Comment by larsberg
14 years ago
I was recently talking with Prof. Dave MacQueen about this (he ran a group at Bell Labs for around 20 years before the Lucent debacle). The most amazing thing was the management style of that lab. Once a year, you had to write an "I am smart" report (yes, the actual name) where you told management why you were doing good, smart things. Management would then meet on two separate days, once to ensure everyone was meeting the bar of doing good things and once to figure out how the money thing should be handled.
That's it. No assessment of "high-impact publications this year"; no assessment up the chain of how many $100MM businesses had been created by your group (thanks, Lucent!); no demo days to see if some product group is going to give you the "leave research and work on this or work on something else" ultimatum...
> The most amazing thing was the management style of that lab
I've worked some years in academic research in a position where the pioneering research of one guy led to a big laboratory with plenty of researchers in the lucky situation that they can work very freely on what they want. Coming from industry I was completely baffled by this. This is probably the style where the great ones work best. No corporate BS, just the work. What has been very puzzling is that in this setting, is that the people there are not that great at many things. Incompetence can be quite rampant among some people. Was there some kind of "quality control" for the work at Bell Labs? I see now the circles I'm working in moving towards a more classical "publish or perish" mindset, which produces safe and unambitious research. Sure, the incompetence needs to be purged out of the system, but direct measurement very easily kills the long term for the short term. I wonder if there is any other alternative.