it would be almost inconceivable that management could be so off-the-ball that they would hire a bunch of people who are destined (meant?) to not like each other, right? That's another rhetorical question, by the way! 

As unlikely as it seems, it sure can happen, and whether it's by design or incompetence is almost irrelevant, because the challenge remains the same. But you know, for all the currently in vogue bleating about "the Team" (capital "T" intended!) and how "there is no I in Team" etc., I feel that in many jobs, most of the time, we should be and still are independently responsible for our productivity and output, irrespective of any team (small "t" intended!). As all cosy-warm and touchy-feely the concept is, I have seen examples where the concept allows under-performers to hide behind that big "T" in Team, and over-achievers to feel under-appreciated or insufficiently credited. 

Irrespective of the most definite infringement on your happy day that difficult co-workers are, one has to keep them in their place (maybe rather than putting them in their place!) as just that - simply co-workers, nothing more.  Focus less on them, and the chaos they may cause or attempt to cause, and remain as task-oriented as ever. In my opinion, while you may not necessarily get any social awards for putting tasks above people, neither will you ever get fired for being amazingly productive and task-oriented, and always delivering on time. Wasn't it Peter Buck (REM) who said that it's amazing how far you can go in business just by showing up for meetings (and presumably delivering) on time? 

Delivering most definitely has an "I" in it (more than one in fact!), and it definitely has no "T". Contributing your part of a team task will generally always get you a nod, whereas being difficult (co-workers) or getting yourself sucked into other people's chaos will not. The choice is clear. Furthermore, those who let others derail their day, and impact their productivity, are actually giving their office nemesis precisely what he-she wants, and playing right into their hands; they get to walk away saying you are the problem, after you get played into poor behaviour in front of someone more senior. Additionally, although workplace nemeses do exist, in many cases if one (or ideally both) takes a step back and tries even for a few minutes to see the other person's point of view or problem, then one can often see that you are both responsible for the misunderstanding or lack of good communication. It's not always easy I admit, but it is doable.

Having said that, if you do find yourself feeling that everyone around is either crazy or incompetent, or even evil, perhaps you do need to take a step back from yourself and look into that mirror long and hard. There's almost always two sides to every story, and one does need to do a reality check every so often, to ensure that it's not yourself that is being "difficult" and you are the one that no one can get along with. If that is the case, and it's the nastiness or professional injustice in that office that is making you so unhappy, then, once again, the choice is clear - in this case, get the hell out! Life's simply too short, and it isn't worth it. But do it the smart way and line up another job (doesn't need to be your dream job), first. 

If one can achieve total focus, ignore all the white noise (which is all it is) that may surround one, and become evermore task-oriented, well, that's hard to compete with or criticise. I don't know one manager who doesn't like productive performers and the rest is just icing a lot of the time. Anyway, having spoken with a lot of my network over the years, I realised that a lot of companies who spout the politically correct BS (because that's what it often is!) about building happy teams and look at our extremely happy group smiling at a forced outing at the local vineyard or chocolate factory, are simply taking advantage. 

The people in that happy photo weren't invited to go, they were often told to go, or going was in fact mandatory. And of course they are all smiling - who wouldn't when getting time off out of their day prison, being force-fed red wine or chocolate?! It's all a nice facade to present on the company website, even or especially after all have returned to the scene of their discontent or even unhappiness - the office. I lost count of the number of times I told someone that they seemed happy somewhere, and their reply was something like, what are you talking about - I am miserable here! A picture is worth a thousand words, not. Maybe it's more, every picture tells a story!

But like it or not, we are the primary authors of our very own story, and while we cannot control how others may try to grab our pen and write part of their story onto ours, how we respond to that is under our control. Ignore the white noise, smile to yourself, and get back to the real task of furthering your own story with a single minded focus on the task(s) at hand. Once the negative influence in your work environment realises they can't find a crack in your armour, and can't break you, they will tend to slither off after easier prey - which will be someone with a much bigger focus on office politics and gossip than on the bottom line - their job. Hell may indeed be other people, but refusing to let other people own even a page in your evolving story is nothing less than heavenly! 

Close encounters of the cartilaginous kind!

Given that we are in high summer now, and the crazy world of business simmers a little more gently than usual, I think a little biological distraction is perfectly acceptable. Summer just wouldn't be summer without "Shark Week", courtesy of the Discovery Channel, and this year was no exception - for what felt like 24/7, we were bombarded by stories both real and mythological featuring these magnificent eating machines of the deep blue. I think they tag it as "The most wonderful week of the year", which is perhaps an exaggeration for some, if not downright hilarious for many, but no matter, Shark Week remains a killer close-up look at some very impressive biology!

I mean, who could resist such episode titles as "Monster Mako" and "Return of the Great White Serial Killer" and "Sharksanity", or even "Bride of Jaws" - featuring the legendary "Joan of Shark" - a mammoth female great white weighing in at over 3,000 pounds and almost 20 feet in length? It's one of those rare occasions where kids and parents alike gather on the sofa with equal excitement, salivating at the very thought of seeing a great white chew off the back end of a boat as a dinner starter. 

