Three weeks in…

Hey every­one… here’s a quick note from 37,000 feet…

I’m just fin­ish­ing up my 3rd week at No­vartis. It has been a crazy, crazy whirl­wind time, and will con­tin­ue to be for at least the next few months.

Michele and the kids are mov­ing out in mid-Feb­ru­ary.

Un­til then, I’m park­ing in a loan­er apart­ment in Bo­ston’s South End, an area I know really well from my North­east­ern days. It’s about a mile from No­vartis in Cam­bridge. My days, while in Bo­ston, have ba­sic­ally con­sisted of get­ting in­to work by 6-7am, be­ing in meet­ings un­til 6pm, then sit­ting down and do­ing email and such un­til about 11. I’ve been to Basel for a week (with a sim­il­ar sched­ule, plus din­ner meet­ings), and will be head­ing to Eng­land, Aus­tria, China, then Cali­for­nia in the next four weeks.

The goal dur­ing this time peri­od is simply to meet as many of the key folks in the com­pany as I can - both the busi­ness lead­ers and the IT folks in my group - to learn how pharma works, and to fig­ure out what the is­sues are.

Un­for­tu­nately, there are is­sues. Ima­gine 4 years with a dif­fer­ent CIO every year, along with cent­ral­iz­a­tion, mer­gers, splits, and so on. Ima­gine how few good folks would be left… So my ex­per­i­ence at Ar­gonne with moves and re­struc­tur­ing is turn­ing out to be in­cred­ibly valu­able. In fact, the sim­il­ar­it­ies are bizarre - enough to make me won­der if I’m do­ing too much re­peat­ing… lay­offs at the top, re­struc­tur­ing so that the sup­port groups and de­veloper groups aren’t split, build­ing IT co­ali­tions across the com­pany, cre­at­ing a web ser­vices team, fo­cus­ing on the sci­ence, try­ing to fix broken fin­an­cial in­cent­ives, …

Plus I have to re­or­gan­ize a lot more dra­mat­ic­ally than there. The or­gan­iz­a­tion is a bur­eau­cracy, run­ning damn near everything through MS pro­ject and two gov­ernance cycles.

The state of high-end com­put­ing is way be­hind what it could be. There’s a tiny group that be­lieves in it and is try­ing to con­vince the rest of the com­pany, but there’s not enough of a team to make a dif­fer­ence. I’ll be tack­ling that with a multi-year ef­fort after I’ve sur­vived the near-term res­cue man­euvers.

So, that’s how things are, in gen­er­al. I os­cil­late between be­ing stunned at how screwed up things are and be­ing elated at how cool it is to be work­ing in a place that is do­ing the good stuff that the com­pany is do­ing. The sci­entif­ic and ex­ec­ut­ive lead­er­ship here is primo - ab­so­lutely first class. Des­pite the IT mess, they’re get­ting great stuff done and are in­cred­ibly en­tre­pren­eur­i­al for such a large com­pany. I hadn’t real­ized the IT situ­ation here was in such a dire need of a turn­around, but on the oth­er hand, if I can fix it, things will be fant­ast­ic. Wish me luck…

By the way, I’ve already punted and am car­ry­ing around my Mac, and am work­ing on bring­ing up their PC-en­vir­on­ment-from-the-90s un­der Par­al­lels. To hell with counter-pro­duct­ive in­ef­fect­ive cor­por­ate stand­ards.

Take care and stay in touch.