Group Manager to Pharma Fellow in one easy lesson

We promised to update you on some gossip from work and our loyal readers (all three of them) know that we do like to keep our promises. You’ll remember Group Manager who couldn’t understand why he shouldn’t be listed as an author on everything that any member of the group wanted to publish. Things had come to a head when Top Gun, having done three years as a post-doc in the lab of a Key Opinion Leader on the East Coast, was a bit disgruntled when Group Manager wanted to treat her like a graduate student. The trouble was that Group Manager was actually not a very good manager and his influencing strategy did not extend beyond setting the Caps Lock and letting rip. Relations deteriorated further and Top Gun took a secondment to the Emerging Antiviral Therapies Team and made it quite clear that she wasn’t coming back until They did something about Group Manager’s Stalinist micromanagement. Group Manager’s VP was running out of ideas and in desperation summoned GMC to his office (yes, that desperate!) to see what our slightly unorthodox approach to organisational re-alignment might offer. Here is a transcript of the discussion:

GMC: Well, there is the obvious solution, as they say, ‘pour encourager les autres'.
VP: I’m afraid we can’t do that; he is a manager after all. If we start culling them at that level it’ll only be a matter of time before it gets to the VPs.

GMC: OK, what about the ‘Two Paths, One Mission’ initiative? You can get one of those half-wits in Human Resources to move him from Management to Science with a handful of keystrokes. Make him a Junior Pharma Fellow (JPF) and your problem is solved.
VP: I’m afraid that it’s not that simple.

GMC: How so? Aren’t Group Manager and Junior Pharma Fellow (JPF) equivalent roles in the ‘Two Paths, One Mission’ initiative?
VP: Well the roles are equivalent but the salary scales are different. If you look at salary, Group Manager is actually equivalent to Pharma Fellow (PF).

GMC: So why do you say that Group Manager is an equivalent role to JPF when Group Manager is actually an equivalent role to PF?
VP: Well the management puts an equal value on the Group Manager and JPF roles but market data mean that we have to pay Group Manager more.

GMC: So what exactly is this market data? Who analyses it?
VP: The Human Resources people keep the data and it is highly confidential. Even I don’t get to look at it.

GMC: Well it looks like you’re going to have to convert him to PF. With the market data secure in the HR information black hole, you should be able to do whatever you like and cite data that nobody will ever see in support of your decision.
VP: We probably could but the problem is that going from Group Manager to PF is technically a promotion even if it doesn’t involve a salary increase.

GMC: I see the problem. You need to justify the promotion and you’ll have to tell everyone what a great scientist he is when he hasn’t been corresponding author on a journal publication since 2001.
VP: Precisely!

GMC: Well let’s see what we might use. Didn’t he help organise some conference and didn’t some university give him an Honorary Professorship?
VP: I’m not sure about the Honorary Professorship. He actually asked one of his friends there if they could sort it and things like this are really pretty worthless these days. You can buy them by giving somebody a juicy slot at a conference that you’re organising. It really is that simple and cheap!

GMC: OK why don’t we say that he’s a Key Opinion Leader (KOL)?
VP: Nice idea but there would be problems because we're already calling Senior Pharma Fellow (SPF) a KOL. I mean they can’t both be KOLs because SPF would throw a hissy fit. You know what his ego is like.

GMC: OK let’s call SPF ‘Thought Leader’. Wouldn’t that be tidy? Then you can call PF a KOL without offending SPF.
VP: What an excellent idea! I must have thought of it myself. But we still need to create a role for PF.

GMC: That shouldn’t be a problem. You can say he’s providing leadership for the JPFs.
VP: Are you sure? The JPFs are a particularly tiresome group and they’re unlikely to fall for the KOL farce. They’re also a lot stronger scientifically than PF so there could be real problems.

GMC: Well you didn’t like our first suggestion so I think this is all you can do. He doesn’t need to actually provide leadership for the JPFs. You just need to say that he’s providing leadership and the organisational inertia will do the rest. How about suggesting that he get them to write up some research proposals. That’ll create an illusion of leadership.
VP: Not so sure about the research proposal idea. I mean there’s no resource for that sort of thing.

GMC: The lack of resource is exactly why it is a good idea. If those meddlesome JPFs are continually writing proposals for projects that will never be resourced, they won’t have the time to create trouble.
VP: What a masterstroke! I almost hadn’t realised that I'd thought of it before. But I have one last question. I’m concerned that appointing Group Manager as PF and calling him a KOL will lose me respect among the scientific community.

GMC: That’s one thing that you don’t need to worry about.
VP: How can you be sure?

GMC: The scientific community in this company stopped taking you seriously years ago.

Any similarity between the characters in this Crapshoot and persons alive or dead is entirely coincidental. No children, animals, VPs, Group Managers, Pharma Fellows or Senior Pharma Fellows were harmed in the preparation of this Crapshoot.