Sharks are by no means recent inhabitants of planet Earth, having been with "us" for not far off 500 million years, although the various species commonly identified today as "sharks" seem to have evolved over the last 100 million years or so. That still makes them evolutionary superstars that have survived four major mass extinctions on the planet, with no disease or infectious agents that seem capable of penetrating their thick skin. One thing that fascinated me since high school biology is the capacity of certain sharks (such as the bull shark) to adapt their biochemistry to survival in both salt water and fresh water, and if that's not a neat trick I don't know what is! As brilliantly evolved as sharks are, their existence has been most significantly dented and threatened in recent history by the usual suspects - mankind. 

Of course, mankind! In fact, commercial fishing and marine-related industry in general in just the 20th century has been estimated to have decimated the population of the ocean's largest predators by as much as 80%, which seems reminiscent of our effect on similarly dominant large predators, in the jungle. Historically, when we come across something significantly bigger than us and innately more dangerous by nature of their evolutionary gifts, well, we are scared of them and use our significantly larger brains to find a way of eliminating them. I suppose some would call that evolution and Darwinian natural selection too, after a fashion, but it sure feels more like ecosystem obliteration if not intentional extinction a lot of the time. 

Sharks do have a bad rap of course, not least because they are on record as supposed ruthless maneaters who terrorise us at every opportunity, but you know, if we were to go running around the jungle in our boxer shorts or bikini, what would we expect to happen? That somehow seems more acceptable than swimmers or surfers being attacked in territory that humans like to regard as theirs - the ocean. But it's not because we place a few nice sandy beaches on the water's edge that the ocean somehow becomes ours; the very fact that sharks such as the great white are around today is testament to the fact that the ocean is very much theirs, and not ours. 

These giants of the deep are predators at the very top of the food chain, and they don't need to sail around in hulking big boats with harpoons and other weapons to feel safe. While their exact correlation of mankind with tasty seafood remains misunderstood or even contentious, it seems remarkably easy to understand how they could mistake a body splashing on a surfboard above them with a seal in the water, and once bitten, well, blood is blood - and we all know how sharks react to that smell and taste. It is probably true also that many of the attacks on humans come from sharks that are ravenous and have not recently bitten the rear off a killer whale for lunch, so, as scavenging predators and opportunists, they bite whatever comes their way even if that includes a steel cage with divers in it! 



The bottom line is that if we were not splashing around in their environment then there would and could not be any attacks on humans. Further, if they were not currently under the evolutionary pressure that we are applying on them, they perhaps would not appear so far inland at our beaches looking for food, with an axe to grind on humankind.  But like us, they will always be prone to making mistakes, snapping off a bit of surf board and getting a sliver of sinew and blood along with it, and the rest will be history, usually. It's simply their nature, and we are modifying their nature, clearly, with some unpleasant results. 

That we are so far from the top of the food chain in the water is underlined by the video below which is from this past week (right on cue for Shark Week Fever!) and gives us all an idea of how a fun day splashing in the water can turn potentially ugly, and fast. Australian Mick Fanning is vying for his fourth world surfing title and was competing at the World Surf League competition in J-Bay, South Africa, when out of the blue (literally!) something sinister appeared behind him. It truly was a horrifying few seconds, even for us, and when he seemed to have disappeared below the water just after the first exchange, well, it looked like it was all over. Thankfully not, and the crowd jumped up and down when they saw him swimming away from his board to safety. 

While much remains misunderstood about shark behaviour, the one thing that is crystal clear is that if we get in their way in open waters, they will do what their 100 million years worth of evolutionarily honed genes have taught them to do - eat.  That it is us and not a baby seal is probably of no consequence to a king of the food chain such as a great white, and as much as many despise them, they are only doing what humans have been doing since the beginning of time - killing other animals for food on which to survive. It is something each of us does basically every day, whether we are in denial about that or not. I guess we have become so used to thinking of ourselves as top of the food chain, that we resent greatly being occasionally reminded that we are not!

In any case, given their clear ferocity in the water, mankind and sharks have a not-so-friendly relationship most of the time, but they are incapable (to date) of invading our territory so we are in no danger from them - until we invade theirs. Doing so for research purposes has greatly increased our understanding of these still mysterious creatures, and it forms the basis of the hugely entertaining "Shark Week" each year, for which you will hear no complaints from me! 

Life science + investment - it's people that make the partnership!

The question often comes up whether a VC team such as AmorChem invests essentially in technology, or technology and people, and to cut a long story short, well, it has to be more than a little of both. Sure, there are probably less typical examples where it may have been the technology primarily, or in an even rarer example,  fundamentally based on the future potential of a given individual, but routinely there simply has to be a solid (business) marriage between investor and inventor, notwithstanding the technology they discovered or invented. 

Marriage is not a bad analogy in fact, because how readily do we marry someone who may have very attractive financial resources that will provide a comfortable future, but with whom something just doesn't feel right? It does happen of course, but we all know how that usually turns out! Conversely, how readily do we marry someone who may be extremely engaging and charming, but perhaps is free of the drive (or burden?!) to succeed, and has no clear plan in life other than enjoying the moment - is that what we are looking for? One tends to be drawn towards opportunities or people with the right mix of current potential combined with a capacity to contribute to a mutually productive relationship; that is fundamental in both business and personal partnerships, methinks. 

Mistakes do get made, of course, but we usually end up paying for them, while hopefully learning from them afterwards. When one invests in a technology the "old-fashioned way" in life science, it usually means starting up a biotech company that gets built around the discoverer, who is almost always a university professor. Typically, that individual keeps their university post while helping to steer the ship and new venture through the inevitable troubled waters that face any entrepreneur fresh out of the gate. But the key point is that additionally, by seeming necessity, a senior management team is also added in, full-time, to at least in theory give some comfort to the VC investors who stuck their neck out on a particular technology. 

While this approach may have fared better in the USA, not least due to there being broader landscape and deeper pockets south of the border, by and large in Quebec, it failed a lot of the time. Now, yes, some of that was totally natural attrition in that not every brilliant idea turns out to be a commercially viable brilliant idea, and science has a nasty way of kicking us in the pants just when we thought we got it figured out - but the set-up and system also failed. If you listened to the post-mortem analysis, it became more or less normal for the business end to blame the science, and the science end to blame the management. 

There was undeniable lack of unity in many local biotechs, not just between scientific vision and upper management's business style, but perhaps more importantly, between boards and management, and even among investor syndicates who were playing in the space, often in multiple local companies at the same time. Squabbling on the board of one particular biotech would apparently often lead to a continuation of the squabble on the board of another biotech where the same parties were represented by the same faces. It wasn't particularly healthy, and in some cases it buried some companies, either prematurely or eventually. There was little discernible unity or "partnership" involved at all it seems, looking back today. 

That is all in the past, and thankfully so, but it serves to illustrate why AmorChem raised a fund that with great intent invests in technologies that are currently resident in universities/research centres, and keeps them there for the duration of the project. This definitely removes the potential for many of the previous problems involving disparate groups of individuals seemingly competing against each other to ensure that their vision (agenda?) was executed, even at the expense of another. However, it leaves one particular individual front and centre, and alone, as the primary connection between technology and investment - the CSO (biotech) or professor (university). 

One of the biggest challenges in this early-stage investing is not so much in judging on the scientific merit of what is going on, because in the case of AmorChem, we think we are pretty good at that, being a team of seasoned scientists ourselves, having worked in academia, biotech and big pharma. Rather, the biggest conundrum may be in gauging how good a fit a particular scientific personality may be with us, and how solid a marriage it could become. Our end of the spectrum stays the same in every investment, but university professors are hardly a bland or unvarying phenotype, so we have to examine every case individually. The question of whether someone is going to be easy to work with or potentially be the source of serious headaches is neither a trivial concern nor one that can be ignored. 

Now don't get me wrong - our "marriages" tend to be temporary in that they typically last only two years or so, so we don't all have to be in love all of the time or for a very long time for that matter - but it helps if we all like each other enough to remain on the same page in terms of carrying the technology through to a commercial inflection point. It's a tough business with its fair share of ups and downs and experimental disappointments, and failing together is still a lot more pleasant than failing amid inner turmoil. Having a willing and collaborative scientific partner is the key to our success, and we look for that prior to any investment. 

That the CSO role was a somewhat troubled one in the typical biotech company was often simply due to an almost predictable clash of cultures between a big time science star and various business people who were primarily concerned with making money, and who usually didn't understand the science that was supposed to be making that money. In at least some cases, it was like investing in a car factory by people who had never actually been involved in building a car, and just like drug discovery and development, it truly helps when you have been-there-done-that! 

In AmorChem's case, we think it's a major advantage that we do get the science - we have to, if we are to invest in it - and given that we are not a biotech based around just one technology (with the pressure that comes with that) but have a portfolio of some 25 ongoing projects, we hope that we are a better buffer between the ideals of the ivory tower and the realities of the business and pharmaceutical worlds. We like to empower the scientists to do what they do best, in a targeted fashion that fits us, while we focus on what is our job, which is to further develop and commercialise technologies that we invest in. 

You can be sure that our 25 investments involve a pretty wide spectrum of varied and colourful personalities, not all of whom may have found the transition into working with a VC fund for the first time such an easy concept. But like any marriage, it is about being willing to communicate, to listen, to understand the needs of the other party, and to adjust and/or compromise, by both sides,  that collectively leads to the most productive union possible. We strive to achieve that balance as much as is practical, while never wavering from the ticking clock and the desire to remain on track and on target in all of our programs.

So, do people matter? Of course they do, and there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to investing in and commercialising university research, but we like to see truly exciting technologies coupled with individuals in whom we see an equally exciting path forward, together, and so there is always an element of investing in a given individual who comes to us with a candidate technology. Like any kind of partnership, a good fit is half the battle, and when you like working together, that can only increase the chances of a positive outcome! 

Speaking of partnership, and marriage, and compromise, a certain someone just raised their eyebrows about my face still being stuck in a computer after a day in the office, so in my own best interests, I think I will leave it at that and sign off right now - until next time! :)